Buddies not showing up in iChat...

OK, so I just moved into my new house up at school. Its my fraternity house, but there is 17 other people living here. There are a few other Mac's in the house but no one can help me.

My iChat will load go through Connecting... and then say available, but will only show my buddy list categories and not the buddies. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't. Why is this doing this? Please help!! (Mac OS X 10.5.4)

I know its a dumb question but best things to do are to get the basics out of the way...Did you click the arrow to drop down all your buddies? (left hand side)

Spork said:

I know its a dumb question but best things to do are to get the basics out of the way...Did you click the arrow to drop down all your buddies? (left hand side)

Click to expand...

Yes sir, I did. Like I said, sometimes they show up and others they dont. It's weird, but until they show up it doesn't recognize me as online.

Hmmm...My buddy had difficulty the first time he bought his mac and his problems were around the same exact ones you had. I'll send him a text and see if he has an answer for me.

[edit] - I'm sorry he wasn't much help. He said all he did was reformat about a week into having his mac and completely forgot about the ichat problem but it's fixed now and I assume it's from the reformat.

I'll see if I can find any help on this issue with the intarwebz lol.


[edit 2]
Came across this on mac-forums

I was having the problem many were complaining about where the icq user always appearing offline and thus I could not reply to im's from that person. After some more poking around on apple discussions I found out that this might have something to do with the buddy being blocked. I looked at the buddies in my ichat using the icq number to log in and it turns out that the entire buddy list was blocked, (buddy meny --> block user was checked). I don't know why. After unblocking the entire buddy list, which I had to do one by one, I didn't have the problem and the icq user showed up as available and online in my ichat using an aim screen name.

Click to expand...

[edit 3] Also if you feel like not reformatting or the other quote doesn't help out. If you would like to re-install iChat this should help you out.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1486891

The iBook that I bought did not come with system restore or reformatting disks. Is there a way I can get them to restore/reformat? How much?