The first time that I used ICQ, I was very amazed about this new program, so different by irc: in fact you can talk only with people that you want. So this was the beginning of ICQ for me, I selected the people I wanted to talk with... I thought nobody could find me on the internet with this method.
So, after a while, one day at home, as I was talking with a friend on ICQ, I see the sentence (which is common for ICQ users): "The user ".." added you to his contact list". ICQ user have their name available publically on the Mirabilis server. Nobody needs an authorization to talk to me... and when I saw these "unknown" nick names like "Lemon Tree", I told myself: “Oh my God, here we are again!".
You see, those few times I was on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to chat with my boyfriend at work), strange people which, just because I'm female, would ask me some pretty weird questions (I won’t say the kind of questions I got, I'm sure you've understood!). I thought ICQ was my escape from the IRC world and I found it can really be like the old IRC..
So my finally advice is: pay attention to the strange nicks or make joke of them:)!!
Good luck!
Note:
ICQ is a small program which load and stays in the background of your Window environment. It allows for direct chatting, file transfer, URL exchange, and other neat little features (such as paging) to "improve” communication between users. The user lists are unfortunately available for everyone to see, so lamers seeing a female name, automatically attempt try their moves on the girl.
For further info, visit the site http://www.mirabilis.com and reduce your office productivity down to zero.
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