I am having technical problems using the AOL and AIM chatrooms. I looking for someone who may frequent these chatroom and have the technical knowledge.
For example some of the chat rooms I enter show me a full list of all the chatters on the left side and other chat rooms do not. Even though all of those chat rooms came from the same source and all are AIM chat rooms and not chat rooms created by individuals.
Anothe issue is I'd like to know if you can search for a chat room using a "key word". I was in a Philly (Philadelphia) chat room last week and someone did give me some techincal help. Now I can not locate this chat room and it is a main room, not one created by an individual that may have closed it. The person who gave me help can not receive offline instant messages so I can not ask them for more help. I've asked these same questions on 2 other forums and zero help. Surely someone uses these chat rooms?

here are details of the AOL AIM problem

I am not a AOL internet customer but I went to aol.com and signed up so I could use the chat rooms. I finally got to the right place: www.peopleconnection.aol.com
I got a screen name for the chat rooms.
After I got my screen name, I located a chat room and could send messages to the room and see a list of all the room participants on the left side of my screen. I could not initiate chat with a person privately but others could with me. I went to a Philly chat room and got some help. I was told to download http://daol.aol.com/software/90vr
which I just did, everything was fine until it wanted me to sign up for AOL service. And before I got to the point of paying it asked for my current screen name and password but when I clicked next, it said my screen name was not valid so I had to go with new account instead of current user. I'm with Comporium. Any way the person in Philly said call AOL and explain I'm not a dialup user and they can change my account status to free, etc. I will call them tomorrow. In the meantime this week and yesterday, I uploaded my photo to my profile. Then when I searched the town sqaure rooms, I found Denver, Dayton, Allentown, Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago and more. Some of these like Allentown, I could see all the room chatters on the left side, but all the time when I went to Charlotte I could not see the other people. I could send a message to the room but after a few minutes, when I tried to send another one I would get a RED message saying there was a connection problem. If I left that room and came back there would be large gaps in the times of the messages, like the last message might have been 4:15 and I'm entering it with my new message and it is 4:35, so I'm missing info there, there is more going on in there chat wise than 20 minutes of silence. So, coincidence or not, uploading my pic seemed to stop my acces to the Charlotte chat room as far as seeing whose there and being able to look at their profiles. Now on this other list of town squares, Baltimore, Allentown, and Denver I was able to stay connected and see the people in the room, but others, including Charlotte, my desired destination, I could not.
So, I'm lost what to do. I have been told 100% I do not have to subscribe to AOL service to use their entire features. When I do go to a chat room the location is www.aim.com I think.

I have this on 3 forums and not a single response. I would swear there are millions of AOL and AIM and AOL chat room users. I guess I'm wrong or they don't look here and there.

go into a chat room and post the problem there. some 12 year old kid will give you a solution.
ront

My guess is that many chat rooms require you to register your "NICK"name before joining in. Never used anything but IRC for chat and it was quite a learning curve.