Yesterday the good folks over at Yahoo! have finally implimented changes in the overwhelming bot presence in chat rooms. They have introducted a captcha system to allow users into the room.
Here is an excerpt from the Yahoo! Messenger Blog,
The Yahoo messenger team has rolled out some bug fixes for the chat problems, and information disclosure bug. Although to some extent, I think it was more relevant showing registration info than profile info, but that’s just me. Read below for the official word from Yahoo, courtesy of Sarah Bacon.
Over the past year, Yahoo! has come under some serious fire for letting their chat rooms go to hell. The public chat rooms are now rampant with bots. I challenge you to enter a chat room and not find a single bot.
In hopes to combat this very serious problem Yahoo! has been working on their backend. They recently installed some patches and fixes for the join room times. These fixes for the most part wen’t well. Joining a chatroom is now quicker than ever but now you can’t really enter the room you want to enter, you get bumped to another available room in the same category.
This certainly puts a damper on your chat experience especially if you are like me and visit a single room and generally stay in that room. Yahoo! is working on a fix and is still working on more updates regarding the bot problem.
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According to Sarah Bacon the Yahoo! Messenger Product Manager;
An important security update is now available for users of Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 on Windows. It is strongly suggested that all users download and install the latest version (8.1.0.416) that includes this update.