O.P. Server Problems (Receiving messages, and Online/Offline status)
Hi,
I know that many people, including myself, have been experiencing the server problems at the moment.
The MSN Messenger version that I am running is 7.5.0311
These problems include, but may not be limited to:
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[*]Appearing offline to people in your list (even though your status is set to online), and still capable of sending and receiving messages to people.
[*]Appearing online to people, but unable to receive messages to them without first sending them a message.
[/list]
The problems may take characteristics of one or both of these.
To expand upon (1): Many of the times when logging in, you appear offline to everyone in your list, even though your actual status is set to online or any other status exluding Appear Offline. Obviously, because you are appearing offline, people cannot talk to you unless they already have a conversation window open to you (in which case they will not be aware of when you're online or not, and will not be sure if their messages will get to you.) This problem makes MSN quite useless if you want people to be able to talk to you without needing to talk to them first. It's like having your entire list blocked, but still be capable of talking to them (but not vice versa).
To expand upon (2): Some of the times you may login and actually appear online, but no one will be able to actually send you a message until you first start talking to them. There is a slight difference in this problem to (1) because people cannot actually start a conversation with you, whereas they can in (1) if they already have a window open with you. There has also been an experience of messages not getting delivered to you after no more than a couple of minutes; in order for people to be able to send you a message again, you'll need to talk to them again to refresh the chat session.
As you can see, and may have experienced yourself, these two problems make MSN practically useless, and extremely frustrating.
I have been doing some tests to see if there are any external programs that are causing this problem, and I'll show my results now.
Problems (1) and (2) both can still occur with Messenger Plus disabled, therefore it's easy to assume that Messenger Plus is responsible, however I have found a much bigger chance of (1) happening with Plus enabled. This might just be coincidence, or merely a catalyst to the server problem.
As stated above, if both problems occur without Messenger Plus being enabled, then we can safely discard any plugins?... I tested them anyway.
The main plugin in question is StuffPlug 2.2.397, which is a very suspicious candidate due to its ability to allow you to talk to blocked contacts - this is very similar behaviour to problem (1). However, I believe (1) still occured without StuffPlug (or Messenger Plus itself) being loaded. I have also had reports from certain people that they have experienced these problems without ever using StuffPlug in the past.
Mess.be's patch to actually change the MSN exe (mainly to remove adveritsement) seems to unaffect the occurance of either of these problems (to my knowledge - this still could do with testing).
So I believe that Messenger Plus is probably not to blame for these problems, (or at least not entirely). The MSN servers must be currently having problems, and hopefully will be resolved.
Can everyone please post their experiences with these problems, and anything you have discovered in relation to this. The MSN Messenger version itself may very well have an affect upon these problems.
Thank you. I hope this problem is soon resolved.
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