[dostler]

I'm hit with a barrage of chat invitations from friends when I go online but I only want to chat with a specific buddy. Is there a way to check to see if a particular buddy is available in iChat without making myself available for chats, like a stealth mode or something? I've tried setting the "away" setting but I still get chat invitations. Any ideas?

[gorickey]

Hmmm, not that I'm aware of. Kind of wild that people are sending you chat invitations while it's very clear you have iChat set to be "Away"...oh well...

[Rickster]

See the Privacy pane in iChat's prefs. If someone can't send you messages due to the settings in that pane, they also can't see that you're online. You can still initiate a chat with them, though.