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,

Hi everyone,

To help reduce the number of automated bots, we’ve implemented a new process for entering the Yahoo! Messenger chat rooms known as Captcha. Captcha is used elsewhere on Yahoo! in places like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Games to help verify that a user is in fact human rather than an automated bot. Here’s how it works in the Yahoo! Messenger chat rooms…

Once you’ve chosen a Yahoo! Messenger chat room, you’ll be put into an empty room (no text, no list of chatters) and see a chat message in the room from a user named “Messenger Chat Admin”. The message will contain a link that says: “Please click here to verify your account. This step is required before you can begin chatting”. Click the link and a new window entitled “Chat Room Verification” will open. Then enter the characters that match the letters and/or numbers in the Captcha test graphic. After successfully completing the Captcha test, you’ll be returned to the chat room and see a confirmation message: “Congratulations! Your account is verified and you now have access to chat rooms”. Then just start chatting!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Bugs, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.