This website was originally conceived by Mike Mintz. However, the addition of Andrew Sayers has brought the site to where it is today.
Mike Mintz began writing this documentation in early 2002. He is officially the owner of hypothetic.org and this documentation and is responsible for the its layout and PHP backend. Mike and Andrew are both responsible for researching and writing the actual content.
Personal information about Mike Mintz can be found at his personal website, at www.mikemintz.com.
Andrew Sayers began developing a new MSN transport for Jabber in late 2002 and met Mike Mintz through Jabber soon thereafter. While experimenting with the protocol, he began contributing new sections and fixes to for the old MSN Messenger documentation, but they realized that it would be necessary to start again from scratch in order to have the most accurate information. Andrew Sayers has written much of the documentation in the new version while continuing to advance his Jabber transport as well as its underlying library, libmsn3.
Andrew Sayers is from England. He probably has a British accent too.
This site has no connections with Microsoft Corporation. If you have a problem with the program on your computer - for example if you can't install Messenger or you've forgotten your password - there are sites mentioned on the links page that can help you. If you'd like to ask a question about this site, or about the protocol itself, there are several ways to talk to us.
Before reporting a problem or asking a question, please read through the FAQ. If nothing on there is pertinent, go ahead and ask your question.
Most discussion and research goes on in the forum. By posting there, many other people (including the authors of this documentation) will be able to see your post and provide useful responses. Not only that, but the next time someone else has a similar problem, your thread will be an invaluable resource to him or her.
The chatroom is an IRC channel where one can chat in real time about the MSN Messenger protocol. It's generally used to discuss new discoveries about the protocol and programming problems in MSN Messenger. At the moment, we congregate on irc.freenode.net in the channel #msn. There used to be Jabber and MSN interfaces to the chatroom, but these were discontinued due to lack of interest.
IRC clients are available for almost every operating system. If you can't find one, you can chat through your web browser with this Java Applet. It is an interface to the IRC facet of the chatroom.
If you have a personal message that should only be seen by the site administrator or one of the authors, please do not post it in a public place such as the forum or the chat room. Please send a message through the "contact me" page at Mike's website. If you would like to send your message to Andrew, you may email him at andrew-website-hypothetic.org@ccl.bham.ac.uk.
The first incarnation of this website was written by Mike Mintz in March 2002. It was continually added to and developed upon until March 2003 when work on a totally new version of the documentation commenced. The last version of the old website can be found here. However, be warned that a lot of the information is outdated and inaccurate. Nothing of great importance on the old website is missing from the new version.
The next version was started by Mike Mintz and Andrew Sayers in March 2003 after they realized it would be impracticle to stick to the old layout. There was just too much information to cover. It was released on June 27th 2003.
Quite a bit of spring-cleaning was done in November 2003, as the site was updated for version 8 of the MSN Messenger protocol, as well as to use language more compatible with RFC 2778
The site is written in XHTML 1.0 with Cascading Style Sheets. The backend is a simple template-generating PHP script written by Mike Mintz.