Does anybody out there have any experience with being warned on AOL instant messenger. A friend of mine just got nailed by some preteen idiot who gave him a warning level of 15%. What does that mean? And how long does it take to go away and what can ya do about it?
Of course the AIM FAQ is a joke.
So… anybody have a clue?
Basically it means nothing. All it does is increase your rate limit so that you cannot send as many messages in a short period of time. With a %15 warning you probably wont even notice a difference. With 100% you cant even sign on though :D. Warning someone to 100% will usually put that screen name out of commission for 1-3 days. A 15% warning will go away much quicker though.
Hmmmmm…
ok so how can you make it go away? Is it just a timed thing?
I better shut up or my post count will go over ten and I will lose my status as a lurker!
I hope you’re kidding. Or at least referring to just interaction between those two people. Otherwise, couldn’t I just go on AIM, get a random person to talk to me for a second and then rapidfire warn them into oblivion?
Nope. You can only warn them once, and one warning is 10%.
As it happens, I’m talking on AIM right now, I’m gonna ask Random Scrub to give me a warn and let me know how much it goes up. OK, I received one warn. The things I do in the name of research. I also got a flashing box on my screen, telling me that I’d been warned by <Random Scrub’s AIM name>. Anyway, warns go away in time. If someone warns you, STOP TALKING TO THAT PERSON! You’ll only get one warn for each “send”, so quit talking, and your warn will only be 5%. Your friend must have sent two more messages after being warned the first time, so I can’t feel TOO sorry for him/her.
You can only warn them in proportion to how much you’ve talked to them. If someone just says “hi” you can only warn them 5%, if even that. But if youve been talking to someone for a while, you can warn them up to 35% sometimes. My group of coworkers and I all use AIM for inter-office communicating, and we fuck around with it a lot. You can start tag-teaming someone and get it up to 100% pretty quickly. I’ve had it done to me several times, and you have to log off for an hour or two. Then when you sign on, you can’t send things as quickly. Then it slowly wears off and after 24-36 hours, you’re back to normal.
It’s pretty funny (and I’m not trying to pick on you, lil lurker) that you can do something so harmless, but that at first can appear to be ominous. Freaks all the people who have never seen it before out. 
I know what you mean… I think the guy’s biggest worry was that AIM would send a letter or something to his house and his wife would find out.
But then again, I would probably freak out if somebody put a warning on me. That is just because I am a perfectionist and the type of person who was anal about her permanent record all through school.
What a kooky thing the warning level is.
And Lynn, thanks for messing up your AIM permanent record for lil ole me…