AIM is ill-behaved. Or is it the campus network? A mystery!

Trowizilla

Background: I go to a tiny liberal arts school with a terrible, terrible network. It barely qualifies as "better than dialup." Anyway, lately Instant Messenger has been acting up; sometimes it randomly disconnects me without letting me know I've been booted, sometimes I just stop appearing online, and sometimes people's messages to me take a good 5 minutes to appear and then get dumped all at once. This makes holding a conversation quite difficult, as I'm never sure if the other person is just taking a while to answer or if I've been randomly disconnected again. Plus, I'm sure other people don't like having to copy-paste their messages all the time. It's a big PITA and if there's something I can do about it, I'd love to hear it. I'm not sure if it's my computer or the network, so any insight there would be great (if it's the network, it won't be a problem in a week, so *fingers crossed*)

FrostyAlphaWolf

It's partly AIM being the wonderful piece of software it is, but the problem is mostly your network. I used to have the same issue when on normal AOL dial-up; I would often not get messages from people and people would think I'm ignoring them (didn't go well with the girls I was trying to chat with -.-). All of that is due to the network.

As for the random disconnects, I believe that's AIM. Even now, on my campus T1, if I close the AIM window, it's a good minute or so before it actually "disconnects." I think you're being disconnected, then AIM takes its sweet time letting you know eventually. And yet, regardless of all the issues it gives me, I continue to use it...why O_o