NINA News: The open source portion of NINA has been receiving several updates since my last mention. The repo descriptions have been updated, too. Keep in mind this is an ongoing process and is not complete by any means. To directly quote tonyshowoff, "A lot of the new repos that have appeared don't have much aside from the project files yet, like I said, as I go through and fix things up, update the license to GPL 2, etc then they get pushed into those repos". Aside from that, a few weeks ago I received a server-wide message about an update about to be pushed. I have since lost that message, but it wasn't anything major or noticable to the user. Just tonight, tony confirmed there's plenty in the pipeline and he hopes to have more updates by the end of this month!

Open OSCAR Server News: After a quick scroll, it looks like mki6 (and others) have been working on ICQ for most of April. I see authorization between non-SSI (non-feedbag) and SSI (feedbag) ICQ clients has been achieved, authorization between ICQ 99 & ICQ 2001, as well as ICQ 99 and 2003b. We're starting May off with ICQ and AIM interoperability being announced just yesterday! There was even another commit added as I am typing this post.

CrossTalk News: I'm not seeing anything major, but it appears the 2nd half of April was focused on stress-testing the server.

I didn't forget about Phoenix! I am not aware of any updates since the repair of the hardware failure at the end of February.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire

On March 6, 2026, Lycos announced that their services, specifically Angelfire and Tripod, were experiencing temporary outages in a note on their frontpage.[6] Later that day, the message was updated to say "To our users of Angelfire and Tripod. We apologize for the service interruptions. Unfortunately we will be shutting down in the next 30 days. Please move your hosting to another host as soon as possible."[7] The message was removed from the homepage shortly after, without further official statement from the company.[8] On April 3, 2026, the message reappeared once more, still without further official statement from Lycos.[9]

Update (4/29): Just last night, when I visited lycos.com, I saw a message saying "Lycos services are experieincing a temporary outage. To our loyal users of Lycos Mail , Tripod and Angelfire we apologize and appreciate your patience while we work to restore service as soon as possible."

Today the message is "Exact Hosting has partnered with Lycos to provide a continuity path for customers whose email services are being discontinued. Visit Exact Hosting for more information." All I can say is, to me, the situation does not look good for Angelfire and Tripod users/fans! I found this Reddit post from about 2 months ago that offers some more (unverified) information.

Site News: I have added another exhibit to our Museum! Combined with my previous post about the Museum, you could speculate that I was leading up to this current post. To be honest, it's just a coincidence. Due to the Angelfire news, I felt a sense of urgency to add this next exhibit (opens in new window), but I was not planning on adding it anytime soon prior to this.

This is not the new section I was teasing about... ;-)

Site News: I have created an official 'Museum' portal. I do have at least 2 other beloved websites I'd like to add. They won't be getting the same revitilization as Nemesis AIM, but that's also good news. It means it's much more likely to get completed in a timely manner! This small frontend update has also led to further backend enhancements! More on that later. Stay tuned for my next post. I will be introducing another new section... ;-)

Open OSCAR Server News: After my last post, mk6i said mobile AIM clients were next on the list. By 3/29, a screenshot was posted! I have uploaded a compressed image here. If you would like to see the full resolution image, check out the Open OSCAR Server Official Discord!

CrossTalk News: *SPOILER ALERT* (Hover to reveal)
AIM 5.x messaging with buddy list/feedbag support and MSN interop!
Here's the CrossTalk Official Discord!

2026-04-01 — Coming soon to a CrossTalk near you... by jinkies (HIDEN) @ 2:23 AM (EST)

Coming soon to a CrossTalk near you...

2026-03-24 — Open OSCAR Server v0.23.0 is now available for download! by mk6i @ 10:44 PM (EST)

v0.23.0 brings support for the long-awaited TOC 2 protocol and additional versions of ICQ.

Features
  
Full support for the TOC2 protocol, including documentation. Enables tons of new clients, including vAIM, Miranda ~v0.4.0.3, iEM 1.0.1 (BizTOCSock), BlueTOC, and more! @jg2leet @mk6i

Enhancements
  
Improved compatibility with Miranda. @siohaza
  
Xtraz support and broader ICQ compatibility up to v6. @siohaza
  
Implemented feedbag transactions, which prevent add/remove operations from briefly buddy "flashing" on other clients’ lists. @mk6i

Bug Fixes
  
Eliminated zombie sessions caused by logging in the same account repeatedly in quick succession. @mk6i

Shout-outs
  
@jg2leet  for starting the TOC2 implementation, finding tons of bugs, and being a helpful sounding board.
  
@siohaza for vastly improving ICQ support.

Release Page

https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server/releases/tag/v0.23.0

AIM-Files News: I reverted the banner since it is now officially Spring. My region just had snow last week, though! Also, the day after my last post, I was messing around with some site settings, trying to mitigate the bots and webcrawlers. If you happen to notice any unexpected 403 Forbidden errors, let me know.

Open OSCAR Server News: Looks like TOC2 support will be released very soon! Lots of activity in their #dev channel!

NINA News: It looks like the open source portion of NINA was updated about a week ago!

CrossTalk News: On March 14, they did end up releasing those Y! Messenger 6.0 cached assets on Archive.org. It also appears CrossTalk has been having some DNS issues that have led to some downtime. Most recently as of March 19, a PSA has been released. I will quote this below!

2026-03-19 — CossTalk Announcement by jinkies (HIDEN) @ 7:35 PM (EST)

PSA: please do not bug me or any other devs about the progress/ETA of anything relating to crosstalk. 

This is a hobby project that we work on in our free time and whenever we feel like it. 

Moving forward nothing we do has an ETA unless explicitly, definitively announced. Asking and pestering the devs will not make progress faster - in fact it hinders progress. Often times we deal more with people asking “wen ETA” or “work on this thing NOW!” that it takes away from actual development time. This so much time, resources, and effort goes into researching, reverse engineering, programming, testing, maintaining and moderating the service, all by a small team of people, all without asking for a dime, and all while having to balance our personal lives, jobs, school. It can start to get insulting/demeaning when all of that is ignored because “I want XYZ NOW!!!!”. The least I’m asking you to do is respect our time. 

Asking once is okay. "Hey when's xyz coming out?" "No ETA" "Got it, I'll wait" is one thing. Constantly bugging the developers over and over again is another.

This isn’t a problem unique to CrossTalk either, this seems to be a general theme around OIC projects and frankly it’s time for that to change.

We always post progress when it occurs, be it here, in #general, or in #updates. Hell, even #git-commits. 

This creates unnecessary stress on me and the other devs when we just wanna get things done and out there.

If you’re particularly annoying/pestery about it, then expect moderation action to be taken.

Thank you, and I hope to have more things to show off soon, been working really hard :heart:

Yes, I have to agree, even this site here is a passion project. I would be frustrated in that situation, too! I used to see this type of behavior all the time when NINA had a Discord server, and really in every scene where there are devs doing serious work as a hobby. What first comes to my mind is back in 2015, in the PS4 scene, with CTurt ending his PS4 hacking research, citing issues related to the community's focus on piracy and ungratefulness. And also in 2017 in the iOS Jailbreak scene with Luca Todesco aka qwertyoruiopz, a prominent iOS jailbreak developer, announced his departure from the jailbreak community due to frustration with harassment and unappreciative fans. So, please, let's be respectful to these devs. Their work is often a labor of love and passion. It doesn't cost anything to show some genuine appreciation!

With that said, THANK YOU to all the contributors in the messenger revival scene!

2026-03-02 — CossTalk Announcement by jinkies (HIDEN) @ 7:41 AM (EST)

With that out of the way, let's talk about the future of CrossTalk itself!

For starters, we have acquired web cache from a build of Yahoo Messenger 6.0 (that is dated 2004 iirc) containing Yinsider config files, some imvironments, and some audibles from the ZN/TW regions. We will be releasing these onto archive.org soon and will be implementing them into CrossTalk with the 0.6.0 update. Huge thanks to EternalQuest for finding all of this stuff!

Speaking of the 0.6.0 update, it is also be the first version that will be fully open source! All source code for the CrossTalk services will be released (all client side code - i.e. patches/tools like Reroute and 24H2Fixer as well as a client library for our cross-service comms protocol are already available).

This would require moving the source trees to new repoes as we have hardcoded API keys in the past (that's been fixed by now, but regardless) - basically we're taking the same approach taken with WebTV Redialed.

I will also try working on the project as much as I can to get this out sooner. Admittedly I have taken a bit of a breather lately as the explosion of CrossTalk's userbase took a lot of adjusting to, but I think I'm ready now :-P

Among the things mentioned earlier (the Yahoo! stuff, alias system/email verification), 0.6.0 will also reintroduce AIM in an actually usable state, add initial MySpaceIM support, better client interop, more fleshed out support for WLM 2O11/2012, logging in with usernames on MSN 1.0 instead of being forced to use a Hotmail e-mail address, and more. Attached to this message is a demo of the latter.

That's all for now. As always, thank you for using CrossTalk and supporting us :heart_hands:

I bolded & italicized the part about AIM to add emphasis. Looking around quickly, it also looks like Open OSCAR Server added some TOC2 related commits since my post last night! Even when things seem quiet, these projects are all very much active! (Maybe not so much regarding new development with Phoenix :-X)

NINA News: It's had to have been about a week now, but tonyshowoff recently mentioned in the Last Call chat room that he updated the NINA servers in preparation for future updates. If you were connected at the time, you might have also gotten an IM about it. Specifics weren't mentioned, but I do believe he did mention there are plans to fix the chat parser bug! This bug is probably the bug that I would say is the most annoying.

Phoenix News: Yesterday, Feb. 28, the Phoenix server was down due to an unspecified hardware failure. The first message on their Discord mentioning the server being down was just before 11:00 AM EST. By about 5:00 PM EST the server was back up and running!

Open OSCAR Server News: Ok, so I am a MONTH late on this, but OOS received a major update:

2026-01-30 — Open OSCAR Server v0.22.0 is now available for download! by mk6i @ 9:47 PM (EST)

v0.22.0 is a HUGE project milestone. After nearly 4 months of development, concurrent logins are now supported, allowing you to simultaneously log in to multiple clients with the same screen name.


Features
  
Multi-connection: Users can simultaneously log in to multiple clients with the same screen name. @mk6i
  
Feedbag Endpoint: New management API endpoint for adding and removing buddies to/from the buddy list. @mk6i

Enhancements
  
Away messages can now be set using AIM 7 clients. @mk6i
  
Added support for Jimm ICQ clients. @siohaza

Bug Fixes
  
Fixed #128: Empty Kopete chat exchange selector. @siohaza
  
Fixed chat messages from AIM clients appearing empty in Kopete. @mk6i
  
Fixed #161: Kopete clients can now successfully join chat rooms. @siohaza
  
Fixed TOC profile requests never resolving. @jg2leet
  
Fixed TOC directory search results incorrectly containing screen names. @mk6i
  
Fixed arrival events for online buddies added to buddy list on AIM 4.8 sometimes not appearing. @mk6i

Shout-outs
  
@jg2leet  for thoroughly testing this release!
  
@siohaza for first client fix contributions.

Release Page

https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server/releases/tag/v0.22.0

CrossTalk News: CrossTalk recently hit some new members/users online milestones! A few minutes after the following post, they achieved 201 concurrent users!

2026-02-13 — CossTalk Announcement by youknowwhatthatmeansloading (epicness) @ 4:12 PM (EST)
We've officially hit the 4-digits - 1,000 members! We're at 196 online on the service as well - shattering our previous record, and quickly approaching 200 online users.

Thanks to those spreading the word, I know a lot of you are here from a certain tweet, feel free to report any issues or bugs you find :-)

I have a lot I want to discuss still, but, I am out of time at the moment! TTYS ;-]

2026 AOLUnderground.com Podcast Episodes

February 21, 2026
Rajuabju - ARiSE Warez President, Cardi...
The president of the ARiSE warez group tells us about his experience with BBS, Prodigy, QuantumLink, AOL, and IRC....
01:06:35

January 17, 2026
BMB - AOL-files.com, FDO, Invokes
Pwning AOL with pure FDO. Hacking employee accounts. Downloading AOL files and posting them to aol-files.com. BMB ...
00:58:08

January 06, 2026
BoFeN - Mass Mailers, PW Stealer, ARiSE...
Creator of Millennium, Blizzard, and Code Genie. Despite facing relentless criticism and accusations of code theft...
00:41:18

I'm already listening! I'll be back soon with some more updates!

I'm going to wrap it up here. I've been in denial about being sick since Monday or so, but the symptoms have fully manifested and there's no denying it. Congestion, runny nose, coughing, sore throat, etc., yeah... at least it is not COVID. I hope to have another site update this weekend.

If anyone has some scene-related news that has not been covered here, and you feel it should be: Click my name on a post or go to the contact page! Discord or Email is probably the best way right now. There's 2 Emails I very recently noticed that I'm hopefully going to respond to this weekend. I wasn't checking the account regularly since the messages were so sparse. I will try to do better now!

While running random progz in the Last Call chat room [NINA], I tried to check an Angelfire link from one of the prog's ads. It just so happens that if you go to Angelfire.com right now (6:30 PM EST), you will get a 502 Bad Gateway error. :-(

Notes: Angelfire was a very popular webhost during the AOL-era. Many progs were hosted on Angelfire. (It was even my first non-AOL webhost.) You know, it's sort of rare, but sometimes one of those old links in a prog still works directly, too!

"We became aware of issues users were experiencing accessing Yahoo services globally after rolling out a change to our traffic management system. After reverting the change, Yahoo services have fully recovered with the impact lasting less than an hour."

To be honest, I was busy working, so I didn't even notice and almost missed this piece of news. *shrugs* haha

Links for further reading:

• Downdetector - Yahoo
• Another Outage? Botched System Change Takes Down Yahoo.com, AOL.com
• Yahoo and AOL were down — live updates on massive outage that impacted Yahoo Mail and more
• Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail Are Down, Reminding Everyone They Still Exist *Spicy*

Site News: Hey! We had a brief period of downtime leading into the new year. I'm hoping you all were too busy celebrating to notice. :-) This downtime was for a good reason, though: our host has upgraded their servers and is passing on the awesomeness (at no additional cost)! The transfer was pretty smooth, too!

Aside from that, I've done some minor housekeeping around the site: tweaked the top banner design, expanded CSS for post quotes. By the time you read this, I will have the 2025 news archive completed. As I do every year, I will leave some of the most recent posts visible on the main page for a couple more weeks.

BeAIM News: Back in November 2024, I mirrored a post from the Phoenix website about BeAIM, a client for BeOS/Haiku by nippos (nikisoft). While I was archiving the news posts, I happened to notice there has been several updates in the past year! This even includes a new project name! For posterity, I will post the changelog since my original post.

2025-12-23 - BumbleBe (formerly BeAIM) Changelog

What's new in version 1.8.0:
  
Rename and rebrand to BumbleBe.
  
No changes in functionality intended.

What's new in version 1.7.1:
  
Fix loading resources when running the application from a non-standard path.
  
Fix crash when deleting a group that still has buddys.
  
Allow shrinking chat windows again after messages have been sent.
    

      
This was broken before, so that every new message locked the minimum window size to the current one, you could then make it even bigger, but not smaller again.
    
  
  
Show profile message and away message (if away) in the "Get User Info" window.
  
Open links only on left click, do nothing on right/middle click.
  
Switch to different color scheme as default if dark system colors are used.
    

      
If you have used BumbleBe before, the light default colors may have already been written to your configuration, so that you don't see a difference here.
    
  
  
Fix some broken combinations of custom font face, size and color in the same message.
  
Add "Get a Screen Name" and "Forgot Password?" links, shown only if the default server is used.
  
Correctly load per-user settings and saved password when switching between accounts in the login window.
  
Add translations for the new strings in English and German.

What's new in version 1.7.0:
  
Rewrite the whole UI to make use of Haikus Layout Kit, rather than hardcoded coordinates.
  
Implement support for HiDPI screens by scaling everything depending on the font size.
  
Move the Changelog into a separate file and reorder it to begin with the latest version.
  
Replace custom MakSplitterView in the ChatWindow with native BSplitView.
  
Integrate PopupTextControl to improve the combined text input+dropdown thingy for the username.
  
Make sure new windows always open within the visible area.
  
Let the TrayIcon scale based on the DeskBars MaxItemWidth() and MaxItemHeight().

What's new in version 1.6.3:
  
Automatically detect https:// links just like the http:// ones, and make them open the browser on click.
  
Enable the commented-out "Style" menu in chat windows and implement the missing pieces for it to work.
  
Add support for strikethrough text (needs hrev58553 at least).
  
Add the previously unused Idle Detector input filter to the package.
  
Make the login progress status text visible.
  
Add translations for the new strings in English and German.

What's new in version 1.6.2:
  
Replace password input to solve a bug with Copy & Paste.
  
Fall back to English if system language is unsupported.
  
Add support for different font families in messages.
  
Look for sounds at the right directories using find_paths - How could the old code ever have worked?
    

      
You still don't get sound yet as a Pull Request to Haiku that implements play_sound still needs to be merged.
    
  
  
Automate generation of debug builds and packages, and document building.

What's new in version 1.6.1:
  
Add support for Haiku system colors.
    

      
That means full support for dark mode!
    
  
  
Switch from custom translation library to Haiku LocaleKit.
  
Allow switching between system DNS and proxy DNS when using a proxy.
  
Minor fix of the window size of the ColorPicker.

What's new in version 1.6.0:
  
New maintainer again, added me to the credits.
  
Switch default server to PhoenixIM / iwarg.ddns.net, AOL AIM is dead.
  
Change license to GNU GPL 3.0, previously no license was specified.
  
Add Spanish translation (thanks cocobean).
  
Fix compiler error related to wrong function return types
  
Fix tons of compiler warnings that appear with GCC 13.
  
Fix application crash when opening the Setup window.
  
Fix connection not working at all.
  
Fix proxy port setting always resetting to default 80 or 1080 (only do that when switching between HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy if no custom port is set)
  
Fix SOCKS5 proxy support, improve error handling for HTTPS proxy.
  
Drop compatibility #ifdefs for pre-BONE BeOS - Everyone should be using Haiku nowadays.

Check out the latest release here.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!