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Welcome to the Instant Messenger Anti-Spam Resource Center!

This site has been created due to the growing frustration of the Yahoo! chat community and the unacceptable level of SPAM that is now appearing in Yahoo! chatrooms. Users are finding it nearly impossible to log into Yahoo, stay connected, or even log into chat. In typical Yahoo! fashion complaints concerning SPAM in chatrooms receive their common form letter response or appear to be dismissed all together. The sole purpose of this site is to get Yahoo's attention and force them to address the complaints of a global community of users. Our primary goal is not only to get Yahoo! to stand up and acknowlege this problem but to properly address is and eliminate this nuisance once and for all.
 
If you're tired of SPAM in Yahoo! chat rooms let them know emailing Yahoo! Chat Customer Care or by sending an abuse complaint to Yahoo! Customer Service .

Yahoo! toots their own horn!
Written by Chet Simpson   
Thursday, 18 September 2008
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!
Last Updated ( Thursday, 18 September 2008 )
 
Rebirth!
Written by Chet Simpson   
Thursday, 11 September 2008
After a long hiatus due to other obligations I have decided that the ineffective attempts by Yahoo! to curtail SPAM in chat rooms and instant messages must once again be addressed. Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting additional information, statistics, and direct contact information concerning this extremely important issue.
Last Updated ( Friday, 19 September 2008 )
 
SPAM Statistics for March 2007
Written by Chet Simpson   
Monday, 02 April 2007
In late February, we began an aggressive campaign to monitor the spam problem in Yahoo! Chat using custom software called Chat Sentry. This software allows us to collect data from many public sources related to Yahoo! Chat and analyze that data based on current trends and known spam distributed across the Yahoo! Messenger network. In early March, we published our preliminary findings that indicated the amount of "Spam Bots" in Yahoo! Chat accounted for nearly 60% of all chat users. These early findings resulted in my posting a comment to the Yahoo! Messenger Blog as well as the creation of this website. Due to the overwhelming response, we continued to monitor the situation and have finished our analysis of the data collected throughout the month of March.
 
Last Updated ( Monday, 29 September 2008 )
 

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