Online Chatting

I have been chatting online for years and I have enjoyed it immensely. I have met some of my best friends whom I love dearly online in chat rooms of one kind or another.

But I'm here to tell you about the end Yahoo chatting.

No, I'm not going to stop chatting online--I love it! I will, however, be pretty much giving up on Yahoo. Why? Simply put, it's broken and they don't seem to have any desire to fix it. Sure, the individual messenger windows (aka PM's or IM's) still seem to work pretty well for the most part, but not the public rooms. They are dead or dying.

Yahoo chat rooms have always been plagued by "bots" that keep popping in and soliciting your interest with sexy one-liners and promises to "get naughty" or whatever. They also have an annoying habit of parking their names in chat rooms (which only hold 50 people each by the way...) so only so many humans can come in. This has always been the way of Yahoo, to allow this sort of thing to happen. Whatever software features (or "holes" if you will) that Yahoo has built in to their system to allow people to put their "bots" in has also allowed hackers to exploit their system. There are many power-hungry hacker geeks that love nothing more than to take control of areas of the Yahoo chat system.

I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Yahoo chat rooms. Lately, the bots have changed. It's like they have gotten "smarter" if you will. At the same time, the rooms have developed serious issues that basically make them completely unusable to us lowly humans:

• The biggest problem was getting into your favorite room to begin with.
• Text that you typed wasn't always visible to the others in the room. Sometimes others would have to relay what you typed because someone else could see it. A few minutes later it would be someone else that's text disappeared to a user or two. We called it "Yahoo stealing our crayons."
• A serious time lag between when you typed a line and when others actually saw it had developed. I'm talking about 50 or more lines (two full screens or so) or more of typed text before someone in the room saw what you had typed. That's a HUGE lag.

All of these things have a cumulative effect: Non-usability.

My theory (and of course it's just MY theory) is that Yahoo is planning this. Here's what I mean: They allow all this to take place little by little, and in fact encourage it to a certain extent. Human users can't use their system at all because it's basically so broken that it's non-functional to them so they stop using it. Because of that, usage by humans goes down. It gets to a certain point and Yahoo can publicly announce, "Due to declining use, we have decided to cease operation of public chat rooms on Yahoo servers." If they did that when all the systems were up and functioning perfectly, imagine what an outcry there would be. This way all they have to do is point to their statistics and say, "See?" Again, it's just a theory, but hey... If it happens remember where you saw it first!

Okay, here's the real message of my post today: If I'm not on Yahoo any more, where will I be? On PalTalk, that's where.

A bunch of people that like chatting in one of Yahoo's rooms called Washington:4 have gotten together and went this direction. Although I paid a little money for an upgrade to eliminate ads and such, it's a totally free thing and it works very well. It works just the same way as most any other chat thing: You don't have to be in a room to chat with somebody. You can see them online (if they're on your "pal list") and send em a private message. I do however, encourage any of you that consider it to make sure your antivirus software is current and functioning well. You just never know what's out there...

I am on this ALL the time if I'm chatting, so chances are you won't find me on Yahoo any longer. My chat name is still grayhaird and I would LOVE for you to pop in and say hi whenever you see me online.

I don't want to lose anybody!