I have considered writing a letter USPS)Yahoo's senior management to make them aware of the situation, and sending printouts of room chat showing the spam.

hugs, i am so tired of these spam or porn spam in the rooms if i wanted to see them i would of not got ytunnle in the first place. it should be for fun chatting with your friends, not to see porn spam all i seem to do is click click click. and the cloners that come in the room after stilling other peoples ID's has got too stop. i had mine stolin and they are playing havic with my ID, and that is not right. so can you please help me or alot of us.

i am so tired of these spam or porn spam in the rooms if i wanted to see them i would of not got ytunnle in the first place. it should be for fun chatting with your friends, not to see porn spam all i seem to do is click click click. and the cloners that come in the room after stilling other peoples ID's has got too stop. i had mine stolin and they are playing havic with my ID, and that is not right.(thios is an exact copy of the letter above, i feel exactly the smae way and i couldnt have said it better. so can you please help me or alot of us.

i FEEX EXACTLY THE WAY THAE LAST PERSON WHO POSTED DOES . i SECOND HER THOUGHTS. pLEASE DO SOME THING SOON. THNK YOU

yahoo is just sick, the rooms now are just bots with 3 of 4 human beings at most in a room that holds 50 users. that is just sickening. i hope executives from yahoo read this because i want them to know how much they suck. it was decent 4 years ago. and thats when it wasnt that bad. there were bots , but we werent sure what they were, they never responded. now they're in the chat rooms talking amongst one another. i used to really like yahoo but now its just junk, ytunnel used to control the bot flow but the flow of bots is just ridiculous. i wont waste my time on yahoo until its fixed.

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I soo agree with all of you. It is time for a change. We're not gonna take it anymore (is that Twisted Sister in the background?)

Hey Chet...it hit me (btw, I posted as Ken on the Yahoo blog). Its time to go to the media about Yahoo! I bet NBC would love to do a story on the deplorable conditions in Yahoo! chat, and Yahoo! mail.

Just think, if they interviewed you, a person who has created a small but popular chat enhancer, that has a spam filter. This would bring Yahoo! to shame publicly...and may get them to wake up their program/site developers and make chat a good experience again.

I remember when Yahoo! almost lost their revenues when NBC Dateline started airing "To Catch a Predator."

Chet, do you or Donna have any media connections?

Yahoos servers are at breaking point they are overloaded thats why everyone is having issues getting into chat the only way they can fix this is to add more servers or add anti spam meassures the number of spam bots has increased ten fold at least within recent months yahoos own greed is killing there chat service it had to happen one day as the server numbers are limited 50 users per room in over 20,000 and the bots to real people ratio is now at least 80% bots per room i used to enjoy yahoo chat now i can not even be botherd to try and join a room you get in you get loged out of chat or see no text or have no voice the bugs are endless yes there is ytk pro,y tunnel etc but why should the general user pay for a nice chat experience when yahoo is worth billions and can not even import simple anti spam meassures wake up yahoo your chat service is dying it will only continue to get worse unless this is sorted yahoo is now yahell

Instead of just talking about doing something and not practice what I preached, I did did something. I sent a very detailed letter to NBC's Dateline, about Yahoo! chat's deplorable conditions. The letter was about 300 to 400 words long...I explained about bots, the problems with the servers and I mentioned you Chet

Lets hope they took my letter seriously, I hope they give a reply within a week or two.

Yes indeed we do. One of our contributors is a freelance journalist with contacts at several news wires and tech related news sites. We don't believe it's a resource that should be used at this time but it is a resource we have available to us if needed. I do appreciate your attempts at contacting Dateline but I'm not sure if they will be interested at this time. We are however investigating information that they may find...interesting.

Dateline had sent me an auto-response message back, giving a physical address to mail story ideas to. I sent that address privately to you, via the contact box.

I'll talk to a couple of friends of mine who are Djs at my community college's radio station and see if they want to spread the word about chatspam.org

It is good to see people expressing there feelings about this and hopefully yahoo will slowly start to relize what going on and change things i would also like to point out there a power struggle in yahoo just now the stock holders are also not happy and are telling yahoo they want things changed a new ceo etc and one of the people doing this might be getting a position on the board of directors for yahoo so if we make our voices heared things will start to change!

I am adding this comment because of the high regard
it seem,that yahoo holds for yahoo chat these
days.
For the last month of so have NOT been able to get into a room
most rooms are inundated with spam bots anyway.
These bots although being just one of the problems have
contributed to destroying and wiping out the chat experiece.
Also had a grave harrasement problem in the past and worked
untold hours and wrote uncountable compliants to yahoo and
I assume the worst they could do to these individuals involved
was temporary chat bans.
This did not correct the problem.
For some individuals in chat their sole aim was making A_holes
out of them selves and alienating people in chat.
Prime example being john_hickinbottom2003 or whever ID or clone
names he is using now.
Have come close a number of times to shutting down my yahoo
service and its still a possibilty.
YAHOO DOES "NOTHING" for its customers.

If yahoo doesnt get with the program. I remember in 1999 or 2000 when I first started using messenger I never seen a bot and the rooms were full of real people now the room is full of bots with maybe 2 real people. I cant even log into rooms anymore cause they are full of bots which is such bull cause this is a chat program for people to chat not for people to watch these damn spam bots talked to each other. Come on yahoo at least in 1999 you guess had a good following now you have nothin but anger users.

I will agree that yahoo used to be fun.. you could chat with friends and complain because everyone was typing so fast.. the room was moving to fast.. lol. not anymore... to many bots.. why cant yahoo at least limit them?? now you only find about 4 real people in a room at the time.. please.. everyone .. complain.. maybe something will get done then.. ty for lettin me vent..

Am noticing alot less bots lately...but to those who think that Y Tunnel is just about SPAM, think again Y Tunnel is so much more & worth every penny paid... it's sucha good & well run program & site ...KUDO's to Chet & Company !! TY

When I started chatting in 1999, I met alot of people and down through the years we've all became "chat family". We would all gather in our room we chatted in and got to know each other real good and met other people as well. Now, since yahoo! has allowed bots to come in and take over since around 2002-03, no one can get in the rooms anymore without bots spamming the rooms or the messenger boxes. What a waste of time to have to keep hitting the ignore button. There must be thousands among thousands of bots now and only a few hundred real people chatting these days. Why? well, the bots tend to run the people off somehow and Yahoo! allowed it. I would love to see the user rooms come back to full force. Since Yahoo! got rid of the user room, it has truly went downhill. 360 is fine and I certainly enjoy having it, but it seems thats the only way people can keep in contact without the bother of bots. I want "room service" again, persae.
Yahoo!......bring back the fun in chatting. P-L-E-A-S-E!?!?!

We cant even get real people in our user rooms anymore..Once you can finally get in all there is is bots...Would love our user chat rooms back...

For those who are using third party clients there is no "report abuse" button. It is simple though to paste the following URI into a browser and transmit it to Yahoo. Replace YID with the spammer's Yahoo ID. Replace This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it with your e-mail if you want a response. Then send. You will need to be logged in to the Yahoo website for this to work.

http://help.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/messenger/cgi_abuse?name=YID&email= This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it &select30=opt305&textarea40=sexual advances in Religion:2&fromurl=&send=Send

Yahoo has got just like aol chat,nothing bot bots.
I don't even chat in the rooms anymore.
It has got out of hand.

I highly doubt that the user rooms will be brought back, considering Yahoo was sued over them and lost promotional ads because of the pedophiles and child porn oriented rooms that kept being created. However a solution might be, to let the room creation have a limit in naming, and subject titles limited as well, narrowed to pinpoint suggestive names out of the creation ability, and let the creators of the rooms have enabled moderation abilities such as kick, or ban from room, or even report user. This would eliminate a lot of the current problems with rudeness in the chat rooms that are active and help filter out the bad element. Furthermore, it would be an excellent idea, to add passwords to the user rooms, to keep out automated bots from logging in and sending their spam. These are only some of the suggestions I keep hearing from friends of mine, a good portion of the users I know online in Yahoo! are not content with the text input limitation either, but we are all working around it, as we do hate seeing booter bots and spammer bots imputting past those limits they have set now.

I do implore the user communities of Yahoo! and all mailing users as well to please, please, push for them to return the rooms with these features, it would better the chatting experience for all and save whats left of the chatting dignity of Yahoo.
Thank you,
Melisa

I know several media contacts, some who have actually worked with some media groups and one another internet service provider Aol & I believe Time-Warner??? - Shrug.. Will definately be forwarding this site along to them. & If you'd like to work with them, Let me know and I'll try to give you their details .

One other suggestion,

How else could we make our "VOICES" heard loud & clear??? I mean hats off to the makers of this movement to eliminate the spam/spim, not to mention the other flagrant abuses that go on (ie the booting,cloning of id's).

What would be the best way to organize an Yahoo Boycott?
...
1. Compile a listing of every single Yahoo! Advertiser,
2. The foundation here will continue to provide statical data
3. Start an online petetion to boycott all of the above #1's
businesses until such time as they hold their their advertising
Yahoo!, accountable for the crap that we all have had to deal
with.
4. Then get as many signatures as we can on that petetion and everyone who can abide by the boycot stick to it!

"United we stand, Divided we fall"

We are a community of people. Yahoo certainly a chat community in it's early years, but it's chat community really came from merge with Geocities back in the day. Geocities was COMMUNITY OF USERS,- I know being a former block leader, and we are a very large community. Some of which might even pay for some of Yahoo's Services, or know of others who pay for them.

They say "money talks & bull dodo walks".. An Online Boycott of not just Yahoo, but of it's advertising partners?? -

Sorry for the length of this, but if everyone things this is another way to get the point across give me a hollar

What's the point of even trying to get into chat? Yahoo has really shot themselvs in the foot with this. Since Google does not have chat you would think that Yahoo would take advantage of that since they are getting their butts kicked when it comes to searching things online. Hell! I've never heard a person say " I just Yahooed it" The only reason I use Yahoo for searches is b/c of their chat. Since that is gone now i'm switching to Google. Nice going Yahoo.

this sucks all the bot are ruining the enjoyment of chat

You take something people used to enjoy, and then turn it into something painful to use. It wasn't that long ago that taking a plane trip somewhere was something exciting and something to look forward to. Now it's a opporunity to spend two hours in a TSA security line getting strip searched. All because 19 losers in four planes plowed the jets into three buildings and one field in Pennsylvania.

Will it never end? Is there some kind of law that says that if there is something people enjoy, dirtbags HAVE to come in and ruin it for everyone?

I think yahoo should ban using any website link during chat so atleast things will settle down fast, or like google they should allow opening of e-mail by invitation only or they can restrict logging of maximum three ID from a ip at a time.