Oscar plugin
Summary
Oscar plugin gives you the ability to communicate using ICQ and AIM networks.
Development status
Oscar is actively developed and supported.
Known issues
- don't use MSN and Oscar plugins simultaneously - it may cause some weird contact list problems for ICQ (one example - all ICQ contacts get deleted at some point from server side...). MSN and ICQ separately works fine I think
- SIM-IM 0.9.4.2 and 0.9.4.3 use version 9 of the Oscar protocol.
- At the moment (24th September, 2007) the latest version of Oscar protocol is 11. To my knowledge, so far it is used in the official ICQ client and in QIP.
- File transfers don't work between the latest version of QIP and SIM-IM 0.9.4.3. I tried this with several users of QIP. It's not related to my firewall and router settings, as it used to work fine, when I used QIP. File transfers don't seem to work with ICQ 5.1 users either, but I only tried this with one person. SIM 0.9.4.3 to SIM 0.9.4.2 file transfers seem to work fine.
- I don't see any user pictures in SIM-IM 0.9.4.3 for users of ICQ 5.1, of the latest version of QIP, of SIM-IM 0.9.4.2. I used to see all the user pictures in QIP.
- Once I didn't receive 4 messages in a row from a QIP (latest version) user. I was online in SIM-IM 0.9.4.3. The other time I sent a message to a QIP user, who was offline. He didn't receive it.
Note: I think, all the mentioned problems are connected with the fact, that various versions of the Oscar protocol are not fully compatible with each other. And I think, this is the problem of the ICQ owners approach, not of the creators of various alternative ICQ-clients.
How does SIM-IM work with contact-list? As far as I understand, it uses the server-side contact-list and stores a copy of it offline.
I tried removing users and groups and SIM-IM 0.9.4.3 really removed them from the server-side contact list (I checked in another ICQ-client). So this seems to work fine, but I think this issue should be described somewhere on this site.