Topic awaiting preservation: AIM signup

I know this may sound silly to some of you.

I have trying to sign up for AIM, to get an account for my daughter - all of her friends use it, and she wants to be able to talk to them online.

I have tried off and on over the last 3-4 weeks, and *every time* I get an error saying the service is temporarily disabled. I have done a ton of searches on their site and Google, and have found nothing indicating any problem.

I have sent an email but have yet to hear back.

Anyone know what the deal is with this? It's a bit frustrating at this point...

(for the record - I've used many different browsers, and no, I can't get all the other kids to switch IM apps )

DL -

I just attempted registering a screen name and had no problems doing so. If you're still having trouble, just post the desired screen name and I'll register it and email you the password which you can change.

This is insane. I have tried over and over. I have just tried several more times, with the same exact results.

Just to make sure I'm not totally losing it, can you detail how/where you did this?

I've gone to the main 'sign up' links on the AOL and AIM sites, through Netscape's built in AIM window, and a few other places that seem to simply link through to the AIM site...
I've used every browser I have, I've disabled every security feature I have...

I don't get it.

I may take you up on that offer, Jestah, but I would prefer to actually make this work if possible - anyone have any idea what's going wrong? Am I just doing something remarkably stupid...?

I tried twice. The first time, I put in a birth date in 1997 and got the result you described. The second time I used a birth date of 1985 and successfully registered the screen name.

There's probably an age limitation for legal reasons (13 years old I'd assume). AIM doesn't make use of the age you enter, so if you're OK with your daughter using it, just lie about the age.

Heh - I was just coming back here to say that is what I doscovered Slime =)

Nowhere could I find anything regarding age....and nowhere did it tell me in the error that there was such a problem.

It seems absurd that they would not specify that you need to be a certain age somewhere obvious, and I could not find such a notice anywhere.

Oh well.

I think we're all set now.

Thanks =)

(here opens a whole new area for me to be paranoid and over protective about my daugher )



(Edited by DL-44 on 10-15-2005 06:09)

Children under the age of 13 have to have parental permission to sign up for online services. It could be that AOL just isn't allowing children under that age to sign up period, granted they should have a better error message.

Maybe they're purposely using a bad error message to prevent people from circumventing the age check? Dunno. But the error had a number at the end of it, which seems a lot like "here's what we're telling you the problem is, and here's an ID for the *real* problem."

Yeah, I figured that as well Slime - they tell a kid they have to be older, they just change the date.

But they should have this *somewhere* where it can be seen. You would think it would at least be in the terms of service.

I could have sworn I tried to sign up with my own information once or twice too....guess I must have screwed something up when I tried it that way

Both the AOL and AIM sites were in the middle of a change-over when I started, so I let it go at first, thinking they had disabled things while they updated...

~sigh~

Hey DL, you should tryout gaim It doesn't have any adware like AIM does. Lets you do lots of nice stuff like tab windows and spell check. Plus you can use it for multiple accounts at once, like an AIM and an ICQ account.

But he still needed to get an AIM account first to use with gaim.

http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/

Get trillian. You can use AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo all in the same program without having to download any AOL product software.

Right. The software was never the poblem though, just the account

As I said, it's just for my daughter, and all she'll be using is the AIM anyway.

thanks =)