Direct connection with alternative aim clients?

at first i thought i wasnt forwarding the right ports on my router, but forwarding port 5190 worked fine for aim. i tried other ports that ppl said would work for trillian, gaim, etc. but i could never direct connect with anybody unless i was using the aol's aim client. one of my friends told me that aol doesnt like third parties making clients for their chat service and made it so that you cant direct connect to one of their servers unless ur using their prog... is that true? i seem to remember some article or something about aol trying to stop trillian users or something but i cant find it

oh i guess it is true, look at this http://www.petitiononline.com/savetril/petition.html

Yes the trillian problem from my knowledge it is true... but i have never seen an artical on it though...

i use gaim located at gaim.soundforge.net i have not experienced problems using it with AIM.
AOL SUCKS!

<rant>
unit if AOL sucks so bad.. why use (g)aim ?? switch to ICQ MSN or IRC :D
</rant>

I never used anything AIM related and are not planning on doing so in the future..
So this post is realy just a waste of 0's and 1's ;)