Let’s Chat

January 22, 2007 on 10:20 am | In Features | 297 Comments

We appreciate all your enthusiasm and comments on our blog. We do read the comments, and it’s clear there are concerns around Yahoo! Messenger’s chat rooms. So we want to address some of them.

Right off the bat, we want to let you know there was an outage the weekend of January 12th that prevented users from signing into the chat rooms. This is uncommon, and we were able to fix it. We appreciated your patience as we tackled the issue.

As some of you know, since Yahoo! Messenger’s chat rooms began the Internet has evolved and as a result, we’ve seen problems occur in the rooms with things like bots and other disruptions that can take the fun out of a chat. We are aware of these problems and continue to work on solutions.

Recently, we discontinued our web-based chat rooms. If you were using web-based chat, we hope you’ve installed the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger and started using its chat rooms. Since this changeover, we fixed a few bugs. Recently, if you clicked to ignore someone in a chat room, the next time you signed in to Messenger, the person was no longer on your ignore list (so you had to ignore the person again). We have corrected this to preserve ignore lists, so if you still have that problem, please upgrade to the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger. Also, if you’re not seeing chat text when you’re in a room, turn off the Messenger preference that is set to ignore anyone who is not on your contact list. You’ll find this under the Messenger menu > Preferences > Ignore list. (Thanks to reader “bart” for the tip!)

We also know many of you enjoyed our user-generated public chat rooms, which were discontinued. We will not be able to bring them back as a feature. But as a Yahoo! Messenger user, you can easily set up a private conference over IM with many friends at once.

Thanks again for your feedback and comments about your chat room use. They are important to us, and we are working on solutions to make the chat experience better. We’ll keep you updated here on the blog.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

297 Comments

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This is useless as the inferior Mac versions is not setup to support chat groups.

Comment by Alex Rodriguez — January 22, 2007 #
What about the chat exploit that disconnects users? Has it been addressed yet?

Comment by Michael King — January 22, 2007 #
If you guys want, I could provide a detailed list of bugs that me and my friends have compiled dealing with crashes, chats, IMs, conferences, GUI, etc. as it can assist the Yahoo! Messenger team improve Y!M (contact me if interested).

Keep up the good work team! =)

Comment by Michael King — January 22, 2007 #
I agree with Michael for bringing this to your attention i am on Yahoo Instant Messenger 24 hours a day and i notice Disconnects in Chats. I only normally have this problem when voice is enabled. There are many voice bots out there which disconnect my messenger also Large amounts of Bots which hit me. I hope your going to help towards blocking these nasty programs in the future because these are nasty programs. I am a proud Yahoo Chatter and like YIM.

Also Sarah you said about you cant bring Yahoo User Chats back. I know many users loved the user chats and i thought you would of comeup with a safer way on Chatroom Creation.

Also everyone keeps asking about Follow User and Go To User also Join User In Chat which was pulled from the buddy list Menu as soon as Yahoo Messenger 6.0 was released. These was handy features and i hope there can be a way to bring them back in the future.

You could allow Privacy Options.

Allow user to Join me in Chats*
Only Allow Buddys to Join me in Chats*

These sort of options Protect the Privacy of all other users. I really do hope there is a way to bring these features back in the future.

Thanks for all your hard work over at Yahoo! Inc.

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 22, 2007 #
Id love to cyber with Sarah. Now, that wasnt intended to get on Sarah’ nerves or to be vulgar but to show Sarah, and Yahoo! that PM isnt disabled, and the users who were breaking such rules in chat can continue to do so in PM – so in reality its only stopped a small amount of abuse.

Comment by mr t meola — January 22, 2007 #
I have used Yahoo Messenger for quite some time, until recently anyway. I also use Windows Instant Messenger. I recently needed to chat with a friend who could not log onto Windows IM and I attempted to log into Yahoo IM several times. It would show to be logging in and then would go back to log in page. I decided that maybe I needed to re-install, and discovered that there was a newer version out, so I downloaded Yahoo Messenger with Voice (8.1.0.239) My Yahoo Module (8.0.0.1). I uninstalled the previous version and installed the new one and attempted to log in and once again could not do so. I did attempt several times with no success. When I was unable to resolve the problem on my own, I went to the “Help” function and “Reported the problem” to Yahoo. I did this several times. I also discovered that others were having the same problem with the service. After completing the reporting process for the second or third time, and having Messenger set to log in automatically, I walked away for a period of time and came back to my computer to find that I had connected to Messenger just at the moment I sat down at the desk. Since I had done nothing, I made the mistake of thinking that perhaps Yahoo support had done something to assist me. Shortly after I sat down, Messenger went of and I have not been able to sign back in, despite leaving it on in a {”connect automatically” for hours at a time. Thankfully, I did not “Hold my breathe” awaiting a response from Yahoo about the problem reports I made to them. I know others are using Yahoo Messenger, but now wonder if they are using an earlier version, since the new version, in my opinion, “SUCKS.”

Comment by Van Randolph — January 22, 2007 #
WHEN R U GONNA ALLOW MAC USERS TO USE THE CHAT ROOM??

Comment by Mike — January 22, 2007 #
Someone should delete all the Spam comments from here. The user mitchell redirects to a porn site.

Oh yeah and chat room would be great, but Photo Sharing is much more important for all teens. This is the digital century. Give Mac users Photo Sharing

Comment by Lucky — January 22, 2007 #
Oh yeah and the new emoticons that Y! 8 has. I want those! Or even better you could do the emoticons Mac OS X style. Just like the Y! messenger homepage for the Mac version.

Comment by Lucky — January 22, 2007 #
Hi everyone – We’ll have a Mac update on the blog in the future so I’ll see what I can find out about chat rooms for Mac version users. Thanks,

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Comment by Administrator — January 23, 2007 #
hey if you love 2 chat your in the right place

Comment by fredina — January 23, 2007 #
I’ve been using yahoo messenger, for a good 6, 7 years, its pretty much the only messenger service I use. In the begining it was great, never had problems, good fun chat rooms to go into. But now, the messenger freezes on me all the time, kicks me off and its hard as hell to get signed back in. Ever since you took out the teen rooms and the user create rooms, the chat rooms have become boreville. I know hunderds of people who quit using the messenger and or the chat rooms because of these problems. You guys should fix the freezing and being booted off and put back the teen rooms and the create rooms so we can have some form of entertainment.

Comment by Rob — January 23, 2007 #
how do i get into a chat room

Comment by frances browne — January 23, 2007 #
to yahoo.
i am really trying to see how i can get into a chat room, cause i have not used the pc for a long time now, so i have forgotton how to log onto the messenger for chatting, kindly send me a step by srep process on how to log on and be a member of the chat
thanking you
aleen

Comment by aleenonyx — January 23, 2007 #
You can find out how to get into chat rooms from Yahoo! Messenger here (refer to the step by step on the right side of the page):

http://messenger.yahoo.com/feat_chatrooms.php

Comment by Administrator — January 23, 2007 #
i recently received an offline message saying that yahoo was going to deactivate messenger accounts and that it would cost 10.00 per month to use our accounts. is this true?

Comment by MJOHNSON77327 — January 23, 2007 #
MJOHNSON77327 – No, that’s not true. Sounds like you got him with some spim (IM spam). If you see that again, click the ignore button in your offline messages window to report it as spam. Thanks!

Sarah Bacon

Comment by Administrator — January 23, 2007 #
This Vista Messenger will you bring out a version compatible with Windows XP. I tested Vista out and dont like its new GUI

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 23, 2007 #
Just a small point about Messenger builds please..would it be possible somewhere on this blog to post changes, enhancements and bug fixes etc for builds as they are released please?

Would be usefull to know whats happening with the builds as they appear so an update log would be of benefit to all users I feel.

Cheers.

Colin

Comment by Colin — January 23, 2007 #
A few things I would like to see implemented.

First and absolutely foremost are the amount of bots in the chat rooms. There are a ridiculous amount of bots and the issue has become almost unbearable.Quite discerning upon entering a room and maybe 10 of the 50 people are actually real. I’m not sure how you would go about adressing the matter, but possibly having a random word verification box prior to entering a room may help somewhat?

The next few have to do with the Messenger GUI. I would like to see the “Chat” button put back on the top of the interface. It was much easier and convenient to just click a single button, rather than go to “Yahoo Messenger/Yahoo/Chat/Join A Room”.

Next is the favorites section. Many people do have favorite rooms, but they also have favorite room numbers that coincide with the category. It would be fantistic if the favorites section ALSO remembered the specific room number – rather than just the catagory.

Last of all. Myself and many, many, many others have a problem with the chat filter not working. When I go to preferences/chat, and select “none” as a word filter – it does not stay. Any log on, log off, or switching of rooms automatically puts the setting back to “weak”, although the option is still set to “none”. The workaround is always having to select “weak”, and then setting it back to “none”. Quite bothersome having to do it every log in & room change.

Thanks for listening!!!

Comment by Daren R. — January 23, 2007 #
I noticed that Sarah Bacon said there would be an update on the Mac version of Messenger – PLEASE PLEASE convey to the development team that we Mac users really want access to Yahoo! Chat rooms. I switched from a PC this year, and love OS X, but was crushed to find out that I couldn’t participate in chat rooms. I don’t plan on going back to a PC anytime soon, so as more people buy Macs, Yahoo is going to lose participants in chat features!

Comment by Bill — January 23, 2007 #
How about fixing Mac to PC webcams? Last week it was working fine, but it seems to have been broken in your “Chat Room” changes. I understand about turing it off in the Chat Rooms, but how about fixing straight person-to-person (Mac to PC) webcam?

Thanks for the soapbox.

Comment by Christopher — January 23, 2007 #
hi i will soon be on windows vista and i saw ur making a new YiM for vista well could u make it so the avatars do what people will type in *action text* ? if my buddy types in *hugs* the avatar will hug my avatar or say my buddy types in * makes out * her avatar will make out with my avatar now that will be so cool !

btw please add a disable photosharing check box i want to disable that completely thnx

Comment by cat — January 24, 2007 #
To the Blog Team, i know you are aware of the current room packet exploit in the YMSG protocol and it been sent in the YMSGHTTP protocol, have you made any progress in detering this exploit and stopping it from happening?

Comment by Dermot — January 24, 2007 #
Hello Yahoo! Messenger Team. I’ve read through the posts on this blog and by now I’m sure you recognize that many users are frustrated and disappointed with the current state of your chat service and IM client, I can’t say I blame them either. While your service is indeed a good one there are so many ridiculous flaws plaguing it that it’s a haven for malicious users to attack innocent chatters.

I have disclosed to you vulnerabilities I have discovered in the past (May of 2005) and more recently a flaw involving your Plugins and sending them to contacts. The last flaw I disclosed to you (and you only) allowed for Plugins to be sent and then automatically loaded against a user’s permission. If you are reading this it would be extremely WISE to hear me out.

Over the last couple of months “room booting” attacks have been a serious problem on your chat service. More recently this room booting has evolved into a seriously widespread DoS attack capable of disconnecting entire rooms of chatters. This attack can be launched by sending only a single large YMSG packet from a YMSG/HTTP session to trigger a server-side disconnect to all connected chatters in the target room. This means that even a dial-up user can launch and ‘boot’ up to 49 people PER chat room! If we do the math here and this flaw was exploited in multiple rooms simultaneously the “body count” would be extremely high. If an attacker chose to log 10 “bots” into 10 different rooms, 1 per room, and send this packet to all of them you’re looking at a max disconnection pay off of 490 users, nearly half a thousand of them in one go. If an attacker logged 20 bots into 20 different rooms and hit them all simultaneously you can kiss about ~1,000 people (assuming the maximum room population in each) goodbye within seconds from even a standard broadband connection.

This vulnerability being exploited is the most serious DoS attack flaw that has ever been seen or launched on ANY IM service I’ve ever used or worked with because it’s a broadcast DoS attack that will drop all chat room users from your YMSG servers. My question to you is… WHY does this vuln exist? Was it put there on purpose (it would appear so since justification for it’s existence wouldn’t make any sense)? Your chat server architecture is pretty flawed, ‘booting’ exists because YOU allow it to. Your servers disconnect the target(s) of YMSG packet floods instead of the source(s), it needs to be the other way around. You should be properly validating YMSG packet length where in many cases you’re not.

Below is some information regarding this YMSG/HTTP (single packet) Broadcast DoS Disconnection Exploit. The “fix” is a simple one and if you, the Yahoo! Messenger team, refuse to resolve it within the next 5 days (you have until the 30th) I will go public with example code (Proof-of-Concept code) and a binary that’s already compiled and ready for use with instructions on how to deny service to potentially thousands of people on your chat service. Five days is PLENTY of time for you to fix this vulnerability, starting now the countdown has started until I disclose this in it’s entirety to secunia and bugtraq. Don’t take me lightly, you’ve allowed this to go on for TOO LONG now and not only am I becoming impatient with your lack of “Quality of Service” and standards but EVERYBODY else is too. Take the responsibility to fix your server flaws especially when they’re of this degree of severity!

Vulnerability Type: Remotely Exploitable Broadcast DoS Attack (server-side disconnect)

Easily Launched? YES

Actively Being Exploited? YES

Affected YMSG Service Type: Chat Room Message/Service Type 0×00 0xA8

Details: A server-side Broadcast Denial of Service Attack can easily be launched on the Yahoo! Chat network potentially affecting thousands of chatters. A vulnerability that exists in the server architecture allows for a remote DoS attack to be exploited in broadcast.

Instructions for Reproduction: Chat network access via YMSG/HTTP login session. Room entry for target room. Upon successful entry (room login accepted and join request granted) a single YMSG packet of an exact length is needed to trigger a broadcast disconnect vulnerability in your current server architecture.

Exploit is delivered through a Chat Room Message packet circumventing your server’s 300 Byte Chat Message limitation. Due to the fact that your YMSG server architecture doesn’t properly validate the full packet length, but instead field-specifically (ie. you’re only applying the 300 char limit to the ‘117′ message field), chat message packets over 10KB in size are able to be generated and delivered to chat room users.

When a YMSG/HTTP session is used to send this structurally abnormal packet the chat message packet can reach over 15KB in size. When a chat message packet is sent from YMSG/HTTP at EXACTLY 15,310 Bytes + Room_Name_Length + User_ID_Length it WILL instantly trigger a broadcast disconnect to all currently logged in chat room users affected under YMSG protocol. The vulnerable field in the chat message packet is the Message Type Definition field which should ONLY be character 0×31, 0×32 or 0×33 (1/2/3). This field NEEDS TO BE restricted to only allow for a single Byte to be carried and acknowledged, you’re allowing for over 15KB to be present in this field, this is ridiculous and poor implementation on your part. =\

You STILL HAVEN’T remedied the issue I disclosed back in May of 2005 concerning your ‘Logfile’ for Messenger “troubleshooting” and it’s serious privacy risk potential. You can find that advisory here: http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2005/May/0212.html & archived and “Verified” by the Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) here: http://osvdb.org/displayvuln.php?osvdb_id=16815&print

Please take the responsibility to AT LEAST patch the broadcast DoS vulnerability that is being actively exploited publicly in all chat rooms on your service or I will have NO CHOICE but to completely disclose it with working proof-of-concepts. You can bet this one would be all over Security Focus, The Register and many security-related sites as a “Headline” in their news sections.

How can you expect people to care about and use your new Vista version of Messenger when they can’t even use your service without serious disruptions such as this? You can contact me directly if you would like anymore information on fixing this one… you have until the 30th and I’ll be checking daily to see if it’s been fixed. This isn’t a threat this is a promise because you’ve been more than aware of this being actively exploited and haven’t even attempted to fix this issue or make the public aware that you acknowledge it’s existence. This is complete negligence on your behalf for such a matter that you could easily rectify within MINUTES not days. I’ve given you until the 30th which is far more time than you would need to resolve this issue. Please don’t “sleep” on this one like you did on the Local Log Disclosure privacy issue that you’ve still yet to do anything about. I’m looking out for the chat public’s best interest.

Regards,
Adam [Torseq Technologies]

Comment by Adam [Torseq Technologies] — January 24, 2007 #
I remember back in the old days when there was a exploitable Yahoo Messenger 5.6 where you could send HTML and Javascript code directly to chat. That was so annoying and its just the problem now with people getting booted all the time. Wouldent it be nice if everyone was totally unbootable on Yahoo Messenger? I think it would be nice if u was not booted.

I hope all these booters an 3rd party clients are going to get patched again Sarah. Like i said to alot of people… “How would you like it if somebody was using your Servers as a Connection direct to their Chats” If it was my servers i would be quite damn annoyed and would keep issuing patches to block these 3rd party clients / booters etc. I hope you patch the YMSG Protocols soon and just stay to one Protocol which you can easily always kill off and patch.

I really hope you guys over at the Yahoo Team are thinking of doing this. Theres no reason they should Exploit onto your Servers, you have a written Document for Yahoo Messenger Users to connect to Windows Live Users / LCS and Lotus Sametime not 3rd party clients and other programs which like to exploit the Servers aswell as other Messenger Users.

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 25, 2007 #
Is there anyway that I can show screen name,and not my real name that I wrote when my account was signed up?
I have tried several ways that I can find but it still can not be solved

Comment by pencil — January 25, 2007 #
@ pencil, Yahoo Preferences > Appearance > Select ‘Yahoo! ID’.

Comment by Michael King — January 25, 2007 #
Quote: “Also, if you’re not seeing chat text when you’re in a room, turn off the Messenger preference that is set to ignore anyone who is not on your contact list. You’ll find this under the Messenger menu > Preferences > Ignore list.”

Sarah, can you explain the rationale for Yahoo changing the ‘Ignore anyone who is not on my friends list’ function? Not too long ago (within the last two years), if you set your Ignore preference to this option, it would ignore any non-chatroom contact from non-friends (IM’s, invites, etc.) but would leave all room text and voice intact. Now, the option also disables text and voice from non-friends in the rooms.

This is impractical for most room chatters, to say the least. They may want this option to block unsolicited IM’s, which is very desirable, but they still want to see all the room activity. I don’t know anyone who uses this option anymore, nor can I think of a reason to do so, short of riding out a booter attack. Please consider revising this feature. Thanks.

Comment by Mike F — January 25, 2007 #
Hi

I am jus curious if yahoo is going to do sumthing about the room booter that is messing up all the rooms sometimes ya cant stay in them for longer then a few minutes as peeps jus keep bootin it and bootin it n it knocks ya straight off messy its making chat not a very enjoyable place to be as some sit there for hours and do it ya change rooms and ya jus get the same I really hope this problem can be sorted out soon and make chatting enjoyable again thanx

Comment by Aus — January 25, 2007 #
I cant get into the Chatrooms again at of 12:15 GMT UK Time today. takes 1 minute to get into a chatroom.

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 26, 2007 #
The Exploit Torseq Technologies posted to you on this blog i think its seriously effecting people on the Chat Servers because alot of the rooms i go in hardly nobody has any ears on in the chatters list. I really hope this issue will be fixed soon for everyones sake.

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 26, 2007 #
I hope you take the advice of Torseq Technologies, because if true and you dont I will personally ask a few of my associates to contact the Government about taking legal action against yahoo for negligence in not enforcing the Denial pf Service rules in your own Terms of Service

Comment by Mr Brand — January 26, 2007 #
Hello Yahoo Messenger Team again

I just downloaded your Yahoo Avatar World its seems a really easy new way to create your own chats and customize it with your Yahoo Avatar. I hope you will be adding more stuff and enhancing it with more Privacy features. Good work well done!

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 26, 2007 #
After posting my initial comments here, and reading all of the others – it looks like many people have disconnection issues. I personally do not experience any random disconnects & have not experienced them for quite a long while.

Again, the only improvements I would like to see are 1) placing the “Chat” button back on the Messenger GUI, rather than having to access it through the menus. 2) Fixing the massive spam bot issues in the rooms, and 3) HAving the “favorite rooms” list keep track of the catagory AND specific room number… rather than simply the catagory alone.

Comment by Daren R. — January 26, 2007 #
Daren, the disconnections mentioned above are caused by a Broadcast Denial of Service exploit within chat rooms. In simple terms, that’s bad. VERY bad.

Comment by Venom — January 26, 2007 #
a bug in the Yahoo Messenger GUI stops the Search for Members on Yahoo Messenger from being displayed in the Buddy Window Menu – You can access it if you put the Menu Item in the Task Tray Menu. I you guys at Yahoo can issue a fix for this as thats a very good feature of Yahoo Messenger. Its nothing to do with a Privacy issue its a Members Directory and anyone has the right to browse throughout the Yahoo Members pages.

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 26, 2007 #
When I enter a chat room the voice/mic automatically turns on. I would like the messenger to remember next time I enter a chat room if I have voice/mic off, to stay off.

Comment by Dave — January 27, 2007 #
Dave, try YTK Lite or YTK Pro as it has an option to turn off auto voicing. =)

Comment by Venom — January 27, 2007 #
After reading all these posts, the ones that most struck a chord with me were the posts submitted by Daren R.

I too have been scratching my head in amazement and disbelief ever since some genius on the Yahoo Messenger development team thought it would be a good idea to REMOVE the “Chat” button from the Messenger interface. Why would you do that? Why fix something that wasn’t broken?

Actually, it wasn’t a fix, but rather a huge step backwards. By removing the simple functionality of a button that was easy to access, you now force users to search thru their menus in an attempt to locate a way to enter chat. And even if you know the location (as has been outlined in previous posts), the fact is it now requires several steps instead of simply pressing one button located right on the GUI. Why? Someone please explain it to me. I’d love to hear the rationale behind this decision. Of course we’ll never get an answer.

I find it all the more perplexing given that you now HAVE to use Messenger to enter chat, and can’t enter thru your web browser. You would think that Yahoo would want to make it as easy as possible for people to enter chat thru Messenger. No, that would be too logical. What does the brain trust at Yahoo do? They tweak the GUI so it now contains a bunch of useless buttons and items that most people never use, and instead remove one of the useful buttons that a majority of people actually use. Kudos to you Yahoo.

Isn’t an upgrade to a program supposed to be an improvement? If so, can someone at Yahoo explain to me how removing the “Chat” button enhances or improves the user’s experience. Yeah, I didn’t think you could. This is why I continue to use version 7.0.

By the way, for anyone that wants to continue to use an older version of Messenger instead of the latest and *cough* greatest, and not be nagged to upgrade each time they launch it, it’s a simple matter of renaming the “yupdater.exe” file to something else. Go to where you have Messenger installed, most likely:

C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger

Make sure you have file extensions visible and not hidden (as they are by default — change that in Folder Options if necessary) and locate the “yupdater.exe” file. Rename it to something like “yupdater.old” and click “Yes” when asked if you are sure you want to change it.

…..

Something else I’ve noticed lately, which hasn’t been addressed much by Sarah or anyone else, is how difficult it has been to enter chat lately. Messenger logs on without a problem, but entering a chatroom is ponderous and slow, and requires several attempts. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the following Chat Error:

“Signing in to Chat took longer than expected. Please try again later.”

It’s been going on for 3 weeks or more, with a short respite of about a week or so, but today I see the problem is back. What’s up with that? Does this have something to do with the interoperability between Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger?

Comment by Michael L. — January 27, 2007 #
Yahoo needs a ‘Status’ web page to let us know of any current problems like right now all rooms are frozen and you cant log on.. so whats up with that?

Comment by So0o0_Confused — January 27, 2007 #
Another thing… That “Loading Chat” message above the ad when you 1st enter a room can be removed, as we all know it’s fake. There IS no loading of chat. It’s quite obvious as other chat apps don’t have to “load” anything.

I’d like to see someone come here and address the issues posted here at least a couple times a week.

Comment by Daren R. — January 27, 2007 #
ok, not to be a jerk here but WTF is yahoo doing to mess things up now? I can’t sign in to regular messy, can’t sign into yazak or yahelite. everything was working good last night then poof, Did some dork in a suit decide to play with the wiring at yahoo cause he was bored?

Comment by southern_fried — January 27, 2007 #
How about having a modetior in each of the rooms… to watch all the crazeyness.. when the mod. leaves…. the room is closed… no questions asked..

Comment by Chris — January 27, 2007 #
When will Yahoo update the TV chat rooms list?
The TV category in Yahoo Messenger chat is horribly outdated. Over half of the rooms (15 of the 28) are for shows that have been long since cancelled and new, popular shows have no room of their own. As an aside, a large group of Big Brother fans have been petioning for our room back since Yahoo removed it after season two. Because Yahoo is a free service, Yahoo seems to turn a deaf ear to any complaints. I have inquired on this on numerous previous occasions and have never received anything other than a “form letter” type reply. Does Yahoo itself monitor these questions?

Comment by Wayne Harke — January 28, 2007 #
I hang out in the pagan rooms and especially Paganism 5…..the room ish being booted at least 8 times a day if not more…..why should we suffer for not doing asnything but chatting….This room has done nothing to deserve being booted….you need to path this booter….ban the room booter!! —- Kytten

Comment by The Wiggmeister's Kytten — January 28, 2007 #
A mod in each room? Thats absolutely ridiculous.

Comment by Daren R. — January 28, 2007 #
i am going to tell you how it is yahoo free .
on that yahoo is the ones who keep the back doors
opne ok for some one to make a booter ok its free
what you going to do booting some one is fun and on top of that why all of you bitching… you know you get booted right i tell you what you need to do is go and get a booter and boot them back.. booter been here for god know how long.. thay started weth aol ok and all so ther a booter out for msn as well you know you can stop them so stop bitching.. to yahoo its free

Comment by l_l_l_dragon_l_l_l — January 28, 2007 #
That’s all well and good, but Yahoo will continue to loose advertizers because of a new room booting program that attacks the Yahoo server and boots a room. People are already getting tired of this ridiculous lame activity by a few airheads and are going over to Paltalk. Now I know a patch can be designed to resolve this AND because Yahoo does record ip addresses, the predators can be stopped and banned from Yahoo. I certainly hope some action will be taken soon.

Comment by willowwisp000 — January 28, 2007 #
Yahoo get your act together, the more your rooms get booted the more you lose out to other chat clients.
Come on yahoo, give people like me a break this is the only contact I have with ppl.
For all those people that only want to chat and have no other way to communicate with the outside world.
Please Yahoo get something done we are all looking to you for help.

Comment by moonwolf — January 28, 2007 #
Face it, Yahoo Inc. does not care and is not interested in improving the chat service. Yahoo Inc. would rather face a tribunal of angry rodents instead of fixing chat. Because they’re indifferent to anything except perhaps a class action lawsuit brought on by angry rodents.
Of course, one day the angry rodents will smarten up and build a better chat service on their own with their own rodent servers. I forsee this happening.
As for myself I Boodoodles, hereby vows to never use Yahoo’s chat service ever again. Indifference costs us all. Stop the suffereing revolt now.

Comment by Boodoodles — January 28, 2007 #
i love yahoo chat room! i don’t see why people thinks its bad to chat! its better then chating in the chat rooms!

Comment by kayla — January 29, 2007 #
It’s not bad to chat. It’s just the malicious script kiddies using server side exploits on the chat rooms to disrupt usage. That, and the porn bots.

Comment by Venom — January 29, 2007 #
Yahoo chat room experience has remained the same in terms of features and has only gotten progressively worse in terms of experience in the last 5 years. Yahoo, you guys really have to do something to improve the chat experience. Is it really that hard to get rid of the bots in the rooms? Just have a word verification before signing in. Can you not do something that simple? Not allowing bots to sign in will improve user experience and avoid unnecessary bandwidth wastage.

Yahoo do something to retain your subscriber base. This is your only leg up on Google. Do not lose this. Is it that hard for a company with the kind of resources that Yahoo has to maintain an agile, responsive, feature rich chat experience?

Comment by Frustrated — January 29, 2007 #
While chat has taken over the world, Chat rooms are going to go the way of the dinosaur. Maybe no real people except Filapinos and Nigerians will even keep the Chat rooms that still do exist existing. The way Yahoo used to be 4 or 5 years ago (much better) is gone. Either deal with your own circle of chat contacts, or deal without Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo Chat rooms have become too much of a beating for any civilized person just trying to make new friends. Those days are long gone.

Comment by RCarter — January 29, 2007 #
Surely the people that are addressing Sarah, dont think that they are going to get a responce. This is Yahoo! GET A GRIP.

Comment by Tommy — January 30, 2007 #
Today is the 30th January 2007. This Remotely Exploitable Broadcast DoS Attack has not been patched.

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 30, 2007 #
Yahoo fix these things
1. Booting is a crime no different than mass spam emails, or phishing for Credit Cards
2. People that lock down rooms to others out is not much better those people should have accounts locked, and charge for violiating my civil rights to free speech.
3. Porn bots should be cordoned off, or marked so users can iggy them.
4. Bring back User rooms in certain subjects, but have a person approve or deny the request for a user room.

Finally, those simple measure make yahoo fun to use again. I used for 7 years, and the last couple years the rooms gotten more bot infested, and people boot, and lock down rooms that is why people dont use yahoo like they did in past. Its the 5% of dimwit users that ruin it for 95% of users that are honest, ethical, and play by the rules

Comment by Nick — January 30, 2007 #
Tommy,

If you actually read the comments here, you’ll notice Sarah has replied to one request already.

Comment by Mike F — January 30, 2007 #
I used to log on to the chat rooms to chat with people all accross the country on my day off. Lately the only people logged on are hookers who want you to visit their porn sites, spammers, and idiots begging for money.
You guys got to let me know where the normal people are signing on or I got to find a new hobby.

Mark Blevins

Comment by Mark Blevins — January 30, 2007 #
So when will Mac users be allowed to use the chatrooms? Come on…it’s not THAT difficult!

Comment by Nick — January 30, 2007 #
ok i just got home from work and its 4pm mst and i can NOT log into yahoo using anything!!!! …like i said WHERES MY STATUS PAGE??????

Comment by So0o0_Confused — January 30, 2007 #
I cant get messenger 8 w beta to sign on so I have to use 7.0 and now it signs on but wont let me in chats

Comment by Greg — January 30, 2007 #
I guess you have heard enough about the new Messenger well here it comes again. No response from the help item. This has come at a bad time due to I had set a time to talk to my son who is in iraq. thanks again for letting me down with messenger.

Comment by Barbara — January 30, 2007 #
Has anyone been having problems with Yahoo Messenger 8.1.0.239 constantly signing you off and back on again all the time??? Since I upgraded to yahoo 8.0 and onwards…I have been experiencing this problem. I googled it and realised that I am not the only and lots have a similar question posted all over the web, especially on yahoo answers and a lot of tech forums. Some suggested that the new build requires IE7 which I upgraded to and still the problem exisits.
Any ideas or fixes??? Pleae Help.

Regards,
Allan

Comment by Allan — January 30, 2007 #
I just read through dozens of posts and have seen only one response by yahoo. has Sarah died, or perhaps she has gone on vacation…. As of this moment, yahoo chat isn’t working at all. What’s happening? Did your servers up and croak or did one of your Yahoo executives start pushing random buttons? Please give us some kind of response! Even if it’s just to tell us all to shut the hell up and get a life, it would be better than nothing.

Comment by Will — January 30, 2007 #
today Jan 30 , 2007 yahoo went down again for several hours .. about 5 to 8:30 eastern time… and they patched the chat room boot exploit in http/ymsg servers chat packet field 124 .. and it wasn’t a power outtage … @ sarah

Comment by freecreed — January 30, 2007 #
now…if they could just get rid of the thousands and thousands of bots that inhabit yahoo chat. I just finally logged onto chat and who got there first but the raging hordes of porn bots. I love being in a full chat room with only 8 real people!

Comment by Will — January 30, 2007 #
I have been a Yahoo! Chat user since the week it was first available to the public. I have seen many advancements to the technologies that make it possible over the years and I have always praised Yahoo! for continuing the free speech philosphy that it has afforded the masses around the globe through the use of the software. Yes I do actually understand the issues Yahoo! has faced in such countries as China and other places regarding free speech and keeping your vows to the users.

Being a network admin for several small networks and having some experience in Visual Basic and .Net technologies myself I have given much thought to the methods by which Yahoo can clean up the chatrooms from all the unwanted garbage that has poluted them over the years.

Being an Amateur Radio Operator and frequently getting the opportunity to share with new freinds the major differences between Ham Radio and Citizens Band Radio it occurs to me that If you really wish to clean up chat and make it fun for the users again? You have to allow the users more control over cleaning it up themselves.

Now certainly this does not mean give the users the ability to take accounts away from others, but here are just a few thoughts I have about it to make it possible for the users to do what you would find or have found to be nearly impossible (Not to mention the administration cost will be put in check in the process).

Give users the ability to use a “shared global ignore list” based on the way email spam filters work. With an overide option at the local level so the chat user can un ignore anyone of thier friends that might be added to the list by another user of the shared global list.

User participation in the shared global list should be voluntary, in this fashion the users can self police the rooms of the less than desireable usernames that arent wanted by most users.

This will also provide for some incentive for users to behave themselves while using chat so as to not automatically be ignored by new users who use the global ignore list when they join the service.

This of course would provide invaluable data as to managing trends in the chat rooms for advertising purposes and managing other aspects of the service as well (such as unauthorized use of usernames and bandwidth management).

Of course this is something that will be done eventually either by Yahoo! or by the the competitors, of course if you would prefer to simply shut down the service? With over 4 million users that would be a considerable amount of advertizing revenue you would have to make up for elsewhere so that really isn’t an option and we both know it.

Let the people speak as to who should never be heard in the first place and there will finally be a system of checks and balances in place for the users to use the service the way it was intended, rather than being abused the way it is now.

I would be happy to discuss this further should you have any questions about my ideas for a solution. You have my email address.

Frosty

Comment by Frosty — January 30, 2007 #
well i like to say job well done on patching that room booter its just the 1st step now it time to stop all them people from using them mass illy bot programs they use in the rooms sometimes they will lock a rooms for days now if you can take out the source http://www.romanware.com which sales them programs to do damage to the chat rooms.

Comment by john m — January 30, 2007 #
Bravo Frosty! a well thought out, sensible plan. Now Yahoo, will you consider it, or something else like it? Or will you just continue to bury your head in the sand and hope the porn bots and hackers miraculously disappear?

Comment by Will — January 30, 2007 #
Just to let everyone know, Yahoo has indeed patched the room exploit. =) Happy chatting everyone.

Comment by Venom — January 30, 2007 #
Really yahoo messanger has become less and less important to me ever since we lost the ability to make our own chat rooms. It is really just a back up for me now.

Comment by Ed — January 30, 2007 #
Yes, the room boot exploit was finally patched as of today. Thank you to the Yahoo! staff for making it happen and meeting the deadline before I was prepared to make it public (which I would’ve done within 48 hours of the deadline not being met).

Now your users can actually enjoy your service and chat without all the headaches.

Regards,
Adam [Torseq Technologies]

Comment by Adam [Torseq Technologies] — January 30, 2007 #
Dear Yahoo,

I’m so happy that the room boot been patched. But yet i still see people booting me easy, I tried emailing yahoo and recieved an automated respond telling me to set up my preferences (which didn’t really help at all).

I think no matter what we do with the preferences, script still get send to the victims(me and other chatters) and we either end up getting disconnected or PC’s being damaged.

I don’t really use Yahoo Messenger much till the JAVA Based Chat was stopped, this is the most and secure to use when people are booting the room. JAVA and CHAT2.0 were the best connections for chatting but I don’t understand why they were taken down. I was very disappointed when this went all down the drain.

Also after years of chatting I’ve noticed that them so called pornbots have risen rapidly. Sometimes this pornbots will be sending links to the room and I ended up clicking the link which I have no intention at all. Them pornographic bots should also be taken care off as priorities too.

I didn’t mind some people who stole my names who used cracker programs but only wished being connected in chat for as long as I want without any disruptions from kids/adults who uses them booter programs.

Please Yahoo, bring back the JAVA & Chat2.0 in the Yahoo Chat home page.

Yours sincerely,
Dave (A Yahoo Chat Junkie)

Comment by dave — January 31, 2007 #
P.S.

I forgot to mention that some Yahoo Staffs ( They hang usually in “Game Rooms”.) were giving information on some “original names created by us long time ago”, which we used in chat rooms. Those I created dating back in 2002 and 2003 were all taken from me.

I wasn’t keylogged or have virus in my brand new PC and my password are very hard to crack as i uses ascii codes intead of normal letters.

People are stealing Yahoo names and sold for money so I suggest this get looked up as well, please.

Thanks.

Comment by dave — January 31, 2007 #
Hey Yahoo Team!

please remove the Hackers Lounge’s from the room lists. These sort of rooms involve illegal chat and invade peoples privacy.

Why have a Hackers Lounge in the first place? is all you see when you go in there is people exploiting you or your system. These rooms are bad news. Also it makes people make Hacker ID’s as its also provoking alot of online hackers. I know the rooms state they are monitored 24 hours a day but i dont think they are. If the rooms was monitored there would be Operators in all rooms like Microsoft MSN used to have.

I really think you need to put a end to all this nonsense in the chatrooms. Its not doing you no favours.

its not just you that these problems are layed upon its your Advertisers too. I remember when you lost a Advertiser due to Webcam Privacy issues.

Also before i set off.. Thank You for patching that room exploit Torseq Tech posted to you. I think he did it the right way and not going public with it straight away unlike some people they go to these security sites and put them there public right away without contacting you first. Within hours its allover Google News so that dont do you any favours at all.

I would also like to bring up the Stealth Privacy Issue. Buddy Spy lets users check if you are online or not and also did check if you was in rooms or if your Webcam is on. I really think you need to try your best effort to protect people from these sorts of programs.

and finally you should limit the number of Yahoo users a IP Address is allowed to login to the Yahoo Servers. This will totally make your servers un-conjested and is the BEST idea i have come up with.

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 31, 2007 #
1 more thing. Vista is Final now and is in Stores near you so please hurry up and make a new release to support the Yacs in the chatrooms. This is a current issue which will effect just under 40% of users. They wont be able to use yacs in chat until you officially support it. You could atleast fix the yacs sometim i got my Vista Premium coming today and i wont be able to use voice in chat for a long time.

please do this yahoo team. I want to talk to my friends.

Comment by Mr Gordon — January 31, 2007 #
Dear Yahoo ,

Mr Gordon is right Hackers’ Lounge should be removed I see many people sharing credit card details there which obviously don’t belong to them. As one of the so called hacker said they were stealing them through IRC to share in Hackers’ Lounge or sell their infos illegally or trade for Yahoo old accounts(which some people refer to as illegal names).

As mentioned to my previous post it would be nice to JAVA & CHAT2.0 back , as not so many people prefer to install the messenger. Most of the time people that uses JAVA & CHAT2.0 are the people who work at the offices.

Since I think money is the issue here I have no problem buying a Yahoo Private Servers or Logins for Yahoo Messenger which will “not” be touched by booters. But if I’ll be paying for it , has to be a one off payment and also be able to use servers or logins to any PC’s (make a limit of how many accounts can be use to login for it)

Thanks.

Yours Sincerely ,

Dave (A Yahoo Chat Junkie)

Comment by dave — January 31, 2007 #
As for Privacy , I noticed people can add anybody to their list without the person knowing. There are many programs that can do this or do it manually.

To add someone manually while the person is offline all you have to do is create an alias name to your subprofile and add the victim with that very same alias but before they get the chance to deny it , just delete the alias that was used to add.

The deny will not be sent because it was deleted or their name will be in the main account.

Comment by dave — January 31, 2007 #
I think yahoo team take time out look all accounts been made for bots for booters and porn bots and so on why people use other program such as thrid party chat cleints (bigger iggy bin) and (better spam protection) ! Also protects users from annoying vulnerability !! Idea would be allow users have a choice be in protected rooms or unprotected rooms .I think all this got out hand and service was not made for this at all even if it is free! With new vista messenger coming out how long do think it be before that need fixed becuase of all these problems not be fixed ?All asking is Fix these problems so people don’t want user booters and see porn bot goto a room and talk to real people and not waste there time with spam and booters! (also free play on)Like game sever use anti cheat bust the cheaters why could yahoo not come up something help protect there servers from people try exploited yahoo messenger servers !Then ignore can be use people that are down right rube user choose not talk to .

Comment by Mark — January 31, 2007 #
Well it’s good to hear this room boot/large exploit issue has been fixed. However (and not suprising I might add), you can still be booted with the other X # of exploits that are out there, including the generic “throw tons of yahoo chat packets at user “. When are you guys going to finally address that one? I don’t even care about the chat rooms even, I mean screw it I can go back to IRC and chat still (still superior too, imho) and same goes for using icq or google or something else for IM if I have to. But its possible to still get booted even without being in a chat room at all–just having ypager logged in or in a pm, you can get booted still with the existing exploits. Why not work on fixing those first before adding new features? Did you guys study under Bill Gates? Hey let’s add tons of new features and interconnectivity and screw the security–we’ll deal with that later. Well thats fine if you have a product that’s in it’s infancy, but you IM product has been around how long now? Yet you still have these flaws. I mean who in the hell is calling the shots there? Someone that’s a flunkie or??? Granted it’s a free product (ty), as are your chat rooms. However, you do tout msgr as a means to connect with people (friends, family) as well as even perhaps a special someone, including on yahoo personals (which btw is NOT free). What incentive do people have to pay yahoo to meet/talk with someone on yahoo personals for example with a IM product that can be booted so easily ? Little I’d say and it’s a good thing you guys weren’t charging this whole time for ypager and/or chat, b/c you’d have gone out of business long long ago rofl. You have Y360 and personals though–surely that is incentive enough to finally fix the exploits? I don’t believe that they can’t be fixed either, not for one minute. It’s your crappy protocol that people are using to send 1000’s of packets to someones yahoo id per second or whatever the discrete unit of time is. What are the chances that any one user will EVER get 10000’s of data (pm’s, room invites, buzzes, conf invites, etc. etc) redirected (by you) to their yahoo id (which you have and keep track of) in any small unit of time? none that’s what. So fix it, or lose it. It’s as easy as that (assuming you don’t want to). B/C there’s always someone else that can come along and show you guys how to do it right. Apply a pure KISS approach–that works for a lot of things esp. programming.

Now, what are the chances that anyone will actually take me seriously without doing what Adam did and threaten to give yahoo tons and tons of bad publicity? *ponders*

P.S. You guys have made an argument before that if you DID charge for ypager/chat, you would be open to lawsuit. Well guess what, lol, you STILL got sued didn’t you? And it can happen again (or at the very least tons of bad publicity hahahaha)

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — January 31, 2007 #
I think yous need to change it back in your codeing in yahoo messenger whan you turn pms off you can see others typeing in chat most ppl dont like how yous have it now whan you turn your pms off you cant see users text in chat 7.0.2.120 and down are fine as you can turn pms off to enyone whos not on your list and you can see users type in chat rooms as for if you go to 7.5 and up if you turn your pms off and you cant see tham typeing enyone but whos on your friends list alot of ppl dont like this also me as well coz that means you have to keep your pms open and you get bots pming you and so on its annoing can yous reless a new yahoo messenger 8.1 and fix it please and thanks and eny newer builds other than that things are fine well the room loader no one likes as well but i dont see yous removeing that but the pms yous need to fix as its relly a pain

Comment by zombie — February 1, 2007 #
the ream over at yahoo yous can also look in to some times you enter a room it dose not allways work and some times whan the room loader is fished you hit the enter butten it dose not allways take you in to chat you have to wait for a long time some times or sign off messenger and close it and try doin it agan hopein it works also to change to a diff room its some times slow ———— so i dont have to make a 3ed post i figer i will post this here i think yous do need to clean up alot of your codeing so its less laggin for some ppl as yous have to think of ppl on slower pcs thay have problams all the time and the more and more yous keep adding its more truble on ppls pcs also with the more yous add in your codeing its more laggin on ppls pcs with if there on xp and a slow pc with not alot of ram or if there on dial up or might be on windows 98 yous need to think more on ppl like that or who have not as fast motherbored theres meny things i can think of most ppl dont care for alot of the stuff yous have add it most like just comein on chat with a friend or so and go in chat and chat with out it laggin see back in 6.0 that was grate and also 5.6 coz it worked good on ppls pcs and ppl still use tham still coz thay can sign on and chat with there friends and go in a room and it dose not lagg there pc as now yous keep addin more things and the installers your up to 9 MB or something befor it was way less yous need to go thow your codeing and bring it down and change some things or remove things clean up the codeing so ppl will update to newer builds and injoy it also as i sayed in my last post about the pms you turn tham off than go in a room and you cant see users typein only if there on your list yous need to fix that coz ppl dont like it

Comment by zombie — February 1, 2007 #
Think point of all this is it out hand.spam and porn bots ,booters,name cracker,lag programs and so on.Over all point is yahoo took better server away like chat2 and java chat now left with one got most mess of them all.There stuff need fixed asp yahoo knows about it alot people told them time and time again ask them fix it .Time look at thing little here room boot is gone rooms seem be filling up little more !If rest this was fixed chat would be fun again.Guess point is when gone to chat goto talk real people or make freinds not finding programs help block spam and boot codes flood the yahoo servers!Over 50 bot you got ip ban most people just change ther ip and load room any way more them 50 bots these are people making problem on yahoo becuase yahoo server allow this stuff be ran on there servers given them power over all other chaters.I seem think yahoo need stop with new builds of messenger and put time in there server and fix these things thrid party chat cleints have seem stop alot this ! becuase there made for that protection .messenger alone is weak all these tool people use it easy for yahoo messenger be booted off yahoo when it should be hard to boot yahoo this your server and your program !this also why people use Ytunnel and programs like that protect them self and older version of yahoo messenger most boot code are made for new builds !Guess asking yahoo look at what gone on with there server and messenger and turn this around so people want to come and chat and so on.Yahoo has good idea’s but need look at protecting the users to more new stuff add more problem are gone come with it fix them while there small before they get out of control .also like see page made so users would know server gone down or work being done so users be able to know what going on not be in the dark for hours at a time

Thank yahoo and messenger blog

Comment by Mark — February 1, 2007 #
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that there has not been one comment from Sarah or any other Administrator from Yahoo since
January 23? The problem with signing in to chat rooms may have been resolved???…. now how about working on STAYING in that chat room? Instead of adding all the new “wonderful features” why not fix what is wrong with the original?? Why would anyone be foolish enough to uncheck that box in yahoo preferences that allows every Tom, Dick and Harry… every porn bot and every BOOTER to IM you just so you can see everyone’s type in that chat room.

Comment by Janice — February 1, 2007 #
“Why would anyone be foolish enough to uncheck that box in yahoo preferences that allows every Tom, Dick and Harry… every porn bot and every BOOTER to IM you just so you can see everyone’s type in that chat room.”

I set mine in preferences to ignore anyone not on your friends list long ago. It doesn’t matter. You can still be disconnected with the exploits still out there, whether it be in a chat room or sitting in a pm with a friend, or just having ypager logged in. It happened to me just a week ago. A friend on my list pm’d me, we chatted for about 15 mins or so then *poof* disconnected. Sign back in, talked for about 5 or 10 mins, then a bit later *poof* again. I happen to know at least one of these times was a boot and not a problem with yahoo or my connection (which is cable), and I had been in a chat room just before this. Locking it to the friends list and setting it to ignore invitations, etc. helps only very slightly to prevent the simplest of these exploits from getting you (pm bombs for example). But you can still be disconnected no matter how much you lock it down. If someone with a super fast upstream sends enough packets to your yahoo id in a short amount of time and you can’t ack them fast enough yahoo happily cuts your plug lol. How lame. Again, what is the chance that any normal user will EVER get 1000’s of ymsg packets in the form of pm’s, various invitations, buzzes, etc., sent to their yahoo id in a very short timespan, under normal usage conditions?!?! NONE that’s what (perhaps webcam/voice data should be exluced–granted I don’t know a ton about how they that works). If you have someone on your ignore list or you have your prefs set to ignore everyone not on your list, yahoo’s end should be taking extra packets and bandwidth and throwing it into the bit bucket, not trying to send it back to you.
Here’s another hilarious thing they’ll tell you if you report abuse or harassment in a chat room – to “use your ignore feature” hahaha. They happily forget to tell you though that they have exploits that allow people to circumvent the ignore feature (e.g. voice chat in a chat room), which can render it useless. They forget to tell you about the exploits in the chat room which allow people to continue using the mic/voice chat well beyond the time they are supposed to be alloted–that doesn’t make chatting voice much fun when you have a room with 1 or 2 idiots that want to play yahoo uber elite god b/c they found some program that takes advantage of an exploit.
Again all this could be overlooked a lot more if this was a relatively new product. But it’s not, it’s been around for years now. And the curious thing regarding the chat is, they had an earlier protocol for chat (YCHT) which was much more boot-proof and they got RID OF IT !!! I mean wtf over??? Why on god’s green earth couldn’t you have YCHT live happily in the same server side program(s)/scripts along with ymsg, and serve chat only, with the other msgr features using the newer protocols?

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — February 1, 2007 #
tnx for addressing the problems.:)

Comment by southtxlatindiva — February 2, 2007 #
Dear Yahoo ,

It seem to me that Yahoo! Inc itself can’t protect each individual here. Isn’t that breaking the term of protection? Chatters PC’s do sometimes get damage from this so called booters/laggers.

Laggers is one of the hard hitting program that can damage PC’s. Why? Because if you can’t iggy the lagger bot on time it will lock you screen totally which you end up rebooting your system (you cannot do the ctrl+alt+del so you have no choice but to push the power button which is not really advisable to do).

Yahoo! Inc is not really doing much to protect chatters to be honest. Many incidents been reported regarding booters/hackers/crackers and Yahoo’s answer to it , is the automated respond to make sure you iggy anyone who is not in your list.

Where is the sense of security in that? Obviously Yahoo failed for taking importance of each users who are victims of this unsecured chat services you guys’ providing!

JAVA & CHAT2.0 are the ONLY servers that can only protect us from booters and they were taken down with NO reason at all.

Also some Yahoo! Inc Staffs who were hanging in the Games room needed to be investigated for giving information on some Yahoo Account names.

Yours Sincerely,

Dave (A Yahoo Chat Junkie)

Comment by dave — February 2, 2007 #
When I have my firewall enabled the boots are useless against me but the iggy bots and laggers still hit….The iggy bots are the biggest problem on Yahoo! as far as I’m concerned. Everyone goes to blame Yahoo! when they get booted, everyone I have ever seen get booted with a mass im flooder got booted because their settings were wrong…the bling bling and the knock knock you hear when someone is getting booted is a sure sign their stuff is set up wrong and a good firewall stops the D/C and for those using Y’Tunnel…you are way easier to boot than just using Yahoo! Messenger especially with a D/C (disconnect) booter, unless you have a good firewall too…most of the problems we all get from being booted is from our own doing, whether it be a certain client we use or the settings we use with them, no need to blame Yahoo! for things we can stop and solve ourselves…Happy Chatting and get yourselves a firewall you can work to your advantage….
P.S…stored im’s will come back to boot too…lol

Comment by polar — February 3, 2007 #
Its so frustrating.. chat used to be great.
Now you can’t get into rooms.
You miss out on lots and lots of messages
Always more porn bots than people in the rooms
I wish they would fix it.. it just gets slower and slower and more rubish every day..

Comment by Fred — February 3, 2007 #
lol Fred your very wrong about your saying there ! room boot before it was patch would not matter how your setting were set !2nd off yahoo can be d/c even with firewall lol I know someone can show how nasty yahoo is alone! Your saying setting lol take you must still be on older yahoo version what yahoo being getting rid of soon !Like version ignore every one not on list any still see text in the room most booter still made for newer yahoo not older version !You leave out alot info when talking about setting being wrong tell you i bet couple people prove your wrong about yahoo alone being so not able to boot ! To me you look on website about yahoo nasty bug and problem not been fix yet with sever side and messenger it self !Im sure with any those hit yahoo messenger even with firewall still open you to being booted or more! egouth said ….

Yahoo know of this stuff they have to can’t tell me they have no idea .over years recived many letter,emails,phone or whatever.Sad part is yahoo is not small or new to internet or online world think they come up something fix all these !Even if on Yahoo hack day lmao .spam on yahoo and letting it go on to point enter a room and thats all there are is spam bots .most people come to yahoo have no idea about setting or firewalls or thrid party cleints so there thing no to user freindly some these link in yahoo chat to someone did not know any better could open there name be cracked or virus sent to them what your antivirus would not have fix to yet it been done !So asking yahoo to fix problems is not ask to much ychat sever seem protect chatters alot more but took that away and then was chat2 what little better what yahoo use now not much .yahoo should protect users I think it open them up get more users want use there stuff not go on bad stuff they all know about !

Comment by Mark — February 3, 2007 #
you guys are so stupid it is so dangerous to talk in a chatroom TRUST ME I KNOW MY DAD WORKS WITH PEOPLE LIKE YOU GUYS NOT ONLY DOES IT RECK YOUR COMPUTER BUT IF YOU MEET THE WRONG PERSON IT CAN RECK YOUR LIFE SO DONT BE STUPID AND SATY AWAY FROM ANY MESSAGER SYSTEM!

Comment by lynn — February 3, 2007 #
Who on yahoo clicks links in chat rooms or im’s from people you don’t somewhat know? Somewhere there has to be Common Sense and if people don’t have it then they will fall prey to hackers and booters etc., it’s not like there isn’t a wealth of information on things not to do on Yahoo! accepting files on Yahoo! MSN or anywhere is just stupid unless you know the person sending and even stupider if you don’t run an updated virus scanner anyway…when you get to a link that has a Yahoo! account login page eg. (yahoo photos and the url in your browser isn’t a true Yahoo! url but a geocities or whatever then the lack of attention on the person clicking links is their own problem, not Yahoo’s)! When it comes to driving a car do you just hop in a car and go, Nooooooo…you get educated on the way the car works and all the rules that go along with driving then you learn how to drive…and the Add a friend is way out of control, someone finds someone that will actually talk to them and instantly they have to add them to their messenger list…>>>STUPID

Comment by polar — February 3, 2007 #
Your article is very informative and helped me further.

Thanks, David

Comment by davidvogt — February 3, 2007 #
“ourselves…Happy Chatting and get yourselves a firewall you can work to your advantage….”

The firewall will NOT protect you from the most tenacious of booters. Yahoo is still sending you all the data, it’s just getting blocked whether it be by an intelligent firewall, client or both. The problem with the generic boot is that it’s on yahoo’s end still just like the room booter exploit was. They shouldn’t be allowing data in the form of ymsg packets to your screen id and trying to send that much data in a short time span to you, and especially if its from a user that’s not on your friends list. If you so choose to ignore anyone not on your friends list (which if they are indeed your friends would not be trying to boot you), then there is no need to get data from some random bot ID’s that some idiot made up to send data to your screen name. And it doesn’t matter if its someone in a chat room or you are in a chat room. You can still be disconnected like this just talking in a pm, playing a game, listening to music, etc. just having msgr logged in and reading mail, you can be disconnected like this. Sure there are times it’s a legitimate issue with yahoo or your own connection, but yahoo has these exploits and for whatever reason have never fully addressed them. This is not rocket science either–these issues are 100% fully fixable.

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — February 3, 2007 #
to be honest. half of you people are complaining and trying to sound smart by explaining these things which you have no understanding of in the 1st place. ”booters” do not damage your pc, they simply flood you with messages until messenger closes and then reopens.
”laggers” cant easily be avoided by using yahoo lagg kill, a program made just for yahoo to get rid of the laggers. and as for the ‘poof’ of your im session, you were victem of the room boot exploit. your name was stuck in a chat room even after you signed out and someone booted the room it was in and it still sent the d/c packet to your id. simple as that. b4 you all try to detail the workings of yahoo chat try doing some research instead of just typing what you ”think”.

Comment by D — February 3, 2007 #
Ohhh “D”. You’re such the expert, lmao. So you’re saying that having to hard reboot your system after a lag isn’t harmful to it? That having to reboot using the power switch can cause no harm? Nothing I hate more than a hypocrite.Were YOU also not typing what YOU “think”? And where’s YOUR brilliant explanation? Your own comment quite frankly admits that you think you are above & beyond the knowledge and intelligence of practically everyone else here, yet you said nothing of any significant importance, and also completely failed to have any sort of intellectual “explanation” for anything whatsoever.

Comment by Daren R. — February 3, 2007 #
LOL ‘D’ while there two sides of boat here !Ones run the programs make the problems on yahoo!Other side are one don’t choose download alot crap just pretected them selfs .So simple thing is come up with the fix and yes yahoo need to do it !Crazy some these people think do this that or download other things gone make it better truth is it don’t becuase each build makes more problems and more they add with out other being fix gone lead to alot problems !Yahoo chat is great way to talk to people from your area or from other parts contry.Sorry if speak what i think i been on yahoo for years got sick download programs just stop stuff waste of computer space if ask me !So asking yahoo team in nice way to fix problems and inprove there service is all.

Comment by mark — February 3, 2007 #
“to be honest. half of you people are complaining and trying to sound smart by explaining these things which you have no understanding of in the 1st place. ‘’booters’’ do not damage your pc, they simply flood you with messages until messenger closes and then reopens”
Booters??!?!? The comment was regarding the voice chat lag which plenty of people have commented on before with the need to either ctrl-alt delete or hard-reset as it DOES consume tons of cpu time when its hitting and the natural reaction of a lot of people it to simply reboot even if it has to be a hard reboot. A lot of people have commented on this before. Can you blame them? I blame yahoo for allowing it for this length of time.

‘’laggers’’ cant easily be avoided by using yahoo lagg kill, a program made just for yahoo to get rid of the laggers.”

Laggers “cant” or “can” which is it? Perhaps you are confused lol. The whole point is this–even if a lagger or boot CAN be avoided by using special program(s), people should NOT HAVE TO DO THIS. It’s yahoo’s end and protocol that is F’d up.

“and as for the ‘poof’ of your im session, you were victem of the room boot exploit. your name was stuck in a chat room even after you signed out and someone booted the room it was in and it still sent the d/c packet to your id. simple as that. b4 you all try to detail the workings of yahoo chat try doing some research instead of just typing what you ‘’think’’”

Wow wrong again. You are such the expert lmao. You’re probably one of the lamers that think they’re uber LEET b/c you dl’d or were given one of the proggies that take advantage of the exploits. Look doofus, I had been in a chat room earlier but I had exited it long before that and left of my own accord tyvm. Stop assuming YOU know what the deal is as well. I know what the difference between the room boot when that was active and the generic boot is, and that’s not what happened. When the room booting was taking place I wasn’t even using ypager (which is yahoo’s product and my source of complaint), and before I started using that I simply logged off in disgust after the 2nd or 3rd boot whenever it was occuring. And I have been disconnected plenty of other times where I had never even gone into a chat room at all PLENTY (already said that). All my points are valid and quite accurate. One can be disconnected whether they are in a chat room or not, period. That’s a fact and the generic boot is what most boot programs these days exploit. There is no beneffical good reason NONE for yahoo to allow someone to arbitrarily attack someone and allow them to indirectly through yahoo send 1000’s of rogue ymsg packets to their ID especially when the person is not on their friends list. The only reason for this is malicious intent, PERIOD. END OF THE DISCUSSION. To anyone, I invite you to do the research yourself–that is exactly the bottom line as to how most of the effective boots/disconnects are still happening. And yes, yahoo needs to finally address that as they did with the room boot exploit. Oh and lets not forget the vaunted “ignore” feature–you ignore them and they come back with another ID anyway. Most of the time this is some nitwit on the same IP–easy to filter for that as well.

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — February 3, 2007 #
Some people actually need to be booted, like the mic hogs, kids in adult rooms and sh*t like that…and a firewall if adjusted to allow a certain amount of packets can be a bonus or it can be a headache…if you don’t know how to use it sometimes it’s better not to use it at all!

Comment by polar — February 3, 2007 #
Frustrated… Seems to me your one use these programs your self seems you know alot about them so if true make you know better then the rest huh ! Silly sit there act like yahoo dose not need fixed ! but at end your letter you agree with alot things been said! Far as lag booter been knowing to blow sound cards on few pc! flood booter yes can cuase pc lag out what make have reboot!Silly sit behind computer just so have power over someone else what point of exploit programs are !Yes i agree yahoo problem and yes did fix room boot now need to fix rest of the problems as see in alot ways were all saying like see it fixed ! So yahoo should do if have no idea how fix these things ask people like Adam [Torseq Technologies] seems to know alot of problem and pretty good idea on how to fix them ! There are few others out there be able to help about time all this stop or least slowed way down! as far as spam it way out control really who want see porn sites or gaming site! Things yahoo should protect users from and there not so how could you enjoy chat or messenger with all that gone on ? Really you can’t itz true pain in the rear !

Comment by mark — February 3, 2007 #
No mark I don’t use them uhhhh because I read up on it? I have never used any of these programs and actually the only reason I started researching and reading more about ANY of this crap was due to this room booting that was running ramped over a month or so. Just because I have read up on it does not mean I am participating oh brother. It was incremental and I simply had enough. Yahoo doesn’t respond to peoples questions or abuse reports unless it’s an automated form reply–that’s their bad not mine. “Silly sit there act like yahoo does not need fixed” huh???? Would you care to retranslate that into english please? Because that is the whole point–that it DOES need to be fixed my whole point and the reason for posting anything at all!!! And yes you can fix that generic boot issue and the other exploits as well and no, it won’t impact chat or msgr adversely, it will enhance it! All they have to do is follow through on what the end user wants, if someone wants everyone not on their list ignored, then there is no reason to get one single packet from anyone not on that list EVER. If someone wants to unlock it in their preferences or if yahoo wants to add additional security options to broaden that in a better managed way for roles or zones or whatever, great. But the way things are now open everyone up to being disconnected, whether it be in a chat room or not. They have taken steps to fix things yes and that’s certainly welcome, but it’s few and far between. And they’re too busy or interested in adding new features and interoperability I guess.
I can only speak for myself I suppose though. But if at the very least that disconnecting issue is not resolved before a lot longer, I’ll probably go to another IM product. Because they have had long enough to fix these things once and for all and all they have demonstrated in the past is a pattern of one step forward and two back.

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — February 3, 2007 #
“Some people actually need to be booted, like the mic hogs, kids in adult rooms and sh*t like that…and a firewall if adjusted to allow a certain amount of packets can be a bonus or it can be a headache…if you don’t know how to use it sometimes it’s better not to use it at all!”

Yeah thats part of what I was talking about. There are people that DO abuse the mic, but everyone is supposed to be alloted a certain amount of time. If nobody else is keyed up to talk, they’re allowed to continue. You’re supposed to have an ignore feature if you don’t want to hear the abuser or fell someone has gone on too long. But they have exploits that allow people to stay on the mic well over their alloted time and even near indefinetely and to remove your ignore as well.

As for the firewall, yes it might seem like you could limit the # of packets or bandwidth you are getting and that would help, but really it doesn’t The problem is yahoo is still allowing it through, the firewall or client just blocks it. That fact that yahoo allows it through at all is the problem–that’s what booters exploit. You can set your firewall to block literally EVERYTHING in fact (total lockdown both incomming and outgoing), and if someone with a booter and enough bots and/or a super fast upstream types your yahoo id into their little program you are going to be disconnected regardless because they are sending packets to your yahoo id and yahoo in their infinite stupidity sends it to back to you thinking you want it (as if anybody needs 1000’s of packets per second under normal IM usage conditions). In other words, they use yahoo as a proxy to attack your ID–the fact is yahoo will try to send it back to you, whether or not that person sending the data is on your friends list matters not. And if you get too many packets in a short amount of time you get disconnected, firewall or not it doesn’t matter. That is an inherrent flaw. Again, there is no reason at all for: (a) someone to get 1000’s of packets per second from someone under normal usage conditions (e.g. yahoo pager simply logged in or someone is sitting in a pm, on yahoo 360, personals, etc.) and (b) no reason for someone to be getting ANY packets let alone 1000’s per second from someone not on their friends list. At the very least they need to implement group security or broaden that and take additional data and throw it into the bit bucket. I’m telling you, I work in IT myself and this is very fixable. And if it means breaking the 3rd party clients to improve ypager and their server side programs, well IMHO tough!

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — February 3, 2007 #
Mic Hogs is not really the biggest problem. Those who hog the mic a simple remedy will do “IGNORE!”.

Booters/Laggers/Crackers/Hackers are the main thing that Yahoo! Inc need to focus on if they’re not fix , meaning we’re chatting “unsecurely” which they’re suppose to be providing!

Yahoo! Chat is free , think again! ( I DON’T THINK SO! why? Without us chatters their “adverts” on their websites/webcams/messenger/chatrooms WILL BE WORTHLESS).

JAVA & CHAT2.0 is what we really needed back to have good chat connection! They can at least protect us from booters and so on with them servers.

Using booters to boot other chatter who deserve it , is really contradicting yourself. At the first place that’s Yahoo! Inc job to protect us and penalize the abusers!

Comment by dave — February 4, 2007 #
To simply ignore someone doesn’t do a thing for them hearing you or anyone else, it doesn’t send them to another room or anything. It just makes it so you can’t hear them. Where have you been for the past 3 years anyway, the dam iggy bots are getting worse as time goes on. Every room on Yahoo! is either full of booters or iggy bots and I see more iggy bots than booters, maybe it is just because I apparently don’t get booted as much as the rest of you people and get to stick around and see the ignore bots. Try ignoring 200+ bots off voice and still think you are going to key up over the one running the bots is as silly as ignoring someone so they can’t hear you…!

Comment by polar — February 4, 2007 #
maybe we are handling it all wrong here as bloggers, yahoo takes everything away we like, maybe we should start “liking” yahoo messenger

Comment by double.dutch_trouble — February 4, 2007 #
Once upon a time, long long ago, the yahoo chat ‘help’ rooms were protected against the booters and bots and laggers etc. because, well face it, those of us that are regs donated our time and effort to try and ‘help’ the less knowledgeable.

And some still are ie; freecreed, and a few others. I, myself have almost given up. If it were’nt for the ‘help’ rooms 75% of the ‘chatters’ would be pulling their hair out or committing chat suicide.

I think Yahoo should bring back the proction so we can get on with our work.

( not trying to be selfish, but its got to start somewhere, and i cant think of a better place.

Comment by So0o0_Confused — February 4, 2007 #
Well, I know a little here and a little there.. not as much as some of you though. All I really got to say is when is Voice gonna wok in the chat room for Windows Vista WHEN i want a date, cause I cant go on like this I need my mic and I cant go back to Xp because this computer didnt come with it and i dont have a copy right now! FIX IT!

Comment by SeD — February 4, 2007 #
there is no voice in yahoo messenger for vista users… sign up here to be informed when it is released …. http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php

Comment by So0o0_Confused — February 4, 2007 #
maybe we are handling it all wrong here as bloggers, yahoo takes everything away we like, maybe we should start “liking” yahoo messenger

Comment by double.dutch_trouble — February 4

Do think poof problems well go away ? or do think they need be fixed ? if read term of service ,really they breaking couple there own rules they have set!

Comment by Mark — February 4, 2007 #
“maybe we are handling it all wrong here as bloggers, yahoo takes everything away we like, maybe we should start “liking” yahoo messenger”

Perhaps lol. And as already mentioned, they don’t even seem to fully adhere to their own tos rules, so why should anybody be suprised when end users break them by taking advantage of their exploits. I’ll use it still as long as they are willing to fix at least the booting/bot issue. And you know, it really makes sense–they have y360 now and tout msgr in yahoo personals even (which is not free if you want to contact someone). Not to mention that little chat feature still in there. One would certainly think they would want to do whatever it took to ensure that everyone didn’t have to turn to 3rd party clients for more security and bot/boot free chatting, when they could be using a secure msgr with it’s built in advertising.

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — February 4, 2007 #
[quote]And you know, it really makes sense–they have y360 now and tout msgr in yahoo personals even (which is not free if you want to contact someone).[/quote]

nationwide this only works for US , what about the rest of the Global?

so i wouldnt really say that , this making phonecalls free benefit everyone that uses messengers.

phonecall’s good for emergency but can we use emergency it for calling Yahoo! Inc HQ to report bots? not , right?

in the end this goes again to JAVA & CHAT2.0 issues , to combat against booters and so on.

do you think i like using third party chat clients? you’re wrong , what i really is the JAVA in http://chat.yahoo.com but no longer to its existence.

Dave (A Yahoo Chat Junkie)

Comment by dave — February 5, 2007 #
It’s not just Vista that doesn’t have voice anymore. Voice hasn’t been working for days now, and I’m on XP.

Comment by Daren — February 5, 2007 #
Well one would certainly think they would not want to restrict Y360 to just the U.S., just like they wouldn’t want to restrict msgr, chat, yahoo search and misc. other services they have to only the US. But the point is they have it and want to make $ off of it directly or indirectly, and yes forcing people to turn to the 3rd party clients due to the exploits makes no sense on their part. The 3rd party can be booted as well. Yes the ycht and chat 2 did a better job with the booting. Hey if they want to bring back ycht or chat 2 and use that to serve only text chat or something, great. Already mentioned that earlier–but regardless, they still have msgr with ymsg and have exploits that allow it to be booted. If they bring back ycht or chat2 you may have a more stable chat but msgr using ymsg can still be booted. They need to address these exploits on their end just like they had to address the room booting exploit to fully fix this thing. I dont think anybody really likes using the 3rd party alternatives. What the majority of people like is something that is relatively easy and trouble free, which msgr used to be. It’s the booting and bots that force people to turn to the 3rd party clients. So again, it just makes sense for them to fix things on their end server side and with msgr.

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — February 5, 2007 #
are u aware that there are people charging fees for ytunnel the program to address what u dont address ie spam booters porn bots 40 spaces in a room 37 porn bots yahoo sucks build a tunnel into it and stop gadging your penny a bot theres other ways to make money from adverts yahoo team are cheap and u have had 4 years to fix the main stream problems iggy button what a joke

Comment by woofgivemeanothercanofbeer — February 6, 2007 #
Get with it yahoo i agree with woof spam and bots have driven people out and away from yahoo! time to build your own ytunnel into the program its a disgrace YTav use it. Scotland Rooms Dont need 25 dollars for a tunnel download a third party chat client its free! Try the new (Ytav) Its no porn bots unbootable no spam and its free! If u have a problem finding it ask for cutefurry_scotsman in Scotland 3 Or Jaffa They have the web site together posts.

Comment by Aha Glen Again — February 6, 2007 #
Why don’t you just tell us where this YTav is? I’d like to compare it next to YMLite & YTK Pro

Comment by Daren — February 6, 2007 #
I agree with tav and woof. the porn bots are a joke.

yahoo needs to put its heed in a basin of cold water.

and also im sick of this http://www.gers character from room one coming in the rooms and trying to sell people used hi-tec trackies and ronson lighters…….he needs reprimanded

Comment by jamesrooney — February 6, 2007 #
They’ve had a LOT longer than 4 years to fix msgr and and boots/bots–that’s the pathetic part of it all.

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — February 7, 2007 #
Cracking program cheers this tav is a genius (Ytav) is Fantastic it has a windows vista look about it well done !

Comment by Harold Potter — February 7, 2007 #
eh any chance a getting ytav please

Comment by fartlikea_trooper — February 7, 2007 #
do a need to pay for it please send me the instructions thanks

Comment by fartlikea_trooper — February 7, 2007 #
Ive been using the Clyde Tunnel For years its better than Ytunnel Its faster to Dumbarton Rock .

Comment by woof — February 7, 2007 #
(YTav) Wow! program !thanks Ive used Y fink for years Acant fink where the link is for it!

Comment by Gary (yTav) — February 7, 2007 #
thanks for the ytav but do a need to format my computer before it will work

Comment by fartlikea_trooper — February 7, 2007 #
I dont need Y!Tav because i use Y!not and it is compatible with 20 club kingsize (anti-booter)

Comment by rooney — February 7, 2007 #
IM IN THE UDA SO I DONT GET BOOTED

Comment by june — February 7, 2007 #
Its still not working very good

Comment by Fred — February 8, 2007 #
Ok Y!tav is not free anymore there selling it in the pound shops around the uk

Comment by tavishes_wife — February 8, 2007 #
“IM IN THE UDA SO I DONT GET BOOTED”

I assume that’s USA ?
If you have never been booted be it on ypager or in a chat room, consider yourself lucky. If someone on a fast upstream wants you to be booted, you are going to be disconnected no matter what. Kudos to yahoo for that! :-\

Comment by Frustrated (still) ypager user (grrrrrr lol) — February 8, 2007 #
Hello all ,

For last few days I am facing a strange problem. I have installed Yahoo latest version and can chat easily , but whenever I join the Chat rooms my PC stucks and its CPU utilization goes to 100% and the only solution was to terminate the yahoo process. I thought some problem with my PC i checked it with 3 other PC of my friends and they have the same problem. The service provider are not listening to me as they thought it might be Yahoo servers error.aahhhhh. Stucked … can any body help me.
The other thing i noticed tht when i use some other IP scheme of other provider they dont have problem.Does it mean there is problem with the IP class of tht provider. I also discussed the Firewall option but they were sure its not firewall option.
Waiting waiting .

Comment by Adeel — February 9, 2007 #
a just bought Y!tav out of pc world says its only compatible with Woof messenger

Comment by woof — February 9, 2007 #
Y!tav comes with its own rooney bin where people from india can sit and have a laugh with rooney

Comment by woof — February 9, 2007 #
naw theres the new y!woof out that comes with a booter that automatically disconnects tav and you can have a laugh

Comment by rooney — February 9, 2007 #
NAW I USE Y!WOOF, YOU CAN TALK AND HAVE A LAUGH AND EVERYTIME TAV ENTERS HE GETS BOOTED

Comment by rooney — February 9, 2007 #
It seems every man and his dog has their own client these days. YTK looks like something I’ve seen several times in the past, well done. As for booting, speed only effects booting if you are sending alot of packets.. A 56k modem is more than enough to kick someone on say a 3mb connection.

Comment by Optikal — February 9, 2007 #
hi there folks im wondering how a can stop this booting thing would be great thanks if a got any feed back thanks,,,,

Comment by brown_sause — February 10, 2007 #
Why don’t you fix the problems in Yahoo chat. Get rid of the porn bots too! What’s the problem? You think we like going into chat rooms and have to read ‘hey guys i just squirted’. Sick.

Comment by doofus — February 11, 2007 #
hi yahoo fans im bringing out my latest program its called Y!tavshowcamcaught still working on it but will be posting the download page as soon as its ready have fun people

Comment by sticky_bum_tavish — February 11, 2007 #
Background:

I am a Yahoo! Member since when I could download entire Yahoo! from a Stanford FTP server. My profile indicates me as have joined in 03/28/1997, which makes it almost 10 years.

During this time, I’ve seen Yahoo! system go through many changes. The last good Messenger was around the 6.0 release cycle.

I have sent this message to John Dunning in the past, but I’ll post here as well as it seems like you, Sarah, are a more appropriate person for this discussion. I would be very interested in collaborating with Yahoo! with coming up solutions to these problems.

Hi John,

Based on your participation in the ydn, I would like to start a dialog with you on the next release of Yahoo! messenger main application. If you are not the correct person, perhaps you can suggest the right one.

I am a frequent user of Yahoo! Chat rooms, in particular Small Business:1, Programming:1 etc.

For quite some time, the automatic ignore feature based on an arbitrary threshold in a chatroom has not been working correctly. I believe it last worked in the 6.0-series release of the client. Rather than ignoring the offender, we erroneously get the “You cannot ignore yourself” modal dialog box popups.

Secondly, we are inundated with automated programs. The infamous ones start with the string aa1. At some rooms the ratio of bots to humans exceeds 1:1. Craigslist deals with this type of a problem with a “Flagging” feature, whereby if a posting attracts a strong negative sentiment, it is removed from the site automatically. It takes a lot of people to remove a posting. What would it take to implement a similar feature such as “flag as bot, spam, or scam” in the Yahoo! Messenger application?

What would it take to escalate scam complaints to http://www.ic3.gov where warranted? There is an abundance of attempts to scam US users by foreign nationals. Perhaps Yahoo! could take initiative in reducing that problem.

What really happens when “Report as spam” button is used and what would it take to implement it at chat room level as well?

Alternatively, we are all add these nuisance generating programs on our ignore list. The ignore list, as I understand it is stored on Yahoo! servers. Presumably, then it is possible to detect that a particular ID has been added to the ignore list by hundreds of people, and automatically disable the ID.

Please classify as feature or bug whether the fact that right-clicking a user in chat room to add to ignore list is just temporary vs. adding them to the ignore list from the Incoming Message window is permanent. If I want to ignore someone, I’d like to do so permanently regardless of point of origin.

In my testing, Vista breaks the voice feature of Messenger.

Also speaking of Vista, Messenger should detect it’s running on Vista and disable its custom theme, which looks awkward at best under Vista. That’s a minor concern, but a valid one nonetheless.

What would it take to make the Changelog available as part of messenger.yahoo.com site?

These are just a few of my questions to start with.

Thank you for your time,

Leonid S. Knyshov, CEO
Crashproof Solutions, LLC
http://www.crashproofsolutions.com
510-282-1008

Comment by Leonid S. Knyshov — February 11, 2007 #
“It seems every man and his dog has their own client these days. YTK looks like something I’ve seen several times in the past, well done. As for booting, speed only effects booting if you are sending alot of packets.. A 56k modem is more than enough to kick someone on say a 3mb connection.”
hello??? a lot of packets is what booters rely on–thats the problem. unless u are talking about specific faults in certain versions of msgr and/or someone that can be booted has pms open then sure that would make sense. some of those problems can be fixed client side, but someone locked up or using one of the 3rd parties, a lot of packets is what it takes, in a short amount of time and you cant do that on dial up–its yahoos blunder no matter how you look at it. the ignore list doesn’t work on their server to block packets there and it should.

Comment by to_yahell_with_this_all — February 11, 2007 #
Im removing yahoo today it has more vruses on it than Bernard Mathews turkey drummers. (Bird Flu)Im using the Old Tavs Program its Bullet proof & English Proof( Rooney came out on the mic last night hes a woman in a mans body)!! Yahoo is great fun keeps u on your toes Its full of ballet dancers.I luv the taran background on the Ytav amazing.

Comment by Yahoo Addicted — February 12, 2007 #
Dear Sarah ,

Yahoo Chat Room Lockers ?? Since Room Boot is class as DOS , isn’t Room Lockers a denial of service?? Can’t get in the chat rooms meaning we’re denied.

It clearly states in the chat room , “Find your most compatible mate. [Notification: We are currently recording IP addresses of all Yahoo! Chat users.]“.

Is Yahoo not detecting the amount of bots being used by the same IP address??

Sarah , this is the only request I’d say that everyone would agree with me onto. Please advice Yahoo! Inc about this so called Room Lockers (a program used to fill up the room with bots) , surely IP can be trace , the culprit will be caught and they will be dealt with.

Please deal with this issue a.s.a.p., Sarah.

Thank you.

Yours Sincerely ,

Dave (A Yahoo Chat Junkie)

Comment by dave — February 13, 2007 #
what can be done to remove BOTS form the chat rooms

reporting them as spam has had no efect on them

is yahoo gong to do anyhting about these ???????????

god it is about time all bots were removed !!!!

or is it to becom bot city on yahoo chat

Comment by ian fewster — February 13, 2007 #
Dear Sir, I am using a latest version of Yahoo messenger 8.1.0.239 , Sir I have a serices problem I have a full IP Range 203.82.53.0/24 when ever I connect with voice chat my system CPU utilization going to be 100 % and confrence box is shown but did’t connect We face this problem last 10 days , please help me in this regard because users are in trouble .

Kind Regards,

Ahmed Ali
System Admin
Micronet Taxila
92-300-5280151
92-300-8524981

Comment by Ahmad Ali — February 14, 2007 #
The disclaimer on a site that distributes booters, etc. is to clear them from any connection to the way people use their programs and the charges that could arise from the use of them. How about the people selling the programs, they are selling the programs to be used for the sole purpose of the programs discription(booting, lagging, mass ignore, etc) wouldn’t that nul the disclaimer

Comment by polar — February 16, 2007 #
Dear Yahoo,
I am another faithful yahoo user (8 year memeber) who is saddened that the chat issues never seem to be addressed or dealt with. The rooms are not fun or interesting with all the porn bots and booters. I would gladly pay for service if these issues could be addressed. Now the technical issues with chat are also getting worse, such as the chat client hanging and my cpu utilization is also going up to 100 percent? What is the deal with this. Also the room numbers never seem to change. There used to be a refresh button on messenger but I see thats gone and now my messenger goes off for no reason. Also the ignore people not on my mess. list is a joke because if its engaged and you go into a room you don’t see anyone typing. I know of many people that have left yahoo chat over the past 2 years because of the b.s. ( the taking down of creating rooms was a big mistake) I say again I’m sure many people would pay for chat if the service was better. These issues that have been ignored for YEARS, doesn’t make me want to try your phone service as yahoo’s track record seems weak on technical issues. PS what’s the point of recording IP addresses if nothing is done about chat abusers? I’m sure this post won’t be read by Sarah or anyone else in yahoo but I just had to vent some of my frustration…..thanx

Comment by L. Gunderson — February 16, 2007 #
i just bought me a labtop with windows vista-basic on it. i love to use the yazak client, but tryed as well yahelite and ymessanger., but not able to get Voice. im a chat junky and miss listening to my peeps, How will i get voice ????? anybody can HELP please

Comment by Silke — February 17, 2007 #
Interesting comments..

Comment by bambino — February 18, 2007 #
Silke for now I think windows vista is not voice supported as yet due to some incapability with the OS itself . I suggest you wait till Yahoo! make another version of messenger for vista.

Dave (A Yahoo Chat Junkie)

Comment by dave — February 18, 2007 #
Dear Sarah ,

I am glad everything is back to normal , the maintenance must be finished.

But anyway let’s get to the point is there chance that Yahoo! Inc will bring CHAT2 & YCHAT servers?
I miss the old JAVA for chatting , having this saves me space in my computer.

With the messenger alone I lost count of how many times I have been booted. Please advice Yahoo! Inc to bring back the old servers.

Thanks.

Yours Sincerely ,
Dave (A Yahoo Chat Junkie)

Comment by dave — February 18, 2007 #
PLesase can some one help fix this yahoo messenger? I have not been able to chat with my family pretty long now. I was using the normal version untill now and I have tried to install the new version but it will never complete. I don’t just know what to do next.

Comment by Stanley wash Hammond — February 19, 2007 #
Dave, thank you for the responde, so i guess in meantime, I AM LOST ;-((

Comment by Silke — February 20, 2007 #
You Yahoo! people are doing absolutely nothing to stop bots in the chat room. They send dirty messages to everyone and take the fun out of chatting. And even when I am not in chat room, they send me messages on my Yahoo! messenger out of no where. Do something. Already so many people have moved out of Yahoo! chat. It’s a shame and you yahoo! people are responsible for doing nothing about this menace.

Comment by user — February 21, 2007 #
They do nothing 2 stop the booting of their messenger product either lol. Talking with a friend just last night on a cell phone and disconnected TWICE. That fucking blows and pisses me off. This has happened too many times really. Screw the chat rooms, fix your god damned pos messnger product. If I have my settings in preferences to IGNORE ANYONE NOT ON MY LIST, then why on gods green god damned earth are you allowing these ymsg packets to come in and boot msgr ?!?!? Its a setting that does nothing to stop booting actually, and its deceptive. Yeah as for chat–whatever. You guys probably should just close it down–but you’re going to lose my business in the future probably, ivte talked 2 plenty of people around yahoo too and its always the same thing–people are fed up with the lack of security and attention to complaints. Its like you guys dont care–well thats fine since its a free DL. Guess what, so are the other msgrs too. Time to go download something other than yahell messy jar.

Comment by to_yahell_with_this_all — February 22, 2007 #
“Dear Sarah ,

I am glad everything is back to normal , the maintenance must be finished.

But anyway let’s get to the point is there chance that Yahoo! Inc will bring CHAT2 & YCHAT servers?
I miss the old JAVA for chatting , having this saves me space in my computer.

With the messenger alone I lost count of how many times I have been booted. Please advice Yahoo! Inc to bring back the old servers.”

Actually if they have any clue whatsoever they will:
1. Shut down the stupid chat rooms for good
2. Concentrate on fixing msgrs security issues so nobody trying to keep in touch with friends and family are booted.
3. Hope and pray that google stock goes down lol

Comment by to_yahell_with_this_all — February 22, 2007 #
Dear Yahoo, why are you broken? Must be a sad reflection of the programmers you have working for you. Have you thought of employing programmers that know how to code? Do you relize that most people that use your faulty, sloppy coded chat client have lost all respect for Yahoo…

Comment by Tommy — February 24, 2007 #
The information I found here was rather helpful. Thank you for this.

Comment by uomo — February 26, 2007 #
Yahoo Messenger chat rooms are very very poor. It’s almost at the point that I will not even attempt to enter an Ohio room.

Every time I attempt to enter a room that is full (which seems to be most of the time), your system hesitates, and hesitates, and hesitates, then closes the dialog box and makes me go through the whole process of selecting chat, selecting Ohio, and then scrolling all the way down to select the appropriate room. Your software needs to be updated to maintain the focus of that location if the room is full to facilitate subsequent attempts to enter.

Comment by Dave Statin — February 26, 2007 #
Dave Statin…are you crippled from the neck down, cause you sound like you have to hit the keys with a pencil in your mouth to join a room, better get a room buster program so you don’t hurt your neck if so…

Comment by polar — February 26, 2007 #
Someone is quick to remove some of my posts, why not apply some of that quick response time to helping some of these people that can’t help themselves. Maybe deleting a post of mine is easier than to at least give these people an explaination of why Yahoo! Chat is becoming what it is. Check out the disclaimer and reminder at the bottom of this page and tell me why Yahoo! can’t do anything about the bots that boot/ lagg/ iggy room voice or just fill rooms, to blow smoke up a persons bum will eventually come back as a fart smelling like burnt poop!

Comment by polar — February 27, 2007 #
Polar – Your post was removed because of the use of profanity in it. Please keep your comments clean. Thank you,

Sarah Bacon

Comment by Administrator — February 27, 2007 #
Thank you Sarah, my post prior to this was a little cleaner…since I have your attention, why can’t Yahoo! fix the bot problem? I remember an aquantance of mine from one of the many chat rooms I visit, said he sent Yahoo! a detailed description on how to bypass the proxies to gather the originating IP Address of the bot runners. Is it the proxy support that makes it harder to identify the people doing such things with the bots?

Comment by polar — February 27, 2007 #
Just out of curiousity…was my post that implicated a certain web site with a certain programmer removed for profanity or just because I was possibly directing people that might use the type of program to the site I mentioned. By all means, I do not advise anyone to download or use any program that might interfere with the way Yahoo! works…and…wouldn’t running these types of programs fall under the “interferring with public communications laws”?

Comment by polar — February 27, 2007 #
One time I ripped a phone out of the wall and threw it across the yard during a domestic dispute and was advised that if charged I could have done up to 15 years for interferring directly with public communications…Food For Thought!

Comment by polar — February 27, 2007 #
You have been signed out of Chat. If you want to sign in again, please join a room.(2/27/2007 11:25 PM)…looking like the room boot is back again! and on top of that I keep getting a Voice Error! Conference Does Not Exist!…You can run bots on people in a chat room to boot/ lagg/ mass ignore/ crack names (steal someones account) or hack someones computer free will and keep doing it on a daily basis but I get posts removed for spelling the “F” word. Am I missing something or does this all just not make sense…? The ones getting things removed should be the bot runners, and the people making the programs for them to ruin chat! Yahoo! is becoming “Big Business” and to have such a big business and leave the crucial part of it (the chat rooms) going the way they are is comparable to…lets say; Nascar running retreads instead of reliable Good Year Tires!

Comment by polar — February 27, 2007 #
Two weeks running (again) without being able to switch chatrooms in a timely manner.

The ability to switch from one chatroom to another quickly (as was the case before all the new bells and whistles were implemented) is absolutely CRUCIAL!

This is true as when entering certain chatrooms, one is met with a dozen or more “room flooding” programs that invariably freeze ones computer or kick one off tour servers.

I know these posts aren’t read by Yahoo. “Sarah Bacon’s” replies to any post are curiously worded like the form responses you get from Yahoo.

I read that technical support is available to Premium Members, but what I don’t understand is how they would expect anyone to make the switch from basic to Premium, when even if you paid for this service, the bugs would never be addressed.

That sound like a good business plan? I think the employees over at Yahoo ought to quit spending so much time out in the sand volleyball pit, and spend more time at their keyboards.

Follow this post, and notice that it won’t recieve a reply as to why it takes so long to sign into/switch chatrooms.

“The numbers next to the chatroom name tell you the number of chatters in the room”….Is it just me? Or has this feature also been broken the few weeks?

Comment by This Again — February 28, 2007 #
after a month sarah finally makes a post and it’s about removing a post for foul language?….Am I missing something. Sarah, faithful Yahoo chatters want some of these questions answered! If you won’t, why not come clean and say Yahoo does not care about yahoo chat. It doesn’t generate enough revenue to make it viable. Its become a Porn Space for chicks on the make. Yahoo would rather let women practise a form of prostitution on their site than let chatters chat. Yahoo has turned into a PIMP. Ps these porn bots don’t buy things. Are your advertisers aware of this?

Comment by L. Gunderson — February 28, 2007 #
“You have a problem with authority, Mr. Gunderson. You believe you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken.”

Comment by Mike F — February 28, 2007 #
is yahoo ever gonna be a pay site?

Comment by Jo Ann — February 28, 2007 #
Have you ever noticed that sometimes you join a room that only shows so many in the room…eg.25 but when you key up on the mic to talk you see like 200+ listeners or when using Yahelite there are so many in the room but the yah vox will show way more with similar names. All them voice bots are way worse than a porn bot, the porn bots are more than likely buying hosting from yahoo as the voice bots buy nothing but give the guy making them 10 bucks to ensure the program will be updated as Yahoo! patches them. All the rooms have bots that either boot/ lagg or mass ignore and when they can’t get any of that stuff to be affective they resort to stealing your Yahoo! Account. Then after they have your Yahoo! Account they can see all your friends and contacts along with any personal stuff you might have on that account. Don’t believe me…go to a country room with at least 30 people and start calling them hickabilly’s and constantly criticise the music, on the most part the music isn’t country anyway…TIP: make your passwords like !@#$1234%^&*5678 and don’t relate any account info. to your profile.

Comment by polar — February 28, 2007 #
I posted the name of the programmer selling the programs that mess with the rooms and my post was removed…Yahoo Account [email address removed] runs mass ignore and room scroller programs that are made by the programmer I posted. Lets see how long this post stays up!

Comment by polar — February 28, 2007 #
Polar – Please do not post another user’s personal information like email address. Thank you,

Sarah Bacon

Comment by Administrator — February 28, 2007 #
Sarah…the guy I posted is just one of many that ruin the chat experience for alot of people, I watched him scroll lagg and voice ignore 2 rooms within an hour the other night, and most of the people came back complaining of their computers slowing down and needing to reboot to overcome the lagg the program put on their system. Are you in a round about way saying this type of problem is one we are all going to have to deal with in our own way? BTW; most of the people affected were running Yahoo! Messenger with about 5 running YM! Lite.

Comment by polar — March 1, 2007 #
So…I am not allowed to use foul language or post a persons name or the web site people get the certain program from but anyone is allowed to join a chat room and flood it with bots that may or may not cause damage to another persons computer with the sole intent of doing so or take another persons account. The whole protect them and exploit us is sounding a little strange, if you aren’t going to do anything about the programs hows about fixing your messenger to help avoid such things.

Comment by polar — March 1, 2007 #
One thing I am figuring out….I have to break the laws of the blog page to get a response and yet have not gotten an answer. You apparently read the post to take the account info out and yet no answer…hmmm!
Is Yahoo! avoiding the people that are ruining Yahoo! for a reason I’m not understanding or is the money people pay for the programs becoming a revenue for Yahoo!?

Comment by polar — March 1, 2007 #
i do not understand why u go thur the havc of patching servers and programs but yet u allow under age kids in fight rooms and porn bot to sell sex

Comment by passeslilsis — March 3, 2007 #
i got to agree with passeslilsis post i do not understand why u go thur the havc of patching servers and programs but yet u allow under age kids in fight rooms and porn bot to sell sex,thats why i dont go in the chat rooms any more because of the bots have time time i can never get in the rooms because someone locks the room with there mass illy program.there is a short fix for this get rid of ymsg11 ymsg12 ymsg 13 your bootes and bots and laggers and spam bot programs uses ymsg12

Comment by john b — March 3, 2007 #
The kids parents should have the parental controls set to keep them away from adult content, why blame Yahoo! for something the parents should be looking out for. The only things the porn bots do is put a face on some lonely persons hand.
The bots that are meant to boot/ lagg or fill/iggy rooms can be fixed by getting a few of the programmers charged for creating and distributing malicious programs, but I heard that a few of the pay sites that distribute malicious programs are being run by Yahoo! employees. Pretty hard to beat them when they are working for ya’s.

Comment by polar — March 3, 2007 #
How embarrassing must it be for Yahoo representitives ( Sara never herea) to post answers to peoples questions on this blog site. No wonder they dont answer 99% of the questions. I think they must have as much knowledge as the Yahoo programmers that programmed the Yahoo chat program… a big fat zero!

Comment by Tommy — March 3, 2007 #
As far as the people go that are complaining about porn bot, maybe you want Yahoo to go the same way as MSN chat went. By all means, complain about how Yahoo chat wont work, but if you want yahoo chat to close down, keep bringing sex into it (porn bots) and you might eventually get your wish and get yahoo closed down…

Comment by Tommy — March 3, 2007 #
Ok… first off. ” scrolling ” does not lag out anyones pc but the person doing the ” scroll ”. i run yahoo messenger with ytk and i dont get booted, i dont see the b.s. ads. i dont get lagged. ur whining like a little kid that got his lollipop taken away. if you dont like it find somewhere else to ”hang” out. yahoo isnt going to fix any of this anytime soon and ur wasting our time of reading ur posts.
now. the only thing i see that needs addressing is yahoo’s voice server. half the time i cant get voice beit on yahoo messenger, yahelite, yazak.. only on ymlite because i can change the server the voice runs on. what are you(yahoo) gonna do about the fact that we cant get voice half the time.???

Comment by dave — March 5, 2007 #
i would also like to remark on tommys post about the porn bots. it is not going to stop… not until they make yahoo messenger a pay chat service, at which point i will no longer chat here. thats all ur whining is going to accomplish. everyone having to pay for chat. you gonna pay for my chat? didnt think so. i agree with passeslilsis 100%. why worry about the bots and crap when you got little jimmy being 13 finding yahoo on mommy and daddys pc and coming in and being subjected to verbal bashing.
yes, mostly it is on the parents behalf. but thats where the booters come in place. boot the kid out. problem solved. it does not harm the pc in anyway. merely floods them with im’s until their connection is broken from chat.
you all come on here moaning and groaning about that which you cannot change. and as for the taking of yahoo id’s. learn to make ur password better. ur credit card pin number isnt 123456 is it?why would anyother secret password you have be that
yahoo is only what you make of it. if you cant deal with bots and booters and laggers and are too damn stupid to protect urself, then you dont need to be here. there are plenty of free programs out there to protect/defend urself. use ur head and learn something other than whining

Comment by dave — March 5, 2007 #
Id Like to Say To Polar And Frustrated… You Are Both A couple of no life having punks. all you do is post bullshit here and think you know it all about everything on yahoo chat. i do run programs. and i do know what they do to a system. moron i write my own shit. boring bastards. why not just bitch n moan til they close down yahoo period eh? lamers. boohoo i got booted waaaaaaa i got lagged. deal with it. ya dont like it go somewhere else. stupid bastards

Comment by D — March 5, 2007 #
lmao@D….you run the programs and you write your own programs, I’m almost thinking you are a leach D and the programs you write are merely a program someone else made with your name on it. Where exactly do you “program runners” go when yahoo does a patch and your garbage programs don’t work, do you run and hide on msn tucking your bot needing tail between your legs? I’m yet to see anyone hang around after a patch that relies on programs as much as you do D and we all know you need the programs…Pussy! And Dave….will I see you in a room 2 or 3 tonight?teehee

Comment by polar — March 5, 2007 #
To: D
Reference: No life

D, if it comes down to people having no life, I think its best to assume that the ones that sit logged into Yahoo Chat eighteen hours a day, messing with other users chat sessions by way of rogue programs that boot or lag, are the people with true issues.

In your post, you state that you write your own “s**t”, and yet you have trouble composing even one simple, legible paragraph to this blog. So I doubt that you write any programming.

But if you do write these kinds of programs, as you yourself admit to, in an attempt to “boot” or “lag” other chat users, I would urge Yahoo Incorporated to pursue whatever legal action their lawyers may deem necessary to remove and prevent your ISP from allowing you to connect to their servers.

Comment by Duh? — March 5, 2007 #
Hey D, if you want to find me look in the fight rooms and bring your bot programs with you. I already have a program that’ll fix you iggy bot needing gimps and all your friends that support your weak attempts to be somebody by locking rooms and booting people because you got a script to D/C Yahoo! or Y! Tunnel. I’m still laughing my ass off at D thinking that making a program requires some special requirements, Hats off to “tutorial D” and his Yahoo! accomplishments. BTW D…get a life it’s free so your broke ass can even afford it “D”ummy!

Comment by polar — March 5, 2007 #
What I laugh at is you people making posts stating that these issues can’t be fixed. They can fix ALL of the booting and just about anything else with traffic shaping, qos rules and validating on users ignore options server side. Why they don’t do it, is pretty strange. It’s not rocket science ya know.

Sarah–care to explain why:
1. Yahoo allows malicious packets with your protocol to be directed at a user, when they have their preferences set to “ignore anyone not on my list”? If someone has their options explicitly set like this, why are you allowing these to go through? It makes absolutely no sense at all and really just wastes extra bandwidth. This is the first thing you need to address.

2. Why Yahoo continually responds with banter about using your “ignore feature” when you clearly know it doesn’t work like it should because of design flaws and holes in your protocol. You have exploits that allow someone on voice chat to have so called “voice dominance”. Why are you telling yahoo messenger users they can use their ignore feature when there are exploits out there that make it moot. Exploits like:
a. Voice dominance programs like “Super Vox” which make multiple connections to your voice chat servers (which btw is wasting more of your bandwidth)
b. You allow someone to connect with multiple “bot” (user id’), even from the same IP address.
c. You allow so called “voice laggers” which can run someones cpu usage hp high enough, that they may need to reboot their pc on occasion.

3. Yahoo continually claims you won’t charge for chat because you will “get sued”. Yahoo DID get sued and you were not charging then either. And if you do not fix the problems which allow people to be abused and exploited, then you may just be prone to another one whereby someone feels they were either exploited in some way, open to verbal/emotional abuse, and etc. That might sound far fetched, but you never know who is using your services and when big brother is watching.

Why don’t you take these things seriously? Do you want another lawsuit? You know it doesn’t matter if you are charging or not. You have services, you have advertising on your msgr product and portal, you encourage the use of the features within your products, so you had better pay better attention to security and peoples rights if you expect them to use your products. And sending out a form response all the time in response to abuse reports is hardly what can be called a proactive approach. If you would address the issues above and be more proactive, you wouldn’t have all this crap being posted on your blog.

And Sarah,it makes absolutely PERFECT SENSE to promote your product by making sure it is the one people want to use. That isn’t the case though is it? People turned to 3rd party alternatives like “yahelite”, “ymlite”, “ytk”. And why? Because ymsgr DOES NOT DELIVER IN THE AREA OF SECURITY. You can fix all of these issues server side, within you protocols, topography, and proper validation of network traffic. This is not rocket science and it’s all 100% possible. So why don’t you do it, and encourage people to turn away from the 3rd party programs and back to actually WANTING to use yahoo messenger? Where you can then advertise and get more revenue..now doesn’t make perfect sense? I know it does, which is probably why you will continue to do nothing ; )

Comment by YahooLearnedSecurityFromMicrosoft — March 7, 2007 #
Well Put YahooLearnedSecurityFromMicrosoft, but apparently some of the programers that make the malicious programs work for yahoo like neo apparently does and a few more and they also charge to get a program to screw up yahoo which employs them. It’s like they are beating themselves regardless.

Comment by polar — March 7, 2007 #
Please get rid of the bots and bring back yahoo chat to its previous glory. I am still waiting for u to do this.

Comment by VAMSI — March 7, 2007 #
Why don’t u put word verification when people sign into yahoo messenger. Even if people sign into chat and then let the bots take over, you can use word verification whenever you find suspicious behavior. and send them out.
you can also use pictures of common things like a dog, ball, and ask people to tell what they are to verify their identity. if they fail to, then u can ban them. please note that only strict measures will yield results.

Measures like, Notification: We are currently recording IP addresses of all Yahoo! Chat users.] will never work as spammers don’t care.

U can also add a line to your TOS that people indulging in spamming will be severely dealt with and their accounts will be closed right then( may be after a warning).

PLEASE DON’T LEAVE MESSENGER IN THIS STATE.
Y MESSENGER IS/WAS A PIONEER IN THE FIELD OF SOCIAL NETWORKING.

The flexibility which yahoo messenger gives for interacting with people cant be matched.

So please do something. We are waiting for you………….

Comment by VAMSI — March 8, 2007 #
Please do reply…

Comment by VAMSI — March 8, 2007 #
You didn’t use any swear words, good luck on a reply!

Comment by polar — March 8, 2007 #
“Well Put YahooLearnedSecurityFromMicrosoft, but apparently some of the programers that make the malicious programs work for yahoo like neo apparently does and a few more and they also charge to get a program to screw up yahoo which employs them. It’s like they are beating themselves regardless.”

The easy fix there is to get the upper management involved and make it public, and not just in blogs. That will create an escalation eventually. I have worked at companies where the IT staff were “helping” themselves to company benefits (to which they were not entitled), and misusing company resources like internet bandwidth or wasting company time. Sure it can go unchecked, but once the right people find out they are out the door. In some cases, immediately terminated. If what you say is indeed true, then one could also make an argument that user’s privacy has also been violated by yahoo itself through these employees. That’s grounds for a lawsuit right there.

Comment by YahooLearnedSecurityFromMicrosoft — March 8, 2007 #
The fixes are out before the patches are done, that is a sure sign someone inside yahoo is behind alot of the exploits that are out right now. Why are these programmers making malicious programs for educational purposes anyway.Type neo2remember in your yahoo tool bar and look what comes up…chat killer, super spy, hard boot life and all this is for malicious intent on yahoo servers.The programs are for sale! Once again on my yahoo tool bar I type “romanware downloads” and I see mr friendly, stb and deep freeze all 3 are programs for sale to be used in a malicous way against yahoo users on yahoo servers. That is like the local drug dealer buying a neon sign to put out front. I just wonder how deep the water runs through yahoo when I see stuff like that. Back to the neon sign, how long would it stay up unless the law were pot heads too.

Comment by Polar — March 8, 2007 #
I’m curoious now, don’t americans pay taxes on income and have to justify the income if so….how do these people claim the money they make for the programs they sell and how do they explain their source of income… probably not; I make programs to interfere with yahoo chat and the public communications between all users. and charge $10 each. $10 x 1000 = $10,000 in unclaimed income. Making illegal programs has to be an offense and if they lie about their source of income is fraud too. What is it going to take for yahoo to do something?

Comment by Polar — March 8, 2007 #
Many chat room users are getting more and more disgusted with the numerous advertising bots, or individuals and groups like “The Masters”, “Guardian Angels”, “Twisted Dragons”, “Hells Angels” and other online terrorist cult familys trying to pass themselves off as a “help family” when all they want is to practice locking up rooms, bootin at will, and causing general hate and disorder.
If Yahoo is serious about cleaning up its chat, they have to do somehting not only about the online child predators and stalkers, but really get a hold on the situation with thes advertising bots and the so called “Help Familys” cults runing amok in the rooms.

Comment by Joe Public — March 10, 2007 #
Everyone of those names posted should be banned along with the ip that posted them being traced back to the isp and further back to the client and action taken to prevent this kind of stuff from happening on a daily basis. We all chat for different reasons and the selection of rooms gives us plenty of options and no 1 single person should be allowed to ruin it for the rest of us. I’d like to come in here and say what a wonderful chat experience I had and how safe and secure yahoo is. Look at the posts here, not very positive and us that do post are trying to help not discourage anyone.

Comment by polar — March 10, 2007 #
Beleive me, Sarah has read YahooLearnedSecurityFromMicrosofts post but she hasnt the courage or brains to respond.

Comment by Tommy — March 10, 2007 #
I can only hope the decent Yahoo! Chatters keep out-numbering idiots like you tuffy!

Comment by polar — March 11, 2007 #
Whoa!!! Maybe all the programs are making it posible for Yahoo! to become a pay chat and all these idiots are doing is making it come faster. I know quite a few that said if yahoo goes to a pay chat they will just cancel their internet and live life as it was before yahoo, you know; hanging out with friends and family at the beach or whatever.

Comment by polar — March 11, 2007 #
We Mac users need chatroom access–what is so difficult about that? Can you not figure out how to do it?? Come on now, there are millions of Mac users who are being left out!

Comment by jeaniepie — March 12, 2007 #
Is getting into chat with messneger just hell for me or is everyone getting jerked around? I join a room and can’t get voice so I go to another room yet keep the font from the first room, no font but have voice from the second room and everyone in the chatters list. BTW; I’m using the new messenger and it doesn’t work any better than 7.0 did.

Comment by polar — March 13, 2007 #
Yahoo needs a raw messenger for people like me, I talk in a room and I type in a room, no instant messges or web cams. It’s just a waste of my time unchecking boxes in the preferences!

Comment by polar — March 13, 2007 #
looks like yahoo has closed its ALL chat rooms completely now so we will all have to get alife at long last

Comment by billy bong — March 14, 2007 #
Oh Man! Yahoo makes interactin with people so much easier, out here in real life I have to shave, get a haircut, wear decent clothes and keep my teeth in. Not to mention; I can be rich and drive a nice car on Yahoo!, and my sex appeal is so much higher since I posted a new pic of myself in some hunks body…teehee

Comment by polar — March 14, 2007 #
Hey,Guys,How is going? I need to ask Yahoo Development team that yesterday i was online on my Yahoo Messanger and 1 of my friend send me virus thru is ID. he was online too. He has sent me some wired laugage and smiles. he did send me virus on perpose. and his ID is [user ID removed]. Please tell me or give me some Virus file so i cant send him back. i am so mad & angry at him. Please guys let me know your answer and reply.thank you bye.

Comment by Juice123 — March 14, 2007 #
Oh well seems like the slowdown on chat is a permanent and deliberate thing. After many many months it couldn’t be anything else. I think yahoo has just decided we will all put up with painfuly slow servers and 50% packets missed. Lots of new stuff interfacing with chat, thats great but its a shame that they’ve decided to leave us a slow and annoying messenger chat. Probobly a money thing, adding all this stuff that will bring in the bucks and messenger probably doesn’t so they won’t spend money fixing or buying new servers and stuff.. too bad, it was fun well it lasted. Its a shame to see the community chatting about and investigating other chat services. Twas fun, but now we’re uneconomical and unwanted.

Comment by Fred — March 15, 2007 #
awww muffin! Group Hug for Fred & Juice123. lol

Comment by polar — March 15, 2007 #
A simple “we are fixing our stuff” would be all I’d need to hear as to why Yahoo! is so messed up, but instead we get nothing. Just hand the keys to Yahoo! over to neo and marcus and a few others and let them pull the plug, It is clear where these fools want to see Yahoo!….GONE! If not gone then why do they create programs to disconnect, lagg or fill rooms with bots that scroll lagg or mass ignore chatters? Yahoo! has to either “poop” or get off the pot. It’s getting old Yahoo! and so are the lame excuses you do give!

Comment by polar — March 16, 2007 #
What was once an entertaining service…is dead. Those who confuse free speech with a license to abuse and extort have won. It’s sad and it’s not necessarily Yahoo’s fault who, all credit to them, have provided, free to the user, the infrastructure and framework that once gave an oppurtunity for like minded people to meet. This meeting no longer takes place for users using this chat service. Thank you for the good times Yahoo…its time for me to go

Comment by David — March 16, 2007 #
It takes me forever and a day to join a chat room and the dam ignore bots are rolling in faster than my system can handle whick produces a lagg on my system and eventually crashes if I don’t reboot to break the connection. This is becoming a joke when the programs to ruin yahoo are working better than yahoo itself!

Comment by polar — March 16, 2007 #
Why don’t you respond Sarah, who do you talk to when you don’t get the answers from the staff? You ask for the manager and apparently that would be you, it says you are the product manager.

Comment by polar — March 16, 2007 #
Isnt this blog just typical of Yahoo, they start something then only half finish it! to funny. Then again, maybe no-one at Yahoo know the answers to the questions…

Comment by Tommy — March 18, 2007 #
Good thing sarah isn’t managing a meat market, we’d all have mad cow and bird flu and a few other things that come from poor managerial skills. I can use swear words and get a quick response in the form of the post being removed, but can’t get a response for a legitimate question like; why doesn’t yahoo stop the bots?

Comment by polar — March 18, 2007 #
8,1,0,244 is the newest version of messenger and it don’t work as good as STB does. Then again STB costs $10-$15 and is used for filling rooms and mass ignoring people. Same with supervox and it’s voice dominance feature work better than messenger. Like I said in an earlier post; Yahoo! might as well give marcus and neo the keys to Yahoo! since they are letting their programs dominate the chat anyway. Funny thing is when Yahoo! does a patch it is marcus and neo who have the fixes first.hmmmm….

Comment by polar — March 18, 2007 #
I’m not doing anything to Yahoo! but expressing my feelings and I’m getting punished while the ones wrecking it are footloose and fancy free doing what they do best….Being GIMPY-GEEKS with a bully complex!

Comment by polar — March 18, 2007 #
Once again a post is removed and no answer to a simple question.

Comment by polar — March 18, 2007 #
I used to like yahoo but I agree with many of the comments that it has gone downhill. My question is…are there any decent alternatives to yahoo chat?

Comment by drew — March 18, 2007 #
POO ON YOU! mic dom owns you all!

Comment by BLooD BaTH — March 18, 2007 #
ill answer all your questions that the retarded people at yahoo can not

Comment by BLooD BaTH — March 18, 2007 #
btw the new version of yahoo splits thier protocol version number with dots, not any longer commas, try to get it right.

Comment by BLooD BaTH — March 18, 2007 #
btw, thank the tards for FINALLY resolving thier 3 month lag issue. sometimes i think you idiots need to give me a job.

Comment by BLooD BaTH — March 18, 2007 #
shamalamadingding>- im OUT!

Comment by BLooD BaTH — March 18, 2007 #
shamalamadingdong* and whats up with the peace smilie? able to make a board, but not capible of putting in the new smilies that are 3 years old? DUH! the peace smilie is older then the user rooms topic…….blah

Comment by BLooD BaTH — March 18, 2007 #
When I click on My Computer/ Local Disk (C:)/ Program Files/ Yahoo/ Messenger/ Yahoo Messenger and right click on properties then click the version tab and highlight File Version it comes up…8,1,0,244 not (8.1.0.244), so go check and see!

Comment by polar — March 18, 2007 #
All you people using the mass iggy and voice dominance should use it to play a song like Travis Tritt’s “I’m Gonna Be Somebody” so the rest of us will know you nobodies are trying;)

Comment by polar — March 18, 2007 #
I’m going back to the 7.0 version this new one sucks!

Comment by polar — March 18, 2007 #
oh update, on chat reset they dropped the room list, for some random lame reason. congrads, new lameness.

Comment by BLooD BaTH — March 18, 2007 #
If user rooms aren’t going back in, can the Messenger team at *least* add some more rooms? Would love to see some Gay-oriented “By Location” rooms. With the curent Gay/bi/Les rooms, it’s nigh impossible to find someone from your own area, and if you go into the rooms for the state that you’re in, it’s like lighting a fire under the straight crowd in there (plus the usual spam-bots nonetheless).

Comment by Andrew — March 18, 2007 #
Alot of fruits hang in the fetish rooms, just incase yahoo doesn’t make you any fruit rooms. Alot of them state rooms have fruits too, you just have to help them out of the closet. Try Yahoo! Personals too, there is quite a few fruits there looking for love.

Comment by polar — March 18, 2007 #
Why is messenger so easy to boot?

Comment by polar — March 19, 2007 #
“This room is full. Please try another room” is becoming too much of a constant thing on yahoo and it’s not because the people have gathered. Iggy bots, room fillers and voice laggers are ruining the chat rooms. The people using these programs resort to attempting hacks and cracks when their programs aren’t affective and it is really a bunch of B.S. I have been booted off messenger more time than I’ve been logged onto it and have been threatened to be hacked through Yahoo’s exploits/backdoors more than I can say. What it boils down to is….Yahoo is making it possible for anyone to run these malicious programs and some of them aren’t that smart. teehee

Comment by polar — March 20, 2007 #
:-j what a joke!

Comment by polar — March 20, 2007 #
resident-evils-underworld.com just popped up while browsing Yahoo! blogs, I hope Yahoo! doesn’t have vulnerabilities with their blogs too. Yet again another site selling malicious programs for Yahoo! Chat.

Comment by polar — March 21, 2007 #
i did mention a few weeks ago, that i cant get voice in chat with windows vista in my systems, is there a way to get it without waiting on Yahoo, till they make a/their move …..

Comment by Silke — March 23, 2007 #
Some of the stories I’m hearing about vista and the malicious programs that are being made for people using vista with Yahoo! messenger, I wouldn’t want it! Voice command shutdown and a few other exploits. XP works fine, why did they need vista anyway.

Comment by polar — March 23, 2007 #
I cannot get into Yazak. When I enter room it says banned or error or full or sometimes nothing at all. I have waited over one hour many times and cannot get in. WHY??? Also – - cannot add picture to profile in Messenger. Keeps sending error 999. Send to help and they keep sending that 999 error (generic). Please help. Would like to start chatting again in Yazak. cannot enter chat room through Messenger – will not let me – and pls. fix the problem about adding picture to profile. Sue

Comment by matchandchat — March 24, 2007 #
Sir:

Yahoo messenger is already a part of my daily life as outlet to my frustrations and deprerssions.Most often my problem is the opening of my IM that makes me worried. Mt Pc is connected to the net , I can open websites and can do research but i got a big problem on my yahoo messnger. Most of the time when i sign after a second i saw on the IM that there is a problem in signing up yahoo please try it a bit later. Honeslty am very much worried about this. A a favor please look into my problem about accessing my yahoo messenger. Hoping for your favorable action regarding this mattter.

More power and God Bless

Comment by Erlinda T. Lopez — March 31, 2007 #
w/ regards to ymlite voice server, one of the above post mentioned about the ability to change voice server. Besides clicking on the “mic” icon within ymlite, where in ymlite could we customize or change the voice server? Please let me, i am trying to get voice in some of the rooms. Thanks

Comment by Maxim — April 4, 2007 #
Okay… I’ve had enough of being sent to rooms that are full of nothing but porn bots. I spend hours trying to log into a REAL room with REAL chatters, but for some reason keep getting stuck in porn bot prison. Fix it NOW. It is ruining your chats.

Comment by DNK — April 5, 2007 #
Yahoo Chat sucks so badly now. I used to go into chat daily…just to chit chat…..and talk to people from all over. Now..it’s a pain to get into…a pain to navigate…and so I’ve just stopped going. It’s a shame that Yahoo had to change it so drastically…..it’s not even enjoyable anymore….too much of a hassle! I wish the old format would come back..that you could save specific rooms…and that the BOTS would go away!

Comment by Terri — April 6, 2007 #
If your specific problem is with Yahoo!’s messenger specifically, just goto http://oldversion.com. This is a site I’ve used for years and years when I would try a new version of Yahoo! Messenger. They simply host old versions of old programs.

Now as for rooms being filled with bots and not real chatters, Yahoo! has removed chat from thier list of priorities. Simply see it the way they do and you will understand alot better, if you don’t pay for it, they don’t care unless THEY pay for it in the end.

The lag issue is generated server side by Yahoo! themselves. When you ping the servers you can easily see that there is no issue with lag. They implimented this when they fixed the [Room Boot]. Some form of payback to the chatters, or some idiot is patching for Yahoo! now and has caused an issue none of them can fix.

Simply see that Yahoo! has given up on its chatters and plainly as i can say DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU! This is why they havent fixed one issue requested here because none of them even read it. If you email Yahoo!, know that the chances a PERSON will even hear about it unless you tell them are less then the chances of you winning the lottery.

As for changing voice servers, as far as i know it is impossible in any client only due to this. When you connect to voice you connect to the primary Yahoo Voice Domain vc.yahoo.com. Then you send whats known as a “voice connection packet” and they send you the new voice server in hex which must be parsed and connected to. Simply meaning, they choose the server for you, and tell you where to connect, if you don’t use it you can’t get voice.

Comment by BLooD BaTH — April 7, 2007 #
you cant even log in or do anything anymore, it gets worse and slower every day. yahoo chat is just complete rubish now

Comment by Fred — April 8, 2007 #
“Simply see that Yahoo! has given up on its chatters and plainly as i can say DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU! This is why they havent fixed one issue requested here because none of them even read it. If you email Yahoo!, know that the chances a PERSON will even hear about it unless you tell them are less then the chances of you winning the lottery”

Probably true, and no doubt it’s that kind of mindset that let to them being sued and why yahoo 360 will probably never amount to anything really great other than yet another “yahoo experiment”.

“POO ON YOU! mic dom owns you all!”

You really need to get over yourself. Lucky for you though and the other 1 million n.p.d. crazies that infest yahoo, that they really don’t care and probably won’t be fixing that anytime soon.

Comment by YahooLearnedSecurityFromMicrosoft — April 11, 2007 #
Terry S. Semel is the chairman and chief executive officer of Yahoo! Inc. Is the man you want to HEAR about the TRAGEDY of our beloved bot infested porbot crawling Yahoo CHAT ! Unless you can get enough of us together and picket outside the Yahoo Inc. Offices, ( isn’t gona happen) for jobs maybe, but not for chat
However, the problem is you have to go thru the Corporate Secretary
CorporateSecretary@yahoo-inc.com
The Corporate Secretary will forward all correspondence that, in the opinion of the Corporate Secretary, deals with the functions of the Board of Directors. The Corporate Secretary will not accept complaints by users or customers with respect to ordinary course of business customer service, offensive or otherwise inappropriate materials.

Good luck letting them know about the dire state of Yahoo CHAT!. The powers that be have insulated themselves from their customers. Looks like we’re stuck with Sarah

Comment by Markus — April 13, 2007 #
im about to find a new place to go im getting mad .it took me 4 years to find some good friends now i cant get in rooms to talk to them

Comment by coopdog — April 14, 2007 #
whats up you need more $$$$$ to upgrade with the money ive spent you should hve enough

Comment by coopdog — April 14, 2007 #
now thats just funny right there!!
I knew you would delete that .
Im hoping you will have Y Messenger chat fixed by may 15th.

Comment by Waljas — April 15, 2007 #
Hi all,

Those of you missing “user Rooms”, download the Australia/New Zealand version of messenger!

Comment by Scott — April 17, 2007 #
Scott , that doesnt work you cant make user rooms with that.

By the way to the Admin of this blog , isnt it an offence to use Yahoo (TM) in booter sites? specially if they have nothing to do with Yahoo or whatsoever?

I came across this site which has a lot of yahoo programs such as booters and which are infected of course.

http://www.yahpros.com . They call themselves the Yahoo Professionals which very much unlikely , all their intentions probably to steal old Yahoo Accounts.

Comment by P2P — April 25, 2007 #
Please please please Yahoo, reinstate “Chat” in Messenger for UK users?

We’ve been without Chat for TOO LONG now!

Thank you!

Comment by Scott — April 26, 2007 #
[...] What’s going on with the chat rooms and when will they improve? [...]

Pingback by Yahoo! Messenger Blog » We’re listening — April 30, 2007 #
Hi it seems the chat rooms are getting a lil easier to get in but still over run by spam bots why? whats the point? also I’ve tried lending a hand reporting people and their bot names they use to flood rooms with boot codes or just to fill a room so no one can get in. I never see anything done to them or the bots why? or can you give me an addy I can post the hundreds of names to and try to help get chat back to the fun place it was yrs ago…I want to help please let me know what i can do. Thank You

Comment by Chris C. — May 1, 2007 #
What is WITH you people?!?!? You dont have chat for mac, how hard can it be?!? the environment i your rooms has become TOTALLY comprimised and if the guy above my head here is to be believed you arent lettting people from outside the US in? are you THIS out of touch? Why do you think I preferred this service over any others? Now I foud out I switched from pc to Mac and you can’t do something as simple a support mac format? this is only ONE of a myriad of reasons why Yahoo is rapidly becoming the very LAST place I come to do any commerce on the net..the only reason I use you at all is because my ISP is SBC…WAKE UP you are losing MONEY!!!!

Comment by norm — May 1, 2007 #
Hello, well, I’m curious too, it seems as if the chatrooms works, but I can’t connect to any of them. Is that because I live outside the USA? I am using the american version of Yahoo! Messenger though…

Comment by minutz3 — May 2, 2007 #
i am free to speak

Comment by mody — May 2, 2007 #
my comment.

i dont know going to the room
thank

Comment by HENDRA GANEZHA — May 3, 2007 #
There’s an easy fix for stopping bots from entering chat rooms. Have users enter a dynamically generated code in order to get into a room. This process is being used all over the net to keep bots out. Why isn’t Yahoo using it???

Comment by Fanatic — May 3, 2007 #
yahoo security is a complete joke, to many exploits cracking booting mass iggying bots laggs dossing servers, exploits cookie exploits and over he past 4 years the increase on net stalkers and pedos who talk openly about having sex with children is disgusting, i reported this guy 21 times and the report abuse department done nothing i even called in 3 times. Pfft what a joke

Comment by Bob jones — May 5, 2007 #
these people should be reported to their isp and be investigated for words which they are saying, but what is yahoo doing about it, Making Web Bassed Chat Software. that is embedded into your browser. but hey let the pedos stroll round yahoo and let ppl destroy our services, we dont care we are yahoo. ppl selling names what idiot wants to buy a yahoo name no matter how many underscores it has,

Comment by Bob jones — May 5, 2007 #
ans if you ignore someone the just come back n make another name should be 1 account per email 2 maximum. emails not verified should equal account deletion, more than 2 accounts should equal deletion. names not logged into for over 2 years should be totally deleted off the yahoo database. and yes the code to get into rooms is the best idea i have head in years.

Comment by Bob jones — May 5, 2007 #
heard* typos my bad anyways il come back in a month n see if anythings changed cause like many i cant be bothered with the freaks on yahoo now

Comment by Bob jones — May 5, 2007 #
I’ve been trying to get into the chat room for a week now, but still it shows me the same massage “CHAT ERROR” Can someone PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!

Comment by yanz — May 5, 2007 #
Why not just have one of those verification codes (where you have to enter the text shown in a little box)to get into chat? This would keep a lot of the bots out I think.

Comment by Martin — May 6, 2007 #
Sarah: You said back in January you would post an update about improvements to the Mac interface. I can’t seem to find it, and your Mac users still lack access to the chat rooms.

If you aren’t going to support one of the fastest growing segments of the PC industry, at least you can open up your source code to let others add the chat functions for you.

Comment by Len — May 11, 2007 #
okay, let’s see if you guys can answer me this. please reply to my email address (the blog manager should be able to see it, i think)

1.as far as i know yahoo boots the reciever of the info packets and not the sender. why is that and why don’t they change it? sounds easy enough.

2. room jam bots. since they all come from the same IP (botter’s IP) and yahoo claims to monitor IP addresses, can’t they create a rule for their chat servers that when more than X ID from the same IP address come then block the IP address for a certain leangth of time?

3. same about booting. since it’s done with bots and yahoo can easily finds out which IP logs into messenger (since i assume boot programs use the messenger protocol) can’t they do the same? can’t yahoo determine that if X number of ID are logged into messenger through the same IP then block the IP for a certain leangth of time?

the ammount of nazies in the jewish chatrooms in yahoo is amazing. no profiling intended but 90% of them are muslims, not that it matters to the subject at hand, but they use room jam bots and booting programs and so on, and dispite years of complaints yahoo has done nothing. we know that because the botters are only 5 people and they have been coming with the same ID for years.

Comment by Ambro — May 13, 2007 #
I would like to ask Sarah why the user rooms can not come back? My understanding of closure was due to a pedophile in the groups and the name of some user rooms under education. Now the name sunder education can be resolved or any area simply by deleting any room started that doesn’t fit the area its in. After all you didn’t close down all the groups just user rooms. By the way, by doing so all it meant was that the friendly regs of rooms who looked out for each other left and no owner ship of rooms means no one watches out for the perverts.

Comment by Ginger — May 14, 2007 #
Your complaints should be directed to the advertisers who rent space on Yahoo chat to generate an income from the users chat experience. Those companies hold more sway in determining how pleasurable your chat experience is than Yahoo ever could be. Yahoo might be forced then to tend to their little bot problems. How wild a suggestion is it that approximately 50% of occupied space in chat is claimed by bots? Not wild at all. More bots, more fed up people, less users, and less revenue for advertisers. Direct your grievances there, you can find their ads at the bottom of that little box you’re chatting in. They’re probably not even aware of Yahoo’s utter indifference to the problem.

Comment by rabbit — May 14, 2007 #
bots and more bots its simple to fix but yahell wont .. so its simple boycott the advertisers, let them know why your boycotting their product,,, hurt yahell were it counts,,,,,in the pocket book…

Comment by den — May 15, 2007 #
I see that Sarah does not actually respond to anything here that isn’t a simple ‘How do I..”question. There are a few issues I would like to see fixed. Firstly, being able to set my IM’s to friends list only without having it block a whole chat room. Secondly, Yahoo is repeatedly showing other people when I sign online. These are people I don’t even know and they are seeing me sign on. Not only do they see the name I use in chat, but they see every ID , even those I use privately for family. Isn’t this breeching my privacy??I am thinking complaining here is about as useful as going through the channels with a problem. Yahoo pretends to be interested. This used to be a good chat site, one of the best, but now I am seriously considering switching over to paltalk.

Comment by Ginger — May 17, 2007 #
Dear Yahoo,

Hi, I have some Hot Questions you can say problems also which I want its answers in the profit of yahoo messengers Chat rooms

1) These days There many complains of Receiving Messenger Viruses The Infected PC Autometically send Virus loaded web page links to the List of Messenger and also make them infected and takes registry control we can’t able to remove it untill and unless we don’t format our PC’s Hard Drive.

Is there and way to remove this virus ? please Sugest effective measures for it.

2) There are some Chat rooms must say Indian Chat rooms which are always locked with bots basically abusive bots more. Its reason is the limitation of users in chat rooms which make rooms locked. and they don’t let others enter into rooms.

Please Also fix this so that rooms can’t be locked by bots.(Hint – IP chacking will not effective as they use proxies based bots for locking rooms).

3) Voice bots problem- As I know Yahoo voice system works on the principle that the person whom more users litsten he will get voice of room. and Many are here who uses this system as their power by filling Voice bots in rooms they makes the Voice of room up to 500 to 3000 voice and do mass ignore also fix as single user controls the mic in room which is not good.

4) Some thimes I get message from a id that is yahoo_messener please Explain Is This ID is yahoo’s official id ?

I will be very much thanks full if thse problems will be solevd and answered by Yahoo team

Comment by Abhishek Anand — May 27, 2007 #
me wish to have a stron boot

Comment by salam — June 5, 2007 #
What is the problem of trying to get into the chats rooms?? Not to long ago it was a breeze to get into them, now it’s like crossing your fingers and hoping you hit the mouse in just the right manner. You can tell by the number of people in the rooms if it is a good day or a bad day to get in the rooms. So much for consistency!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Comment by Barbara — June 16, 2007 #
What is the problem here? Why is it that when i try to sign into a chat room is ALWAYS says “Signing into chat took longer than expected. Please try again later”. For the passed month i’ve been getting this message and it’s sickening already.

Comment by Tara — June 17, 2007 #
Hi there Yahoo Team,
I’ve been going in the yahoo country music rooms for years, now i cant even hardly get in anymore and when i do theres nothing but booters and bots!
Come On Team lets clean up the rooms so we can have some fun like the good old days i miss all the Big people coming in from Nashville and having online concerts and stuff like that,PLEASE HELP

Patsy

Comment by Patsy — June 19, 2007 #
My first and last post. Are there really any legit answers to the Yahoo Chat Room Trouble??? i been looking and i have to say its overwhelming the amount of people that have no life and no clue and take the time to post/blog such useless information. Stop your winning about a free service. Try finding and saying something that’s of use. Or try leaving the house and talking with a real person and stop waisting the time of people that actually try to find a solution.

Comment by Peter — June 20, 2007 #
also yahoo doesnt do a very good job on security on yahoo 5.0 used to be able to open web pages into rooms with auto loading trojans. an infect everyone in the room.. . i sent yahoo a email telling them exactally how to stop it.. instead of fixing the problem they deactivated the account that i emailed them with telling them about the flaw..

Comment by Lab — June 25, 2007 #
Anyone able to help with the Chat Error: Signing into Chat took longer than expected. Please try again later

I have not been able to get into any chat room for over a week now and I am getting no help whatsoever….

Please Help

Comment by Jeff — July 6, 2007 #
What ever you do don’t change settings on your computer thinking that will help you get into chat.Yahoo is messed up its not your computer.

Comment by JOY — July 7, 2007 #
For some time now I cannot connect to the chat rooms. It comes back with a message that signing in to chat took longer than expected and to please try again. After trying a few other rooms off and on for a couple weeks I am thinking maybe I should be using another IM. It’s a pity since I enjoy using Tahoo.

Comment by Robert — July 9, 2007 #
Yahoo chats are the most messed up situations I have ever encountered on my computer. I like to talk to people, but I havent been able to connect to yahoo nor get into any chatroom. Now whose fault is this? Mine is a brand new computer, so i dont see why all the problems. I have to try at least 30-50 times to enter or log into a chatroom. I know Yahoo is losing customers by the droves because of this, It h as to be. People are not that patient, I k now im not. Im getting sick of this.

Comment by Lisa — July 22, 2007 #
I want the web-based chat rooms back!

Comment by Sam — August 13, 2007 #
guess yahooo doesnt care bout anyones kids or the quality of there programs ..its all bout advertising

Comment by jonna — August 17, 2007 #
I just wanna say I am really enjoying reading this blog. Thank you and please keep posting all the exciting news.

Comment by Dog Costume — September 28, 2007 #
I cant believe all the people that send offlines of sites that they want me to go to of their sites of spam or to see pics of them if you know what I mean. I thought Yahoo was trying to cut down on all the people logging in that send spam or that send sites that they want you to click in of picturs of themselves that are revealing. Is that ever going to stop. If you click ingnore anyone that is not on my messenger list you dont see so many people logging into chat that type or say things. That is something that changed on the new 8.0 that I do not like. The only way to talk or see everyone type is ignore only the people below which allow everyone to IM you. Yahoo needs to fix this setting I would think like the old version.
There is still so much spam and bad stuff logging into yahoo how do you send it to yahoo about the x rated stuff that should be banned from yahoo.

Comment by Jule — October 11, 2007 #
Hate to tell ya but Yahoo is so far behind the exploiters, booters, hackers and redirecters they will never catch up. Switch to Yahelite or Ymlite or something.

Comment by Master Aceman — October 20, 2007 #
every night without fail I get booted when posting………if I just sit there and observe everything is okay but after posting a few times I get booted……….however when I am in private conversation PM nothing happens, only when I am in the room…….do you think its possible you could fix it……..I’n being sarcastic……..why would you attempt to do something when you have no idea what you’re doing?…….please explain that to me

Comment by william sike — November 1, 2007 #
watch my video on utube http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dcf6NEbcktk

Comment by tavish — December 5, 2007 #
Hi, a few days back, someone booted me out of room. I signed in again and blocked my PMs, checking on ” Ignore anyone who is not in your messenger list but after having done that, when I enters the chatrooms, I do not see the texts of other people in the chatrooms. Please help..Thanx

Comment by kamran — December 21, 2007 #
i m currently using mac os x n if i chat on yahoo frm my mac to other pc m web cam doesnt work is it bcoz of diff yahoo version or sumthng else plz help me out in these thing………….thanx

Comment by sahil — January 31, 2008 #
As many have experienced, I also cannot read dialog in the chat rooms if I have ignore all on, but also If I do not have it on, to many people are IMming me at one time and freeze my computer up.

I don’t think your capachat is working as well you planned, there are still bots in the rooms and they disrupt conversations with there pleas of watch my web cam. I’ve tryed ignoring them, but then the room laggs real bad. I hope you can get this fixed, I use to love going into chat rooms, but these days, it’s a real pain in the ***.

Comment by Theresa — August 4, 2008 #
Yahoo, I appreciate the chat service you offer free of charge, Thanks.

Comment by winsock.kernel — October 23, 2008 #
Why do I now hear a sound every so often in a chat room like a thunder noise. We have all of those turned off and have had no problems. Now all of a sudden out of no where you hear this sound. Its similar to when if you have your sound turned on when someone you know logs on and it either knocks or makes a sound you pick. We have had no problem but now out of the blue its happening, Is yahoo doing something that has affected this and if so when will it be fixed

Comment by Jule — November 27, 2008 #
Why are the bots still taking over the chat rooms?

Comment by Big Tom — April 19, 2009 #
April 19, 2009 Oh, and two more things.. when you have everyone on ignore while in a chat room.. the bots seem to know this because they then request to be added to your messenger list; obviously an oversight your IT pros (LOL) missed; along with so many other more important end-user problems. Why on earth should anyone be able to request an add-on when everyone is ignored. Another thing.. if You… Yahoo… really cared about this blog – as you say (LOL).. it would be readily available to EVERYONE, even a dummy! Why is this blog not a link right in the Messenger Tab.. perhaps titled.. Blog us your Yahoo Problems, or something! Yahoo needs to employ capable IT programmers and testers. Yahoo needs to use their own software and troubleshoot EVERYTHING all the time; especially before you release it, and guess what.. Beta sucks, especially when you don’t do anything about the problems before or after the final release. I’m telling you… I believe it’s high time the advertisers stop giving sub-standard, insufficient, and ethically immoral Yahoo a dime more in revenue. April 19, 2009

Comment by WhoCares — April 19, 2009 #