Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas! While I wanted to present you all with a "gift", I want to make sure that all of the wrinkles are smoothed out first! Sorry!

Luckily NINA has our Christmas gift in the form of TOC 2.0 support! This means software such as QuickBuddy and AIM Express, amongst others, can now be used again!

Seems like 2024 will be a great year for the AOL/AIM revival scene!


Big Ol' News Dump!
Okay, okay, it has been far too long since I posted an update here! I admit I forgot to echo the news here, but I have been posting it on the AIM-Files.com Discord.

Here's a nice summary:

August - September: Willz, Fizdog, and I were doing all kinds of experiments to test the NINA AIM server out. I'd say we uncovered a respectable amount of bugs! The dev team was quick to address them, too.

2023-09-19: NINA has officially entered the Beta stage!

2023-09-23: Users of Phoenix Desktop with some coding skills can create their own content for the software! If this is something you're interested in, ask about it in #phoenix-desktop on the Phoenix Discord.

2023-10-02: NINA has dropped some serious hints (including a teaser image) that their AOL 4.0 revival might be available to Alpha Testers sooner than we think!

2023-10-02: Wildman brought "Smarter Child Jr" back to life on Phoenix AIM!

2023-10-03: Our Discord server now has an official Code of Conduct!

2023-10-10: NINA AIM now officially supports TOC 1.0! If you're unaware, TOC stands for Talk to OsCar, and is a much simpler ASCII-based protocol compared to the binary protocol, OSCAR.

2023-10-21: P3OL's AOL 2.5/3.0 server migration is complete! Check their Discord for the new server addresses!

Aside from those highlights, I have been digging up projects I started up to 3 years ago since they might now have some more relevance! These past 2 months have really blown by. Wow!

There's also another exciting project I will be revealing soon! I've spent a lot of time these past few years uncovering artifacts from the Wayback Machine like some kind of Internet Archaeologist! I've also used a good bit of my free time this past week to bring you the next announcement! Stay tuned! ;-)


Better late than never!
That thing that was supposed to happen on August 1st didn't happen until today, but check it out:

NINA and Escargot #announcements — August 03, 2023 at 4:08 PM

We are glad to announce that the **NINA PRE-ALPHA** HAS OFFICIALLY BEGUN!

This first pre-alpha is available for the Alpha testers, and we hope you join us
and help us test the service, flesh out bugs, and just have a fun time with AIM!

Check out the development channels for more information!

Wanna join the alpha team? Donate here: https://nina.chat/donate/

Now, how exciting is that!?

More NINA News!
Has it really been almost a month since my last post?! Well anyways, if you happened to call that NINA hotline number, you might have figured out there was a secret message to be discovered! There was a teaser with the date of August 1st... and that is tomorrow! If you're a donator or a member of their Patreon, you might already know what the significance of that date is! I guess we'll see soon!

New NINA Hotline?!
Earlier today on the NINA & Escargot Discord, @animadoria made a news post:

Animadoria — Today at 4:19 PM
@NINA News Interested in NINA? Feel free to call the NINA hotline at +1 (951) 666-6020!

So yeah, I called the number! You should, too! Be prepared to hear and automated message and then be screamed at by what sounds like an old dialup modem... I wonder what it's saying...

Minor Site Updates

In other news... regarding my private life: Back in February, I accepted a job offer for a higher position with a different company than my previous position! Things are going very well. One of the downsides, though, is that I have even less free time now. The first half of each month seems to be the busiest for me, so you'll likely see site updates during the second half of the month.

Speaking of site updates... I just now made a few minor tweaks to the Clients page and cleaned up the layout HTML a bit. I'm open to article submissions if anyone wants to write one relating to the past and/or present AIM Scene.

Also, if anyone out there has a related website and you'd like to exchange links, hit me up!


Another New Host
Some of you may have noticed that my previous hosting account was suspended. It wasn't for this website, but something else that I had uploaded for another website, triggered the auto-suspender. This has happened to me semi-regularly. I don't log in to my accounts for months, then log in to update something, and BAM! For each of the 3 previous instances, I would contact support about it. I would get a response saying it was a false-positive and my account would then be restored.

I'm not sure what was going on this time, but I made 3 attempts to contact support (waiting 72h inbetween), with no response at all. So... I ended up just getting a new host! I have a bit more freedom here, so I might rename 'Secrets' back to 'Exploits' once I get the time to add the content I have queued.

Secret Layouts
So way back in June 2021, when I was ressurrecting and redesigning this website, I retained the original style sheet from AOL-Files. I have now made that and a hybrid of my redesign with the original AOL-Files colors available for your viewing pleasure!

AIM-Files.com's OG AOL-Files Theme

AIM-Files.com's Remixed AOL-Files Theme

And in case you want to revert easily, you can Click Here


Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! It's now 2023! Not much has changed on this website in the past 7 or so months. To be fair, not much has changed in the AIM scene either. Hah! I have a backlog of draft news entries for the remainder of 2022 that I'd like to put up. I also have a few small improvements planned for this site. This brings me to what has changed on AIM-Files. I have updated the News navigation section to list the archives by year. Hopefully, this will tidy things up a bit.

Where I left off with the 2022 news updates, I was getting ready to make a public post about the Re-AOL project. I was a member of their Discord server just before they started to gain traction and go public. While I was waiting for the OK to make a post about it here, I became preoccupied with writing some progs and tools that are compatible with their service. I did release some stuff on the AIM-Files Discord server, just never got around to posting about it here.

Shortly after that, sometime in June or July 2022, life started to get busier for me and I was finding myself with less free time. I'm a bit behind with the so-called scene, but I did see that the Re-AOL project has renamed itself to Project P3OL (pronounced "peel"). You can click that link to join their Discord server!

In the future, I'd like to cover news about their project here as well. It's similar enough and the scenes are small enough that it really all ties in together. Along with that, I have continued working on my own projects. I just haven't been making too many posts about them. But, like everyone likes to say, good things are in the works and will be coming soon. ;)

If you have any scene news that you think should be covered here, please contact me!

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