Captchas + Yahoo! Chat = No Bots (for Now)

[iGuest 3]

it aint workin

Captchas + Yahoo! Chat = No Bots (for Now)

 

What do you call the interruption of cam site transmissions ongoing in all the rooms?Those arent real people wanting to chat! it is robotic scrolling and not being manned by a live person;how is it that you allow that kind of crap,and why or do you get a piece of thier action? I am giving up on yahoo integrity-they have none as far as I have seen and they never answer inquiries with resolution! Bunch of bunk--and I Will Continue to harrass cammers as long as they harrass me!

 

-reply by norm

[Chat Rooms Suck 0]

Yahoo chat rooms still suck, still just as many if not more bots in the rooms than before. Now they are getting rid of most of the good rooms.

Only place I chat now is OohYa Chat Rooms, they have no bots and it's because they limit how many people can chat per IP.

Yahoo makes the case that limiting per IP would keep people from internet cafes or people on networks like at work or at school from getting in, but since internet cafes are a thing of the 90's and you probably shouldn't be chatting from work or school who really cares!?

[tansqrx 0]

Since the CAPTCHAs have been introduced I haven’t visited the chat rooms very often but I did make a visit about a week ago. I have to say that the rooms are now completely broken and are basically unusable. You now have to enter a CAPTCHA for every room you visit which got really old really quick. At least before you had a valid CAPTCHA for around 5 minutes.I am starting to think that Yahoo! should just open the system up to the users and let the SPAM flow. Yes there will be SPAM but at least the user/SPAM ratio would be better than it is today. When I visited last week you had 4 users and 15 SPAM bots. At the height of Yahoo! chat you still had 15 SPAM bots but you also had 30 users which created a better ratio. IRC has been around for much longer than Yahoo! chat rooms but they are still functional. In the beginning I was on the side of the CAPTCHAs but now I am starting to go the other way. Yahoo! is killing SPAM at the cost of content.

[turbopowerdmaxsteel 0]

I don't think the captchas are that bad. Some things need to be changed, though. The most annoying part of the captchas is that you have to open a web page in the browser to enter it. A built in GUI to enter the captcha would be very handy. The captchas should be limited to 1 per 2-3 hrs of room joining or so. Users often need to surf through rooms before they finally get in a room with real users and real conversations. Also, as you mentioned in a topic that the existing Yahoo captchas have been broken; so they need to be changed.

[minimcmonkey 0]

They should make you enter a captcha on login, then send a session cookie, that way, you only have to enter it once each time you log in.Although that would mean possibility of bots being logged in by the makers, then left to roam free, so there could be a detection system, which would check if a user was - changing chat room a lot - most of the things the user said contained a link - they often link to the same website - they say similar things a lot

[tansqrx 0]

I’m not necessarily against CAPTCHAs, just that you have to enter one every single time you change rooms. From what I have seen I also think it would be easy create a bot identification program on Yahoo!’s end. Most of the SPAM bots point back to only one or two websites and if they advertise such a site then they could be placed on a list. Also most bots use the same template for profile pages that can be easily identified. Lastly, many bots use a very distinct username such as <common woman’s first name><common adjective (usually provocative)><random three digit number>.I don’t think a user should be kicked automatically by the system but instead a suspicious account should be put on a list in real time and a human make the final decision. The sad fact is that it is obvious that Yahoo! does not have even one real human monitoring the system at all. I believe that just one shift of workers monitoring 24/7 could improve the Yahoo! chat rooms drastically. Instead chat is running on some server in a deserted closet and it never gets any attention.

[turbopowerdmaxsteel 0]

Actually, there is a SPAM protection mechanism at Yahoo's end. It blocks messages with links from suspicious usernames and IPs. For example, if the conversation was started with a link or the same link (or even link to the same domain name) is repeatedly sent, the account & IP gets blocked. This ban doesn't apply to links being sent to buddies. The actual spam protection algorithm is much more complicated than what I have described and it works quite well considering the fact that many spammers ask for ways to bypass it.You are right about a user moderated protection. It would be really handy in chat rooms. Say if 4-5 clean room users vote an account as SPAM, it should be banned. By clean users I mean those that are active in the room and are rated low on the spam rating.

[tansqrx 0]

I don’t know if the user vote would work very well because if Yahoo! has taught us one thing it’s that the system can and will be hacked. Here is what I would do. If I wanted to flag someone for SPAM just to cause problems for a user then I would load my list of “clean” names and log them all into the chat room. I would then initiate a vote and all of the clean bots would vote to kick them. Same story different method for harassment in Yahoo! chat rooms.I have to say that I am impressed with how this thread has taken off. Some really good discussion.