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keldwud keldwud
 
December 22, 2008 04:50 AM

What is the story behind this "coho" thing on AOL Instant Messenger?

If you are not familiar with the xxxxx-coho phenomenon it happens when you are logged into AIM and you get random messages from usernames that end with the word coho. Sometimes they respond to you because your account has sent a random message where your display name shows up as something-coho.

What I did find out was that coho was one of the chan memes and involved fish of some sort. But I haven't been able to find out where the AIM virus/worm/bot came from or what it's purpose is.
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filmkid filmkid
 
 December 22, 2008 05:04 AM
"These messages were generated by a bot. This type of bot started with an AIM bot called TheGreatHatsby. Since then there has been the Salmon bots, Trout bots, and now Coho bots. The bot basically crawls sites like LiveJournal and sometimes DeviantArt or Xanga and get screennames of AIM users and then pair them up by sending an IM to each of them."

This guy ran into the same problem and figured it out: http://www.musingsforadarkenedroom.com/social-media/i-just-became-a-statisti-in-a-social-experiment/
Source(s):
http://www.musingsforadarkenedroom.com/social-media/i-just-became-a-statist...

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keldwud keldwud
 
December 22, 2008 05:12 AM
The story in the link you provided is pretty much how all of my coho conversations have gone.

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filmkid filmkid
 
December 22, 2008 05:15 AM
Yep. Apparently you're not the only one. Maybe you should get a new screen name.

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keldwud keldwud
 
December 22, 2008 05:19 AM
that's hard to want to do when I am keldwud *every* where on the 'net. :)

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filmkid filmkid
 
December 22, 2008 05:23 AM
I hear ya.

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palafo palafo
 
January 06, 2009 05:13 AM
If you type $optout you won't get any more of these messages (supposedly). Here's what happened when I tried it:
http://palafo.com/2009/01/06/caught-an-im-coho-and-threw-it-back/

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