Recently one of my very old friend who is not so good in computers ask me to help him check his computer and router connection because very often he’d get a whole line of online alert flooding the right side of his screen. He also told me that this only happens only one of his contact and not other people.

When he told me this, I immediately remembered that this is an old trick that people use to annoy everyone in his contacts by changing the status as Appear Offline and then back to Online again. If you do it correctly, your friend’s screen would look something like the image below.

MSN Flood

That is the manual way of doing it. I searched in the Internet and found quite a lot of tools that can automate this process.

Buddy Annoyer is a small program (only 74KB in size) that will allow you to go online/off-line at your own selectable speed. All you need to do is to sign in to your Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger first, then run Buddy Annoyer, select which instant messenger you’re using and click the big “Enable” button. The help button mentioned that this tool uses 32-Bit API, so I am not sure if it will work in 64-Bit Windows. There is a limit to changing your status in MSN. If you keep Buddy Annoyer enabled for a while, you’ll get a popup that says “Your status could not be changed. Please try again later.”

Download Buddy Annoyer

If you search the term “buddy annoyer” in Google, you’ll find that there are many other similar tools such as Y! Buddy Annoyer, Voodowares Buddy Annoyer, Buddy Annoyer 3x, SevdaBoy Y! Buddy Annoyer 2.0, and etc… I have not tested others so I am not sure if they are safe to use or not.

The best way to protect yourself against this type of annoyances is either block the contact that is doing that or simply disable “Display alerts when contacts come online” at Tools > Options > Alerts and Sounds.

I’ve scanned Buddy Annoyer with VirusTotal (36 types of antivirus) and none of the antivirus detected it as threat. IF one day it is detected as a malware, I won’t be surprised at all because this tool is used to prank and annoy your contacts in Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. To be on the safe side, I’ve submitted Buddy Annoyer to ThreatExpert for analysis and it didn’t detect any suspicious activity.

Just a word of advice: this might be a fun tool to annoy the crap out of your friends but it is also a very fast way to loose a lot of friends. If you want to take revenge on the person that flooded you with the alert in the first place, you can put all your contacts in block list except that person that you want to flood. By putting all your “real” friends in block list, they can’t see you online, so they won’t be flooded by this annoying alert.

[ Download Buddy Annoyer ]

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