AIM F2 Trick for Hidden Text

Do you want to hide something that isn’t really hidden? Use AIM’s F2 trick to send hidden messages to your friends. Sure it’s pointless, but its kind of neat and you will surely prove that you are IM savvy.

What is the F2 Trick?

The F2 trick uses the timestamp feature of AIM. The assumption is that most people have timestamp turned off. Pressing F2 toggles AIM’s timestamp on/off. Time stamping just lets you know when the person said what they said. Notice the time next to the name. The trick allows you to fool AIM into thinking that your message is part of the time stamp. Here’s an example of a normal conversation with timestamps turned on:

How to insert your “secret message”

Now you just open up Notepad (any other text editor will do) and type in the secret message that you want, inside of these brackets: <!– MESSAGE –>

Copy the text of whatever “secret message” you want to have. To quickly copy all the text, press CTRL-A, then CTRL-C.

Head back to AIM and type in the normal message. Paste (CTRL-V) the secret message wherever you want in the normal message. Here is an example of a successful “secret message”

Tips

• Make sure you place ANY character type in front of and in back of the hidden message. If you fail to do so, you will be punished with horrible things like: </FONT></BODY></HTML> in your “secret message”, shown in this nifty image:

• This character can be anything, such as C * $ or even just a space. What I like to do is leave the “secret message” at the end of the normal message followed by a space; the other person can’t even see it!
• Note that if you have timestamp turned on when you paste in your “secret message”, this will make your horrible, horrible secret clear to everyone! Shown in this picture below:

*NOTE* Whatever you type in as your secret message could and probably will be read, so don’t go putting your deepest and darkest secrets here unless you don’t care if other people know.

*NOTE* These tricks only work with AIM, not with AOL’s built in messenger.

Etcetera

1. One other use of the F2 trick is in your profile. To do this, go to My AIM, then Edit Profile.
2. Click Next twice to reach your More Info section. Here is where you will place a ~Secret Message~.
3. Follow the same rules as above and you can insert hidden messages in your profile, too.

Here is a glowing example of my very own My Info page:

*GASP* And no one would’ve been the wiser if not for……… F2!

Useful Links

• AIM Support forum at BigBlueBall