I extremely dislike auto-away messages on IRC that spam the entire channel. Like the whole channel gives a rip when you leave and come back and how long you were gone and for what reason. That's what the friggin' /away command is for... so people who do care can /whois you and see you're away and /whois even shows how long you've been idle! A lot of channels even kickban people for spamming the channel with them which is nice. If no one is there chatting, I'd rather see silence than a bunch of auto-away messages bouncing around. It's like duh, if you're not talking you must be away or lurking and if you're lurking, you might as well be away because you're not contributing either way, you're just maintaining a precense.
It's kind of like people who change their nicknames for every inane action they perform. Sleep, sex, bathroom, tv, tired, away, afk, store, smoke, happy, sad, blah, blah, blah. Pick a nick and stick with it damnit. Those who care can /whois and see the away message detailing why you don't answer, those who don't care don't need to see the endless spam of nick changes. I saw one guy tonight change his nick 4 times in as many minutes! What the hell, are the cops or the mafia after you and you have to hide?
On the same idea, userinfo on ICQ... people who change that every friggin' week and then message their entire lists to tell them so every single time. You know what, if you can't keep a nickname for more than a week or have that much going on that you need to change your freeform info, make a LiveJournal for yourself or something. ICQ has a whole host of other problems though. Like people who knows it's not true, but forward messages anyway saying ICQ will transform somehow if you forward it too. I will delete and ignore you.
I actually have no problems with AIM... no spam, no stupid messages, it's not bad besides being ugly, and lack of functionality (until they merge it with ICQ at least - everyone out there knows by now that you can log in to AIM using your ICQ UIN and password right? heh)
More rants. My sister. :P I love my sister. heh. She messages me on AIM and ICQ and such and starts every single message off with a "Hey" or something similar. What's the problem with that you say? The problem is, she never says "Hey" because she wants to chat, she says it because she wants something. Wants me to pass a message on, wants information, wants help with a computer prob. It's never to chat. She seems to be the only one who does it. If you're going to message me to ask for help or info or for any other single reason that you want something... don't say "hey" like it's a conversation, just ask me! "Do you still have that file?" "Do you know how to..." "Can you check out ... and tell me what's wrong?" So much easier and less time-consuming. Why mince words with a greeting when that's not why you're messaging? My friends from Rose all either message me asking if I'm there, or else spit it out. If I'm there, I'll answer, if I'm not, I won't. If I don't answer, I'll answer when I get back, in the meantime, feel free to look elsewhere. Blah!!! I hope to hell I don't do that to other people.
Ah well, I'll leave it at that for now. :P