ICQ now in open alpha, Skype news, and other stuff

Hey buddies!

It's been a little while since our last major update, but it's because we're working on big things. In this announcement we're going to cover ICQ, Skype, AIM, and some other things.

We've been growing, a lot, we've added some more servers, and we're now testing our new multi-server protocol that will allow us to expand more easily going forward. We're in the first stage of that rollout, and during the rollout strange buddy visibility issues may occur; keep an out for future updates on this.

ICQ is now an open alpha, that is free to use with a UIN only. Open alpha means there are still some issues which will be dealt with as we roll out more fixes and updates so please stay patient. Learn more on our ICQ Connection Guide.

Updates:

• ICQ: Now in open alpha, as covered above.

• AIM: TommyD is working on a client you can try out, NINA Fire Edition, more info on that is pinned in the #nina-fire-edition channel on the Discord.

• WebAPI: As a part of our promise to maintain and update AOL's protocols, we have added our own easy to use Chat WebAPI for your custom client or bot, read more on our wiki.

• Skype: Development is underway, primarily for Skype 6/7, more details below.

• Escargot: A preliminary patcher for Messenger for Mac 8 is available for Supporters, still bugs to fix but you can sign on and receive messages so far.

• Discord: We now have a server tag, help promote us by applying it to your username!

• TOC/WebAPI: Both TOC and WebAPI have been updated to use our internal unified communication library, this will make adding features on all our services easier and faster. TOC has been stable and tested, WebAPI is still fresh, so report any bugs!

Fixes:

• ICQ: Plain text messaging should be working better, if issues still occur please let us know exact client version

• AIM: Changing privacy settings sometimes not-properly updating should now be fixed

• WebAPI: Presence's online time is now sent properly

• WebAPI: XML event fetching should work again

That doesn't seem like a whole lot, as much effort has been going into expanding the services, implementing the new multi-server protocol, improving performance, fixing minor bugs not worth mentioning, etc. Next week's update will contain a whole lot more.

We wanted to make it clear that when it comes to reverse engineering Skype and its protocol, an extremely complicated process, we're also going to be documenting what we come up with so others can use it to create their own servers and even clients as well. Of course we'll continue to document other protocols as well, in fact we've got a lot more OSCAR documentation that we will be putting up on the wiki very soon, things that have never been documented publicly before.

Happy 4th of July and also Canada Day since we missed that one, sorry Canadians!