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Comment by drinchev | Hacker News Reader

My ICQ UID is 15584496 . I still remember people buying less-digits or easy-to-remember digits accounts for real money.

Gosh, I just logged in. Kudos for not auto-deleting my account for so many years.

163766. Had tons of people asking to buy it. Too bad I can't even log in since it's tied to my email address from 4th or 5th grade.

I think the numbers started at 100000.

Prior to that, elementary school, I used PowWow and Mplayer to socialize with pretty much only Californians.. since everyone on the internet back then lived in CA. That was a weird time. I of course was 18 for.. oh, 10 years.

I believe I've met 2-3 people with lower numbers than mine.

edit: Wow, just signed in, been awhile. None of my friends online and the web app doesn't tell you their last time online. Not sure if the desktop apps still do.

Wow, I thought mine in the 400k's was low. I lost it, though.

I remember meeting a 14xxxx or 13xxxx once! Maybe both.

157xxx here. Logged in just for kicks and found out that yes, the password still works. :)

I don't remember meeting anyone with a lower number than mine, although I was aware that, at least on the global user directory, there were 2 people in my city with a lower number, both related.

In my case I got last online times for several people (mobile app) but mostly all from 2015. I wonder if that's in any way related with the govt blocking WhatsApp that year...

I remember that once I started looking for really low numbers and I believe in the 100s range you could find Mirabilis developers.

Numbers started at 10000, uin 31337 was one of the AOL admins.

141181 here btw, everyone is offline. One friend used icq until maybe a year ago, offline now too.

You can get it back! I was in the same spot.

Contact ICQ support and tell them that you no longer have access to that email. You'll confirm your UIN and a few names from your user list. It took about a day to get mine back.

Thanks for this post - I've contacted them and intend to get my old account back too! 48xxxx level.

538342. Had a weak / compromised password for ages, I'm surprised to have been able to access my account and change to a stronger password. I'm not sure the popularity of 6 digit accounts and the password compromise times overlapped much though.

Had some great times chatting to people all around the world on ICQ. I think I still have a couple of FB friends from that era.

I was bouncing an idea of an IRC like pager app around in my head in the months before I became aware of ICQ (but well after it was already developed).

I'm surprised I remembered the password at all, and I can't change it without giving out a mobile phone number for a SMS. No thanks.

"Your account has been compromised, you must enter a mobile to enable 2FA"? I got that when trying to troll, uh I mean chat, a group chat last night.

The form looks like:

  Change Password

  [ Password field for current password ]

  (i) Passwords must contain 8-16 symbols. They must include numbers and uppercase and lower case Latin letters.

  [ New Password field ] [ Confirm Password field ]
 
  (i) Get SMS code via mobile phone number to confirm new password

  [ Country code selector ] [ Phone number field ]

        [ Request SMS button ]

The trick was this: back then you'd check the associated email addresses of low ICQ numbers. If it was Yahoo, Hotmail and the like, there was a small chance that the email address expired and could be re-registered.

The forgot password thing then gave you access to the ICQ account.

180662, and I am still using it!

11997634

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