how to remove your birthday from the icq directory

//UPDATE: the method described below does not seem to work anymore.

if someone finds an alternative way, please leave a comment 🙂

All those who have ever tried to hide this little detail from their icq profile (for whatever purpose…) might have noticed that it’s actually impossible to permanently remove it. You can change it on the website, and there is even the option to leave the field blank, however, when you try to update, the current birth date will be preserved.

The fact that the removal of other information submitted through dropdown-fields (e.g. spoken languages) is easily possible, made me have a closer look at the the actual value sent for those input fields for the blank option:

<select name="user_data[year]" class="ubu-1-cmb">
<option value=""></option>
<option value="1995">1995</option><option value="1994">1994</option>
<option value="1993">1993</option><option value="1992">1992</option>
<option ...

It’s just an empty string – the same as for the selection of languages etc. – which makes it seem rather intentional than being just some bug in the backend software… 😀

I tried to send several values like 0, null, -1,… but all with the same effect.

However, if you give a “valid” year that is just a bit out of range (i.e. dates before “The Epoch” or after january, 2038), the server will set the date as unspecified! …yeah! 😀

To do this on your own, just login to the icq website, edit your profile (/full_details_update.php) and save the source code of that page to your disk (rename to .htm !).

Then open with notepad, search for the lines shown above and set the value for the first option (the blank one) to something like 1337 😀 )

<select name="user_data[year]" class="ubu-1-cmb">
<option value="1337"></option>
<option value="1995">1995</option><option value="1994">1994</option>
<option value="1993">1993</option><option value="1992">1992</option>
<option ...

To submit data from your personal copy of the form, complete the “action=”-url for the form, i.e. search for the following lines:

<form action="save_user_details.php" method="post" 
enctype="multipart/form-data" name="user_details" id="user_details">
<input type="hidden" name="uin" value="...

and replace with the full path:

<form action="http://people.icq.com/people/save_user_details.php" method="post"
enctype="multipart/form-data" name="user_details" id="user_details">

…now save changes, open the local .htm-file, and set the value for the year to the blank one.

For whatever reason, the javascript-initiated submit does not work locally, so feel free to either add your own submit button, or just click one of those text input fields to set the focus, and press enter – that should actually do it! 🙂