New entry process for chat rooms

Hi everyone,

To help reduce the number of automated bots, we’ve implemented a new process for entering the Yahoo! Messenger chat rooms known as Captcha. Captcha is used elsewhere on Yahoo! in places like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Games to help verify that a user is in fact human rather than an automated bot. Here’s how it works in the Yahoo! Messenger chat rooms…

Once you’ve chosen a Yahoo! Messenger chat room, you’ll be put into an empty room (no text, no list of chatters) and see a chat message in the room from a user named “Messenger Chat Admin”. The message will contain a link that says: “Please click here to verify your account. This step is required before you can begin chatting”. Click the link and a new window entitled “Chat Room Verification” will open. Then enter the characters that match the letters and/or numbers in the Captcha test graphic. After successfully completing the Captcha test, you’ll be returned to the chat room and see a confirmation message: “Congratulations! Your account is verified and you now have access to chat rooms”. Then just start chatting!

A Captcha test is required each time you enter a room, not just when you start a session in the chat rooms. While we realize this may slow down your ability to switch rooms quickly, this extra security is needed to help reduce the number of bots.

This new process for entering chat rooms was introduced specifically to ward off the automated bots that have become frequent, unwelcome visitors in our chat rooms. We appreciate your patience as we implement this new feature and hope that it will result in a fun (and less bot-filled) chat experience.

Popularity: 6% [?]