| SPAM Statistics for March 2007 |
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| Written by Chet Simpson | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 02 April 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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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. The data analyzed includes over 685,000 messages and over 95,000 users and the results are incredibly discouraging. The overall results show the number of spam bots in Yahoo! Chat is now estimated at 75% of all chat users - far surpassing the preliminary results published in early March. Surprisingly the report also shows that one of the popular third party clients is used by 16% of spam bots encountered throughout the data collection period while all other clients combined were responsible for only .7%. Not only is the excessive number of bots logged into Yahoo! Chat clogging rooms with useless garbage but the servers have become so overloaded that it can take up to 30 minutes just to enter chat. That is if you are lucky enough to be using a third party client or add-on that automatically retries joining rooms. This is quite disheartening as the Yahoo! community will most certainly continue to dwindle unless Yahoo! makes a concerted and aggressive effort to eliminate this junk from chat. Below are the summary statistics generated from the overall report and are separated into three sections: All users, Live users, and Spam Bots. These statistics show the number of active and inactive users as well as the number of messages posted by each category of user.
The painful realization is that the Spam problem will continue to grow until aggressive measures are put in place to eliminate it from the Yahoo! Messenger network. * The report was compiled using data collected from all publicly available resources by our Chat Sentry software including chat room and private messages and user profile data. Message and profile data were analyzed using known trends and content posted by Spam Bots including content contained in their user profile as well as manual validation of both live users and Spam Bots. This report has an estimated 2.5% margin of error.
Comments (10)
  written by Donna, April 03, 2007
those are disturbing statistics, and yet not surprising - I would predict, with no action taken for remedy, it would be two years or less and those numbers would show 100% spam, 0% live users..
 written by gothicmemberyoda, April 03, 2007  wow, that's a lot of bots in the Yahoo chat rooms. Back only two years ago, it was only about 45% of the users that were bots...its a huge climb. Hopefully Yahoo will listen to us  written by Lewis Holland, April 03, 2007
At last! let us hope that our united resolution will encourage yahoo to take notice of its clients. many of us are elderly people to whom the chat rooms mean a way of communicating to our peers
and are an important part of our lives unless action is taken I can see the end of yahoo chat rooms as such so let us stay united in this  written by Cchris78, April 21, 2007
Its called spim not spam. The word Spam is used if it is using email. Spim is used if it is using an instant messenger.
 written by Nancy, May 28, 2007
I knew the situation with Yahoo! chat was getting worse but never in my imagination did I think it was THAT bad!!! I for one am all for getting rid of the blasted bots. They were annoying anyway-thank GOD for YTunnel to keep them from IMing me. Thanks Chet!!!
A Loyal YTunnel user- Nancy Katzer  written by mountain_gal_va, June 02, 2007
Well, I wrote yahoo several months ago complaining about the bots, and especially the comments made by so many of them anymore. All I got was a letter that they are looking into it and apoligized that such comments are being seen. Has it done any good? Of course not! Yahoo apparently approves of prostitution on the net in my opinion, cause that's all it is.
 written by Steven, September 09, 2007
Any chance you'd be willing to release the data used for the statistics? I'd be interested in looking at the logs.
 written by steve, December 05, 2007
that's a lot of spam and bots in the Yahoo chat rooms.chat room is not opend so pls solve my problem coz i dotn seen anyone chatmate in d chat room pls help
 written by Ron, July 30, 2008
I sent the following to Yahoo, and also to the cnet.com senior writer responsible for reporting on Yahoo:
"I am totally disgusted by Yahoo's inability to block spammers and bots from its chat rooms, especially chat rooms that are purportedly family oriented. In every chat room I went to tonight, including two genealogy chats, a "Do it yourself" chat, and several others, there was absolutely no appropriate chatting going on, only obvious bots and spammers promoting adult activities, webcams and pics. In several, as soon as I joined the room I was immediately hit up with IMs for adult content / activities. I reported many of the abusers using the "Report Abuse" link, but reporting all of them would be impossible. If you cannot control them, Yahoo should totally shut down all chat room activity, or face serious legal and PR consequences." Maybe they need more negative PR, and sicing CNet and other industry news giants on them may be one avenue to raising awareness of the issue.  written by Frusterated User, August 03, 2008
The number of spam bots is HUGE. Something must be done to control these bots from invading the yahoo chat.
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