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Comment by FigBug | Hacker News Reader

Around 2000 I got annoyed with the ads and crap in ICQ, so I wrote Miranda ICQ, now called Miranda IM (http://www.miranda-im.org/) based on libicq. One of my main inspirations to write the app was I wanted to connect a chatbot to ICQ to harass my friends, but the standard API wouldn't allow sending messages. So I added a plugin API, connected the MegaHAL chatbot and good times ensued.

I lost interest in Miranda shortly after that, but I'm always impressed that a group has kept it going.

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Hey! I'm not sure if we ever talked, but I maintained Licq and did the rewrite when the protocol got switched to be like AIM.

I also wrote the initial Miranda ICQ plugin for the new protocol as well, I think that was back in 2002.

Just thought I'd say hey.

Aah Licq ... so much memories in my head right now. Thanks for the great product.

licq, thanks for that, scary thoughts how much of my life back then passed thru licq.

I'm still on ICQ, via pidgin. There's just 'me' these days, but I'm holding the fort. So there :-)

I connect out of tradition, too. Nobody uses it anymore but damn it if I didn't have many contacts.

Memory lane, eh?

There is still one icq contact occasionally online for me! And I think I talked to a friend using icq less than three years ago ;)

Though with all the closing of networks these last years I sometimes neglect starting pidgin at all since I'll need some tabs open fore messaging regardless :(

Wish I could get my 5-6 digit icq number back... long since lost to the ether...

Back in 2004 the only way to connect to my employer's ICQcorp server from Linux was by running miranda under wine!

Thanks for that.

Oh man, Miranda was so great. I used it as my main client until I switched away from windows, but I loved how configurable and light it was. I guess I'm a complainy old fart now, but when one manages to see a time where apps open up, fully drawn, less than 50ms after you press the hotkey, you start hating all the bloated Electron and slow web apps that seem to be all we get nowadays.

A bit off topic, I guess, but I think the thing we most need now is a moderately low-level, easy to use, cross-platform UI toolkit. I don't want my desktop apps to take up 1 GB of RAM each and feel slow.

Wow, let me be the first to say Thanks! I still use Miranda daily, both at my desktop computer at home and at my computer at work. Just chat, no fuzz.. Just the way I like it.

It seems that Miranda has forked into Miranda IM and Miranda NG, what are your thoughts about those two? Personally, I use Miranda NG because the Facebook plugin worked better in NG last time I compared the two.

I'm out of the loop. Not even sure what the differences are. But as long as people are still interested in developing it and using it, I think that's good. Hopefully the fork will rejoin sometime in the future.

The early Trillian ~0.72; that one I really loved; I found Miranda later, so that I never really used.

A while ago I digged around in my computer and collected _all_ the chat logs I was able to find: Trillian, MSN, Pidgin, Empathy, Thunderbird, XChat, Facebook, and normalized them to plain text. They were in all sorts of formats: line-by-line XML, JSON, per file JSON, per file XML, text, HTML. (I had to exclude Skype due to it's binary log.) If you have any logs, do a similar normalization as soon as possible, it will only get more painful. Anyway, the trillian logs were exceptionally ugly with with the line-by-line all data in attributes XML, but hey, the user interface and the connect to any platform was awesome.

Most versions of Skype use SQLite for local storage, if that is of any help!

I didn't know that; I'll take a look. This was the Linux version 2.x era, mostly.

I've made a converter for 2.x series, reach me at turrini at gmail

whats the best front end program to read those databases, for non-db folks? (windows or linux / CLI or GUI)

There's a reasonably full featured plugin for Firefox called SQLite Manager that lets you open arbitrary SQLite files and browse / edit the contents.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlite-manage...

SQLite Studio works great

http://sqlitestudio.pl/

Yup, I can second that, stable with good feature set.

I recently stumpled upon Skyperious[0]. I intend to test the merging feature soon (multiple computers and unsynced chat logs annoy me more that they should). So far the viewing works fine !

[0] https://suurjaak.github.io/Skyperious/index.html

Thanks a lot for Miranda, I'm using it since 2006 I think. I don't rely so heavily on it as I used to, probably because of popularity of facebook and mobile chat applications, but I still find it useful :-) I started using a fork http://www.miranda-ng.org some time ago, which seems to be more actively developed.

Miranda was my go to for years! We used to tar up our bundles and drop them into our work stations at our call centre jobs where messaging was a strict no no! Due to its super slim design and hotkeys it was the best tool for the job! Thank you for building it! I spent days upon days customizing it and hacking it as a young techie. It truly is my favourite messenger of all time. I wish I could still use it on OSX to consolidate all the different messaging services that are popular these days; slack, FB, imessage etc. It's funny how history repeats itself.

I created the original Add-ons for Miranda IM. Good to see you around here! Kinda still amazed that the project is still going.

Thanks a ton

Loved Miranda

Showed me how software should be. Useful, out of my way if not needed

Even preferred it over trillian and adium

Thanks a ton!

Wow you're a legend :) Thanks for Miranda.

That's awesome!

I remember these days when I studied (2002-2007) - before that the official ICQ client was the Go-To messenger. But as you said - people got annoyed by the introduced app. Then at university everybody had ICQ. It was the defacto communication mechanism - even between people that lived in adjacent rooms. And at some time all of those people started to move to Miranda at once, so you could probably find it on 1000s of PCs on the campus. New plugins came up all the time and were discussed.

I think we all greatly enjoyed the ability to show status/away messages on mouseover. And on the other side the ability to display a notification when someone has read your away message :) That lead to some very interesting usage patterns and conversations.

Thank you!!! I was so frustrated at having multiple chat apps I spent hours and hours around the time you were writing Miranda just trying to find one I liked. Miranda was like early Linux: ludicrously flexible configuration (and extensible!), but once you got it tweaked just right, it was hard to go back to anything different... including Trillian, which was the OSX foil to what Miranda was designed to be.

I don't know when I stopped using Miranda, but it was probably approximately when I started using Gtalk and encouraged the majority of my ICQ and AIM contacts to get Google accounts, too.

i loved miranda and the megahal plugin. one of my friends had a really good therapeutic session with the megahal plugin (thinking it was me) after his girlfriend broke up with him.

then some other friends discovered that it was a bot and that they could train it..... it didn't went well after that.

i still think about recoding megahal in pure JS and use it for the current hip chatbots.

thx for miranda (and the megahal plugin)

That's a good story, I didn't get much feedback from users at the time. Nice to hear to what people were doing. And yes, my megahal got 'trained' as well.

I started using Miranda relatively late - around 2008 or so - but I do recall that it was the best chat app back then. I think Pidgin started to become popular around this time.

Woah! Miranda was my first IRC+MSN client, back when MSN was a thing... I no longer use it, but let me be another person to thank you for creating it.

I loved Miranda, and made all my friends use it :)

Miranda was my go-to-client for quite a while, on Windows. I like it better Pidgin due to how lean it was. Thanks for writing it!

Thank you ! I was a happy user back then !

Haven't use ICQ in a long time but I still remember my ICQ number :)

Wow, thank you for a great program! used it for msn and irc for a long time. Never once annoyed me

Wow! Thanks for Miranda, really nice to have multiple IM clients in a single program.

That you so much! Miranda was such a great client! So lightweight.

Thanks you so much for creating Miranda. Small, unintrusive, fast.

Thank you for this. I used it for a couple of good years.

ICQ was an ad ridden overbloated UI shitfest.

Miranda was so beautiful!

I still use Miranda to this day. Thank you so much.

Woah! I loved Miranda IM. Thank you so much!

Oh I loved Miranda when it came out. Thanks.

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