It's amazing really. Yahoo! has all of these resources allocated to writing 4 different versions of Messenger (XP, Vista, Mac, Web). With the exception of the web version I'm sure that the other incarnations share at least some common code between them but that's fairly irrelevant at this point and time. Each new version of Messenger gets prettier and adds support for more Yahoo! services yet never addresses the critical network wide problems. In fact that only feature added in the last 8 years concerning SPAM is the ability to report spam received in instant messages. Obviously that hasn't been all that effective as many people continue get upwards of 30-40 "spims" a day (especially if their name gets stuck in a chatroom due to being disconnected).

Unfortunately it seems that they have done very little to combat SPAM and denial of service exploits. There have been some improvements but overall it has been an epic FAILURE. Well over a year ago people were suggesting implementing CAPTCHA. Myself and others made our opinions quite clear that this approach would NOT work. Yes it had an initial impact and did indeed curtail the bots effectiveness at first. Unfortunately it was just a simple matter of updating their BOT software to compensate for the now required CAPTCHA.

As it stands now Yahoo! has alienated their visually impaired users, many of whom are senior citizens who use Yahoo! to communicate with friends and family and yet the BOTS are still running rampant. They have implemented a system that makes it extremely difficult for users to get into a chatroom while not even alerting them to the room being full until AFTER they have gone through the tedious CAPTCHA validation, yet the BOTS still run rampant. They have implemented additional 'chat banning' which affects many legitimate users, yet the BOTS still run rampant. They have closed down many of the adult oriented rooms which has forced the BOTS to migrate to other areas of chat and....they're still running rampant.

If you compare the resources available to Yahoo! vs. that of ALL the independent developers working to combat this problem I have to wonder if Yahoo! really has their priorities straight. If one or two individuals can spend a few hours a week analyzing and effectively detecting SPAM what's preventing Yahoo! from doing the same thing?

Well the major third party developers are now collaborating to find even more viable and effective solutions to this problem. By the end of the year we hope to have a fully operational proof of concept demonstrating real time SPAM detection...What's Yahoo! doing? Oh yeah talking about how many cool features they're putting into the many different versions of Messenger.

There's only one nail left in the chat coffin and the undertaker is frothing at the mouth to pick up his hammer.


I've said it before and I'll say it again. EPIC FAILURE!