How to use Skype 2.8 on a PowerPC mac

Perhaps you had the disgusting experience of Skype cutting off your service if you were running version 2.8 because it's cleaner than the current spammy crappy versions or because you have a PowerPC (PPC) mac that can only run this earlier version, or whatever your reason, and you have been informed that MS / Skype will no longer work on your computer. I am practicing my best restraint here not to use all the 4-letter words that came to my mind when MS did this and screwed us.

It took a lot of searching, but I found a work-around that solves the problem for the time being. You have to edit a .plist file so that the Skype server thinks you are running a modern version when you are actually still running 2.8. Here is how to do it:

I will write up the geeky way that definitely worked. You may be able to accomplish the same thing using the Finder, Show Package Contents, and an editor like TextEdit, but I ran into permission problems when I tried that, so I switched to doing this through the Unix terminal and this worked fine.

1) make sure Skype is not running (Quit if it is) and run /Applications/Utilities/Terminal. From there....

2) cd /Applications/Skype.app/Contents/ (if this is where your Skype is)

3) ls (this (LS in lower case) will list the components there, and you can confirm that one is named Info.plist)

4) sudo vi Info.plist (this opens Info.plist in the vi editor) you will need to type your admin user password.

5) /2.8 <return> (this searches for and finds an instance of 2.8 in the file, so you can edit it and change it to the currently "acceptable" skype version)

6) type the letter i. this puts you in insert mode and you can edit the file.

7) replace whatever 2.8 version you have with 6.15.0.334

8) type <esc> to exit insert mode

9) repeat steps 5-8 until you have replaced all instances of the 2.8 version number. (I found 3)

10) after done editing, type :wq (this saves the file and quits the editor

11) launch Skype, and you should be good to go!

On some later versions of Mac OS X, the package contents are more challenging to access, but you can search for how to do that, separately. The main take home from this is that you need to edit the Info.plist file in package contents of the Skype application and change the version number from 2.8.0.866 (or whatever version you have) to 6.15.0.334 (of whatever version skype is now requiring). There are other terminal editors, such as "nano" and "pico" that you can use instead of "vi". Please post other methods to accomplish this in a more streamlined way if you find something that works better for you.