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What’s the scoop on the bots that infest the yahoo chat rooms?
I have heard rumors that Yahoo makes money off of them, but I am thinking the companies that run the bots figure yahoo chat rooms are a great way to ply their trade with no advertising costs. There are links to ifriends, adult friend finder, dating sites, pay per view cams and many other things they employ to make money.
I can’t reach a real person at Yahoo to get a straight answer, so I am posing it to you.
If yahoo can control or eliminate the bots, I think many of their performance problems would disappear. Our ignoring the bots as individuals is no good since they still occupy space in the chat rooms and clog yahoo’s network. Reporting them as spam is useless since they morph their names often. I estimate that the average bot to real person ratio in many chat rooms is as much as 90% bots to 1-2 real people. I reported one pay per view bot, checked off as spam, and she was back on in a few hours. She probably was never kicked off yahoo!
Is there a way, other than ignore or block, that we can eliminate bots and help make chat enjoyable for all?
Yes, bots have completely overran chat rooms. You can read comments on the Yahoo! Messenger Blog about unhappy users posting about the bots and spam. As for the money rumor, that hasn’t been proven.
Bottom line: Yahoo will have to ultimately deal with the bots.
Bots… yeah, I remember those. I don’t see many of them anymore though, good thing for that. 😀
PS: Get a good free 3rd party client with anti-spam filters (YMLite, YahElite, Yazak etc) or YTK Pro (my application that isn’t free). Y!TunnelPro might be up your alley too since it’s decent at killing spam.
I use YTunnel and its super iggy bin has thousands of the things. At least the bots are not sending me bogus IM, but YTunnel’s bot challenge seems to block most women, but bi and gay men figure it out.
Y! Tunnel has if i’m not mistaken has Regular Expression Support
Perhaps you should yourself start learning how to use it effectively against chatroom bots as it is very powerful.
I know it doesn’t disconnect the bots or solve the connection issues but lets be frank about that, only one company can sort that out and thats yahoo!.
I have started to work on a filter page that i will try and write as many regular expressions and wildcards as i can but im not promising anything and im sure if anything, you can learn from them.
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