Many Westerners who would like to use QQ, China’s largest instant messenger & social network, feel deterred by the standard QQ software. The programme feels very heavy, looks bloated and is full of advertising. And since the QQ network is usually not THAT important to us, we either look for alternatives or we rather not use it.

I have posted about LumaQQ, a Java-based alternative to the original software, about three years ago. I didn’t use LumaQQ for too long back then and from what I can gather from their homepage, the project seems to be dead by now. The Pidgin QQ plugin, which comes with the main programme by default (download here), was much more convienent and has bascially worked flawlessly for the last two years. Until last summer, when Tencent decided to close the channel for third party clients. At first, users were still able to ‘circumvent’ their blocks by changing a setting in Pidgin that told the server you were using a much newer version of QQ. However, Tencent was quick to fix that hole and now you will usually receive a message like this one when trying to sign in: “您的号码可能存在异常情况，已受到限制登录保护，需激活后才能正常登录。激活网址：http://jihuo.qq.com” — literally: Don’t come back until you got the propper software. Adium, Pidgin’s sister-client for Mac OS X, suffers from the same problem, but won’t get fixed either until the Pidgin devs update the libraries.

Unfortunately, QQ isn’t the highest priority on the list for Pidgin’s developers. Moreover, I’ve heard that the Pidgin QQ plugin is based on LumaQQ code, so I’m not too optimistic about receiving a fix soon. So what options are left? There are a couple of Linux apps that still boast QQ support, Kopete for example. But as I don’t use Linux for everyday work that doesn’t really help. And I wasn’t able to get Kopete to sign on using it on Windows via the experimental ‘KDE on Windows‘. Seems all the third party clients are having this problem. So until someone comes up with a solution to circument Tencent’s new block, the only option left would be to use WebQQ. WebQQ works similar to Microsoft’s Web Messenger for MSN. It’s an online interface for their chat network that runs in your browser and enables you to log in from any computer with internet access. Unfortunately, the website is Chinese-only, so it may be a little difficult to navigate if you don’t speak Chinese. Give it a try, though — you might have to stick with it for a while.

• WebQQ: http://web.qq.com/

annoyances, asia, china, internet, software