iChat and truncated status messages

[Wrao]

Now, Maybe my memory is faulty, but I seem to remember iChat used to be far more liberal with both it's available status messages and it's away status messages in terms of how many characters you could use(and would be displayed)

but lately, it seems as though iChat only allows maybe 25 characters for each.

so, there hasn't been an update(except for maybe security updates) that would affect iChat in a while. I'm pretty sure it must have always truncated after a certain length.

So, I recently got a couple friends using iChat and they really like the available status messages, they use them a lot and enjoy the feature. But they keep coming to me 'can you read the whole thing?" and inevitably I can't

So, what I'm wondering is, is there anyway to nullify the character count for truncating messages? I was thinking it might be in the terminal or something like that?

this is iChatAV 2.1 on all computers, 2 are running 10.3.4, I'm running 10.3.5

And Adium doesn't support available status messages yet or I would have already tried that.

[LoCash]

Yeah, Apple fucked it up somehow. They've also opted not to unfuck it. It's little shit like this that gets to me. They won't rev iChat until they ship a new OS. Same with Safari and most of the other little apss. Not even for some fucking important and convenient bugfixes. Gives us back our fucking long away messages, god dammit.

[Wrao]

Indeed, so I'm not crazy, they actually used to be longsville. that's a relief :)

Well that's lame. Still, this seems like exactly the sort of thing a terminal line could remedy, I can't imagine it being anything more than some code line with a value of =25 or whatever...guh...but what do I know, code to me...I might as well read pasta.

[curiousuburb]

iChat (or maybe the AIM client/server) has some issues with long message length, too.

If they had to prioritize whether to fix status message length or actual content length,
I'm inclined to say that content is more important than cute away messages,
but given the time between revs, they ought to be able to solve both problems.

OTOH, maybe be improving the status text by making it user-specific (custom replies per buddy list/group/user as some cellphones/voicemail will do with caller-id info), some chats could be eliminated entirely, saving network bandwidth.

[Wrao]

Oh believe me, that's been a perpetual gripe of mine(I think I have 3 threads about it here and at AI) the long messages, or the chat flooding thing. it's way too sensitive.

iChat used to rule so hard, but it seems like it's gotten progressively more neutered.

[LoCash]

All my friends have greater than 25 char away messages. They use windows clients and adium. Why iChat can't just play ball is beyond me.

[DMBand0026]

I can read the away messages that are over 25, but not the "available" messages. This is just pushing me one step closer to switching to Adium exclusively, but I'm not ready for that. Especially now that more of my friends have Macs. iChat AV = teh r0xo3r!!one!11!

But it's now less because of the superiority of the actual app and more because I can't get the AV functions anywhere else.

[Wrao]

All my friends have greater than 25 char away messages. They use windows clients and adium. Why iChat can't just play ball is beyond me.

Yea, same here, except for the handful of iChat users.

[Luca]

I'm using a Windows PC at the moment, with DeadAIM, so I don't see what the big fuss is about. I can have long away messages, tabbed windows, file transfer that WORKS, direct connect, an AIM shared folder that my buddies can access...

;)