Check out the "Space apart your AIM connections..." workaround if you're using multiple AIM accounts and have lots of orphans!

Hello, and welcome to the Trillian Orphanage . I've been looking for fixes to the buddy orphan issue, and figured I'd put all I found into one post for simplicity. If you want to reply with your own solutions and steps to verify, I can consolidate it into this list.

ALL MEDIUMS

• Connection Problems / Sudden Orphan Bonanza
  
  INDICATIONS - After opening Trillian, all buddies are orphaned, or it may happen with just one account (ie, all the AIM contacts are orphaned).
  
  POSSIBLE CAUSE - Trillian has not yet been able to download the list of buddies from the server.
  
  VERIFY CAUSE - Check to see if Trillian is disconnected on one or more accounts.
  
  RESOLUTION - Connect to the accounts.
  
  VERIFY TRILLIAN BEHAVIOR - Start Trillian without a network connection. Everything is orphaned! Notice this will not happen after an account has been disconnected while Trillian is still open.
  
• Exceeded Buddy List Limits / Recently added contacts orphaned or never show up online
  
  INDICATIONS - Orphans appear on accounts with lots and lots of buddies. Typically only a few orphans, or else recently added ones. Sometimes, newly added screen names will not show up as online, even when you know they are! AIM - Buddies are orphaned only from specific large groups.
  
  POSSIBLE CAUSE - Orphans may be caused by exceeding the internal buddy list limits:
  
  AIM - 500 per account, 200 per group. Nested groups are not part of this limit (AIM seems to split a Trillian-nested group into its own separate group on the server)
  MSN - 300 per account.
  YM - 300 per account
  ICQ - 600 per account; number garnered from research by the good admiral Memo (thanks!)
  
  VERIFY CAUSE - Login with the official client and see if your total # of buddies is at or more than the limit. AIM - Check the number of buddies in each group, too.
  
  RESOLUTION - Move buddies from the target group or account until they are within the limit. You may want to register for another account to keep all your buddies. After doing this, you can right-click -> Add To -> [your new account] and then right-click -> Delete From -> [your old account]
  
  VERIFY TRILLIAN BEHAVIOR - Mass-add buddies to an AIM group or an account on any network until you exceed the limit. Exit Trillian and restart. Watch the lil orphans cry out for mommy! (Anyone have experience on HOW the buddies are orphaned? For me, it seems to be most-recently-added when the limit is involved)

AIM

• Space apart your AIM connections if you have multiple screen names!
  
  INDICATIONS - Buddies are orphaned even though their screen names show up when you log in with another program/computer/Trillian profile. You know for a fact they are on the server buddy list for your screen name, but they don't show up in Trillian. May be associated with having multiple AIM accounts logging in at once.
  
  POSSIBLE CAUSE - It seems to be some issue with many accounts logging in at the same time. Therefore, solutions will be found through spacing the connections apart. Any of these should work, it's just a matter of preference.
  
  WORKAROUND #1 - Set your AIM accounts so that they don't connect automatically. Right-click the Trillian icon in your system tray and select Connections -> "Manage My Connections". Click each of your AIM accounts and turn off "automatically connect".
  
  Every time you load Trillian, go to "Manage My Connections" again and click your first AIM account. Now click the "CONNECT" button. Wait about 30 seconds and do this for each AIM account. This will manually connect to each one about 30 seconds apart.
  
  WORKAROUND #2 - If you don't like messing with "Manage my Connections" every time, just use the yellow ball at the top of your buddy list to disconnect each of your screen names, and then manually reconnect it. The only problem is, AIM tends to be sensitive to too many reconnections in a short time period - sometimes it will give you the 15 minute boot. Remember to give each connection about 30 seconds!
  
  WORKAROUND #3 - I was playing with deleting/recreating accounts; this was how I discovered the issue. You can delete your account information and then recreate your AIM settings, but doing this is kinda pointless. Besides, it's a little too easy to accidentally click "yes" and delete all your buddies. However, it's there if you want to try it, just make sure you have a backup! For all intents and purposes, I don't think this does anything that #1 and #2 can't do.
  
  VERIFY TRILLIAN BEHAVIOR - Try workaround #1. Always manually connect, and give each account about 30 seconds before moving on to the next one. Notice how many orphans you have. Now go back to having them all automatically connect, and watch the orphans skyrocket. Curious...
  
• Buddy Cache Fix for Random / Recently Added Orphans
  
  INDICATIONS - Buddies are randomly orphaned. More recently added buddies tend to be orphaned more often than not, but occasionally a couple older IM names seem to get orphaned all the time. This is the only bona fide bug in this post so far. The rest are user interface issues, but this bug is something that is theoretically not supposed to happen.
  
  POSSIBLE CAUSE - Something's fishy with the Trillian AIM buddy cache. This just seems totally random to me. Any theories on why this happens?
  
  RESOLUTION #1 - Close Trillian. Open up aim-contact-cache.ini and look for lines with count=. Change the count number (doesn't seem to matter what you change it to, 0 seems like a safe bet ). Open Trillian again. This readded nearly all my buddies, but there are still one or two that fall off the bandwagon sometimes. YMMV
  
  RESOLUTION #2 - Close Trillian. Delete aim-contact-cache.ini. Open Trillian again. This helps, but I didn't have as much success with this fix as with #1. I have no idea why. YMMV
  
  VERIFY TRILLIAN BEHAVIOR - This is really hard to do. For me, this is showing up with multiple accounts, though there's no reason why it wouldn't happen with just one. Try adding a lot of buddies at once, then exiting and reloading. The problem seems to be proportionate to how many buddies Trillian is handling, regardless of whether or not the server limits have been exceeded. There are a few names that seem to have it happen more often than not, but the end result is random...I can't make a test case that will always act in the same way.
  
• Multiple Recent Restarts / Try Waiting!
  
  INDICATIONS - Orphans have no pattern, but are persistent! The same names keep getting reorphaned every time you load, despite having a message history and having once been part of your buddy list. Recently, Trillian has been restarted multiple times in a short time period. Deleting or editing the AIM cache file does nothing.
  
  POSSIBLE CAUSE - The AIM servers seem to need a waiting period of some sort. Lots of logins in a short period of time seems to prevent the buddy list from updating?!
  
  RESOLUTION - Try waiting 15 minutes (I'm serious!) then delete or rename the aim-contactcache.ini and load up Trillian. This happened to me today and yesterday; each time it wiped out all my orphans (except the illegal-name ones )
  
  VERIFY TRILLIAN BEHAVIOR - Again, difficult to do. Wait until you already HAVE orphans, then exit and reload Trillian repeatedly. Most, if not all of them, will never be added to the AIM server's buddy list.
  
• Illegal Screen Name / Orphan Never Successfully Added Before
  
  INDICATIONS - One or more orphans have NEVER been successfully added to your buddy list - no record of ever having logged in or anything.
  
  POSSIBLE CAUSE - the AIM SN is not a valid screenname. AIM Screen names have to be "3-16 letters or numbers. It must start with a letter."
  
  RESOLUTION - Double check the SN your friend gave ya . Delete this buddy and readd them using a valid screen name.
  
  VERIFY TRILLIAN BEHAVIOR - Make up an invalid screen name, like "12345" or "AB" and try adding them as buddies. Trillian will let you add them, but will orphan them upon Trillian restart.

MSN

• Cancelled or Invalid MSN Accounts / Really Old Orphans
  
  INDICATIONS - Orphans are very old accounts, or else are not valid or misspelled.
  
  POSSIBLE CAUSE - Orphans may be accounts that no longer use MSN.
  
  VERIFY CAUSE - Sign in to official MSN and see if it will let you add them.
  
  RESOLUTION - Delete the contacts. There is little point to keeping them in your Trillian list, because they do not use MSN anymore.
  
  VERIFY TRILLIAN BEHAVIOR - Make up some ridiculous name and add it to your MSN. The made up name will remain on your buddy list as long as you don't close Trillian - this is true even with signing on and off. After closing Trillian, buddy will be orphaned. To my knowledge, none of the other services does this.

ICQ

• Orphan Twins (Thanks, Viceroy!)
  
  INDICATIONS
  In conversations, recently added contacts come up as not being on the list, even though they plainly are. Adding will result in a duplicate "bare bones" entry on the list, without any renames/notes that you may have attached.
  
  POSSIBLE CAUSE
  This appears to be a case of exceeding the buddy limit for ICQ.
  
  POSSIBLE RESOLUTION
  Delete some buddies until you're under the limit.
  
  VERIFY TRILLIAN BEHAVIOR - I have not been able to personally verify this, but basically it goes like this: Add buddies until you exceed the limit, then start conversations with a newly added buddy and see if they appear on the list or not. If not, try adding them and see if you have a duplicate entry.
  

I don't have anything for Yahoo yet, and I could use more ICQ orphan testimonials If you have an orphan story, do share!

-- Joren

Great stuff.

I would like to add that I (and presumably quite a few other regular Trillian users) have NEVER had not even ONE orphaned contact with any install of Trillian so I think most of this must be directly related to large amounts of buddies on an account.

The following is not directed at any post or message in the Trillian Forums. It came from a Russian Trillian Forum that promoted piracy of Trillian Pro.

"I need to check my records but I am pretty sure that this is the most retarded post I have ever seen. I actually felt myself lose 2 IQ points as I read it." -- Anonymous <snicker>

I had orphaned contacts once.
I had other things to do, so I ignored it. Restarted the computer a little later and have never seen it again.

Oh, how I wish I could be among you .

Yes, it definitely has something to do with lots of buddies. Multiple accounts seems to compound it. The orphans brought me back to these forums...I haven't posted in years! But who can resist a cute lil orphan?

I'm thinking of making a test Buddies.xml full of madeup AIM SNs to see which ones disappear. Maybe it would help them track down the problem?

-- Joren

*bump*

Added a couple updates. Tourbi, your comment triggered a line of thinking that added another solution...AIM seems to benefit from waiting 15 minutes or so after trying to resolve orphans. Thanks!

-- Joren

My experience with orphaned contacts has been wholly different from any of those posted here... and none of the solutions posted in the OP have solved my particular problem.

For whatever reason, Trillian does not successfully update my buddy list(s) on the remote server(s). When I add a new contact in Trillian it shows up fine. However, when I restart Trillian the new contact has been orphaned.

If I add the contact using the regular client, however, (AIM, for example) then the next time I load Trillian it shows up and is not orphaned - and is never orphaned again.

Is there a solution to this? I've been enduring this problem for about a year and a half now, and have settled to just add contacts using the native client software. However, having purchased Trillian while still needing to keep AIM and MSN installed on my computer seems to defeat one of the purposes of having Trillian.

Ideas?

I am having a similar problem, with having all of my contacts orphaned when I sign on. The strange thing is - trillian says that I am connected to all of my accounts. Normally, I can just sign on with the original AIM or Yahoo! software, exit, and start trillian and everything works fine - but for some reason I am not able to connect on those programs either anymore. I dont have very many contacts at all (45 total) and my internet connection is fully functional and operational. I tried a reinstall as a last resort the previous time this happened and it worked, but I tried it again today and it made no difference.

Sometimes, if I wait, it will work, but the odd thing is that sometimes when I'm connected, my message windows will suddenly tell me that I've been disconnected, but Trillian shows me connected, with all of my buddies orphaned, again.

Also, sometimes I will be talking to someone and suddenly will not be getting messages from them. I test this by sending messages to my own AIM screen name, and they wont be sent back. Sometimes this is temporary but it will usually lead me to have to restart trillian.

Any ideas?

Also, i forgot to add... "add to"-ing the buddies while i'm connected but overflowing with orphans doesnt work either... they are then just 'offline'.

I have never had any orphants. I don't have many buddies in my list. And when it happened it was all contacts for a while...

But know I have two (out of ca 20) MSN contacts that are orphaned. And both are active contacts (I can check their page on MSN and one of them I know use MSN still).

Any ideas? Could there be an issue with them upgrading to Messanger Live or something... Or what else could it be?

www.osterud.name - ICQ: 7297605 - AIM/Yahoo/Astra: LarsErikOsterud
WinXP, Asus P4PE, Intel P4 2.53Ghz, 1GB RAM, MSI 7600GS, SB-Live!

Sorry for the lack of attention; I'm in Tokyo this month. I'll be back soon and see about testing what yall said on my Trillian install at home. Not using Trillian here. Adding with the native client is an interesting idea; thanks!

-- Joren

Ok, I've got a new train of thought here.

I had a newly added buddy on AIM that kept getting orphaned. Oddly enough, in AIM Express, this person shows up in the buddy list, but Trillian has them as orphaned. I opened up aim-contactcache.ini and kept track of the changes.

After adding the buddy from within Trillian, the new buddy will get added to this ini file as contact0=NewBuddy while all the other contacts get shifted down one. For example, the old contact0 is now contact1, contact 1 is now contact 2, etc. The file will stay this way until the end of the session.

Here's where things start to go wrong. When launching Trillian, as soon as the AIM account connects, the file is re-written. All the contacts get shifted UP one, so that contact 0 is contact 1, etc. And the last contact on the list gets duplicated, and the count of buddies is decreased one.

I had a fix but apparently only temporary. The problem keeps coming back. I've tried first and last contact, tried altering count to match the # of entries, but it keeps getting regenerated. Now I'm gonna try something else.

-- Joren

*bump* - I found what seems to be a rather effective workaround for AIM. Can you please try this and tell me how it works for you? This should only help if:

- You have multiple AIM accounts
- Your orphaned buddies ARE on the server list (e.g., you sign on with official client and you can see them without having to add them)
- Your accounts are set to automatically connect at the start, or else you're in the habit of initiating several AIM connections at once

[EDIT - This post was referring to the "Space apart your AIM connections" in the top post in this thread.]

I think this is only effective if you have multiple AIM accounts, as the fact that they're all connecting at once seems to be the root of some of this orphan issue. However, please try it anyway if you have orphans and you only have one account. If this doesn't work, please tell me if:

You have verified that your orphan IS ON the buddy list (e.g., you've signed on with the official client)

You have more than one AIM account, and how many you have

Rough estimate of how many buddies per account

Anything else that you think might help...?

-- Joren

I have Trillian Pro (v3.1 build 121), and I have this problem all the time!!! It's very frustrating because I have HUNDREDS of AIM contacts spread over 2 AIM screen names, and I have to go through and add them BY HAND. Joren's bag of tricks (and the other solutions) don't work for me.

Why doesn't someone from Trillian's staff fix this? I have read the FAQ, and they address WHY it happens (sort of), but they don't seem to offer fixes...

Why in the heck can't I "add" a group of buddies at once? It would make my life alot easier when dealing with this <snip>.

don't circumvent the filter

My contacts from all the different accounts on all the different clients are constantly orphaned. The only thing that seems to work for me is re-starting trillian several times until for whatever reason, it loads most or all of them.

I can't understand why it's so random, but I REALLY hope that they fix this stupidity with Astra.

i appreciate all the inight and research you are all doing to try and help solve this problem, especially since i have recently encounteered this probl;em on 2 computers, but imust tell you that you are all, for the most part, wasting your time with the methods you are attempting.

the first time i experienced this problem it was only with AIM contacts, and i have roughly 25 of them.my MSN and Yahoo! contacts were all working fine. it was only the AIM contacts that were orphaned. i tried many things to fix my problem but had little luck.

**before you go trying all these odd-ball solutions with adding contacts with AIM software to use them in trillian, please try these 2 steps:
1. are you able to log on to your AIM account with the AIM software and view your contacts?
2. are you able to access aol.com?

i was unable to do either. i took my computer to a friends house for him to try and fix it and when it was all hooked up everything worked perfectly as normal. the next day i hooked it up at home and AIM contacts were still orphaned. i was unable to log in using AIM software, or to even view aol.com using 3 different browsers. after researching for a while and talking to a tech from my local ISP i discovered what the REAL issue was anda how to solve it.

it turns out that AOL is blocking accounts that aren't using their software. it's that simple. AOL provides you a screen name for free becauase they advertise using their AIM software. if you use trillian, there are no adds, so they're blocking your account. what confused me was why it wasn't working at my house, but at a friend's house who lives 30 miles away. the tech i spoke with was able to help me fix my problem completely. the way AOL is blocking people is not through the actually screen name, but through your computers MAC address. the solution: change yoyur MAC. it was that simple. i simply changed the very last digit in my MAC adderss from an "E" to an "F" and my problem was fixed.

i have 2 computers though, the first was built by a friend and the other is a garbage DELL. the home built machinew was the computer that i encountered this problem on first, and was a simple fix. i now have orphaned AIM contacts on my DELL, but am able to use AIM software to log on just fine, and can also access aol.com without any trouble. i tried using a MAC editing program, as the p.o.s. intel proset network adapter in the dell is unable to manually change the MAC, like i was able with my other computer, and had no luck. so i continue to search for a solution. fortunately the DELL is not my main computer so if i am in fact unable to fix this issue, it is at no significant loss, but it is slightly annoying.

hopefully some of this information was useful to someone also encountering this problem. if anyone else is having orphaned contact issues, but is in fact able to use AIM software and access aol.com, and finds a solution to this problem, please post it here as i am very interested on how this may be resolved. thanks for reading.

Veedub, thanks for your post (I know I am replying to something a half year old). I honestly can't see how AOL blocking a computer would have anything to do with orphans, unless ALL the users on the buddy list got orphaned at once, which would indicate a failure to connect, as you have said. Most of this thread is meant to address problems with orphans on a successful connection.

However, I am most intrigued by your changing the MAC address on your computer. Is AOL your ISP? You did indicate talking to an AOL tech, so I am assuming this is the case. If they are not your ISP, how in the world do they have access to your MAC address? And what did changing it solve? If AOL is indeed filtering by MAC addresses (even being able to obtain them!), I would encourage posting in a new thread about that, as that would be a major development and other people should know.

I will reiterate again for those who may be reading - if ALL your buddies from one or more AIM accounts are being orphaned, this indicates a failure to connect. You will need to troubleshoot from that angle.

If SOME of your buddies are being orphaned, then try one of the other solutions above. If you are using multiple AIM accounts, the one that has worked the best for me has been to disconnect all AIM accounts (see "Space apart your AIM connections" at the top of this thread), and then connect each screen name ONE AT A TIME, waiting for one to completely log in before connecting with another.

-- Joren

All the buddies from all the services suddenly went orphan days ago, and it has not come back. The native clients work and find the contacts online. Reinstalling Trill did not help. Trillian reports that it is connected on all the services (via status bar on contact list), but when the status windows are open during a disconnet/reconnect, it shows a first attempt, but no repeats (at 60 second intervals). Finally, when trying to add or re-add a buddy, Trill then admits it is not connected.

Did anything change with your firewall? Did you try changing ports or disabling software firewalls as a test?

I'm having exactly the same problems with Trillian Pro on Vista SP1. I've disabled Windows Firewall and reinstalled Trillian Pro, both to no effect, Buddies are all using MSN, but right-clicking them and selecting Add... from the context menu also has no effect. I say 'no' effect, but FWIW the circle next to the contact does turn from a completey blank circle into a lightly shared circle.

tbransco, are you absolutely sure you are CONNECTED to that MSN account first?

Pick the blue icon and pick "show status window" and see what it says...

All I did was right click on the orphaned contact hit add then my screenname and it was no longer orphaned

No, I'm not entirely sure I'm connected. The message that appears in Status window is simply this:

[12:40] *** Creating connection
"<<my MSN email address>>"

Just to add some context for this, I have two MSN accounts and I've set up separate profiles for each of them in Trillian Pro. Only one of the two profiles is having this connection problem with MSN, i.e., it hangs at the "Creating connection..." stage.

I've tried deleting this profile and re-creating it, but it still cannot log in to MSN with Trillian Pro. Using the MSN client itself, Live Messenger, I am able to login to MSN using either of the two MSN accounts I have.

Well I don't know the answer to that problem, but until you get it connected you can't do anything about the orphaned contacts. And once you do get it connected, likely they will all be fine anyways