These little images show you who’s ready to chat—and who’s not.

A plain yellow disc means “online”. Double-click the name to start a conversation!

A gray disc means that they’re offline.

A red disc with a white bar through it means this person is busy.

A yellow clock means this person is online, but they haven’t used the computer in a while. Other people see this for you, too, if you’re away from your computer. And of course you can control what they see! You can turn the “Idle” status off completely, or adjust the time when it begins to display. Here’s how:

1. Click the down-arrow in the upper-right corner to open the menu.
2. Click Preferences.
3. From the list on the left, click General. At the end of this list you can adjust “Show me as “Idle”...” to display after as little as 1 minute (but why would you do that?) all the way up to 60 minutes. Or, you can simply turn the feature off by un-checking “Show me as “Idle”…”