Edit: So, you've got orphaned contacts and want to know what that means? It means that particular contact exists in your Trillian contact list, but no associated messenger accounts are connected. If it's a Yahoo contact then you need to be connected to a Yahoo account in order to see if that contact is Online, Offline, Away or whatever -- but since you are not then it shows as Orphaned. Click the connection icon (circle in your contact list) associated with that particular contact's network and then Show Status Window, where you can see what sort of error you may be getting while connecting to that network.

In a nutshell: Contacts are "orphaned" until you connect to the appropriate messaging networks where those contacts live.

Note that the rest of this forum post is over a year old and some of it may not apply to a problem you're having today.

~ajm 6/27/07

Check out the "Turn off 'Automatically Connect'" 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 - Who knows?
  
  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

• Turn off "automatically connect" for multiple AIM accounts!
  
  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.

I don't have anything for Yahoo or ICQ yet; I haven't been able to make any orphans come up on those. If you have an orphan story, do share!

-- 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

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

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