What you should be able to do in Yahoo! Chat is post something like

:is happy

and it posts as an emote. It’s been this way forever, but since the beta of version 9, it hasn’t worked. I have reported it in beta bug report from and final via customer suppoer, but when you get responses like that from Max, you really do believe the developers are not aware of it. And concerning is that the support team don’t understand basic functionality for what they are supporting.

Another bug new in beta 9 and since that I reported and got responses from Max, are not being able to use the up arrow to scroll through your chat posts if you need to repost one, his response was as before, not understanding the question!

-Melissa

@CivilisedButCensored: It appears there have been some changes since the last time I used their support. Quick question, though: I’m used to IRC for chatting. Can you not use “/me” to emote? I’m surprised they ignored a potential security vulnerability!

“Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Messenger.

I’m sorry you’ve been having trouble sending emoticons in Yahoo! Chat. I
can understand this must be frustrating.

Yahoo! Chat does support emoticons. For a complete list please visit the
following link:” and it goes on to tell me about smileys.

That was not the answer to my question.

When I reported about 5 bugs, including a security vulnerability, I got this response:

“While we don’t have administrative Yahoo! “chatters” on call, you can
take advantage of the following features we have available for you:” and it goes on to tell me about ignore feature.

I sent a request asking why chat data pulled the old profile data, and we couldn’t modify them, and the response was “We do not have enough information to understand your question”? I thought it was quite clear, I responded in clearer terms, nothing heard back til a few days later when I got a satisfaction survey.

-Melissa

@Jack: I vaguely remember a UNIX client a long time ago, though I didn’t realize it was targetted directly at GNU/Linux. Yes, it was terrible. While I don’t use GNU/Linux on anything resembling a regular basis, I have quite a few friends that do. They all use AOL, though, so it’s a moot point for me.

@CivilisedButCensored: See my comment to mal_igned above. I’m not sure why, but my experiences (two so far, thankfully) with Yahoo! Messenger support have been fantastic. I get the auto-responder first followed by an article from the knowledgebase that does a poor job of answering my question. After that, though, I got through to a real person that helped me. In both cases, they were bugs with the program that were fixed in later builds, so I know they listen. Maybe things have gotten worse over the years.

Go to the profile blog and see what a difference it is there, where Melissa responds to people’s concerns, negative or not. It’s more civilised, has many users and you get a feeling they are going somewhere in terms of customer service.