On "Feedbag Error 17"...
A couple of days ago I noticed that I couldn't add Azeem Azhar to my iChat AV contacts list. I kept getting returned "Feedbag Error 17" which seemed entirely unexpected and unpleasantly phrased. Was I a feedbag? Had iChat eaten Azeem? The mind boggled.
After several hours of consideration, another option occurred to me. Perhaps iChat was trying to protect me from excessive contact with Azeem! Maybe my beautiful new Pantherised beast was being defensive! "No, Tom!" It was going, "He's bad news! He'll tell you that you work in Marketing again and you'll get all cross and defensive and make that ludicrous speech about being an artisan! Please! Please! Let me protect you from the embarrassment!" At which point, I assumed, feedbag laptop decided to chow-down on poor Mr Azhar's AIM name with fierce hungry vengeance. I touted this theory around a few of my friends. General consensus, "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
Well now I know that I'm not alone and that it's nothing personal, Mr Azhar! My Powerbook loves you and iChat loves you and all I had to do was throw away a couple of my childhood friends who - frankly - are never online anyway and kind of sucked at web stuff. In the end the problem was all caused by having too many friends - apparently AIM can only handle 150 contacts - at least that is according to Mssrs. Unsanity, Rael and Webb.
But it occurs to me that there's something slightly suspicious about all of this. A couple of days ago I tried searching for information about this error message, but it was nowhere. There was literally no information. Today, there's a search result returned, and posts about the subject on three separate weblogs. So what's happened? Is it a new error message or is it just we've all hit the limit at the same time? Or has the number of buddies available changed? I smell a mystery!
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
The 150 buddy limit in AIM has been well known for some time. I ran into the issue a few months back and have taken the opportunity to purge the vast array of offline buddies who appear to ALWAYS bee offline.
It's a cleansing process akin to moving from one cell phone to the next where you get to ask "Gosh, do I want to talk to this person any more?"
→ Posted by: rands at October 28, 2003 3:29 PM
Limits like that suck. Hopefully you can find and download some program on the Internet that'll let you have unlimitd AOL friends or whatever. *thumbs up
→ Posted by: Tiffany at October 29, 2003 12:35 AM
Um, it's not just an AIM limit - it's a physiological limit
→ Posted by: Garrick Van Buren at October 30, 2003 2:26 AM
While I completely appreciate that the average group size and mental capacity of humans is to manage around 150 people, I can't help thinking that if it was a clear-cut psychological limit then so many human beings wouldn't find themselves butting up against it.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at October 30, 2003 7:29 AM
ah, now i know what its all about. and i thought panther thought my friend ryan was a feedbag!
→ Posted by: zak at January 9, 2004 3:08 AM
I keep running into it because I have loser friends that decide to never log in again.. and I forget about them under the fold of "offline". Ah well. Time to clean. Thanks for the hint!
→ Posted by: eliot at February 10, 2004 4:20 AM
i had the same problem today.. but with an error 10 and with an empty list with a new pseudo aim....i can't add anybody. If y change to my old pseudo (with it's list of pseudo) i can add what i want....i try to create a new pseudo on aol and with the new one, i don't have the error and can add what i want.
If i return on the new wrong pseudo the error is still there. I tried to locate le ichat pref and trash them....ichat re-create the files. I started again and fianly try to add a contact....Impossible d’ajouter ŕ votre liste de contacts. (erreur Feedbag 10)
sorry my english is so bad !
have you any idea ?
please respond to shoff@filnet.fr
→ Posted by: seb at August 27, 2004 1:25 PM
I had the error 10. My problem is related to iChat not grouping correctly. Since I have multiple groups, whenever I add someone in iChat, it adds them to every group. Thus, one new person shows up six times. This completely overloaded my list and is why it wouldn't let me add people. Simply editing the list in AIM worked.
→ Posted by: Paul at November 19, 2004 5:31 AM