Yahoo chatrooms closing
 

Any info on this? Does it have something to do with the recent lawsuit?

i highly doubt it , they just announced they are merging with msn messenger so that by next year they will be interchangeable

I think is good...

doesn't sound like they would do that if they were going to shutoff chat , but maybe they are going to kill chat and go with messenger service only..

they are merging not closing

If any chats should be closed, it's AIM chatrooms. They are 95% bots 24/7. The other 5% of real people are desperate 15 - 21 year old guys looking for girls who arent bots.

Yahoo chatrooms can never close, cannot even imagine this, maybe merging can be fine!

I noticed msn has chatrooms again? I didnt look real close but I thought they were dead?

Not shutoff chat (that would NOT be a good idea specially with the MSN deal in the offing), I'm talking about the chat ROOMS.

who the hell still chats anyhow?

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

You have your facts mixed up...

Yahoo chat room are staying open. User created rooms are temporarily suspended due to the high ammounts of KP...they'll clean them up and be back up and rolling

Your mostly right , but i dont think they suspended user created rooms because of KP , I have been with yahoo from the beginning and i never saw any kp. but talk on yahoo is about several id theft rings ( suntrust bank scam ) that were basically running trojans in toolbar type products , these would then create a yahoo chat username , login and sit and idle in certain chat rooms, and transmit credit card information for scammers to pickup on the fly in encoded format..

They came out and said it was because of the KP...it was a court order that they had to reconstruct.

11.2% of the chatrooms on yahoo were themed around adults having sex with children was what the news story on yahoo said

Its all related to this story:

http://ca.us.biz.yahoo.com/ap/051012...ooms.html?.v=6

AP
Yahoo to Bar Minor-Adult Sex Chat Rooms
Wednesday October 12, 8:38 pm ET
By Samuel Maull, Associated Press Writer
Yahoo to Bar Chat Rooms That Promote Sex With Minors, Restrict Them to Users 18 and Older

NEW YORK (AP) -- Yahoo Inc. said Wednesday it will bar chat rooms that promote sex between minors and adults and restrict all chat rooms to users 18 and older.

The changes come under an agreement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning.

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"This is about protecting kids," Bruning said.

Spitzer said authorities did not have to resort to litigation. He said Yahoo, "acting as a good corporate citizen, ... did the right thing. We asked them to create a filter to stop this kind of thing and they have done so."

In June, while still in discussions with the attorneys general, Yahoo voluntarily closed its user-created chat rooms following complaints that some had names suggesting they facilitated illegal conduct, including sex between adults and minors.

Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said Wednesday that Yahoo was still determining if and when user-created chats would be restored as it makes improvements "to enhance the user experience and compliance with our terms of service."

If they do get restored, the agreement calls for Yahoo to review the names of such rooms ahead of time and reject any deemed inappropriate. Even if a room's name is innocuous, Yahoo also will bar any whose postings encourage sex acts between adults and minors, purging such chat rooms within 24 hours from when it becomes aware of them.

"These efforts are consistent with and build upon our long-standing commitment to providing a safer and more secure online experience for consumers," Osako said.

The company also is eliminating the teen chat category and limiting usage of all chat rooms to adults, although it was not clear how the company would prevent children from signing up as adults because credit cards aren't required.

Spitzer, a Democrat running for governor next year, said he started the investigation at Bruning's urging.

"The agreement we have today is the first of its kind," Spitzer said. "We think this is an agreement that can be a template for others to use."

Bruning said the agreement means "our children are safer online and predators have fewer opportunities to prey on them."

Among the illicit chat rooms removed were those with labels such as "girls 13 & up for much older men," "8-12 yo girls for older men," and "teen girls for older fat men." Many of these were located within the "Schools and Education" and "Teen" chat categories.

An undercover investigator, posing as a 14-year-old while visiting one of those chat rooms, received 35 personal messages of a sexual nature over a single 25-minute period, the attorneys general said.

Spitzer and Bruning said they launched their investigations earlier this year after receiving tips that children had unfettered access to adult chat rooms.

Other measure announced under the agreement:

--Yahoo will make it easier to report any threats to child safety, give priority to such complaints and designate specific employees to do so.

--Yahoo will develop educational materials and feature them on the Yahoo network, promoting the safe use of chat rooms.

--Yahoo will donate $175,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's New York affiliates, and provide banner advertising to that organization targeted to teens.

Associated Press Writer Ula Ilnytzky contributed to this report.

Bots and peds

AIM chatrooms will close before Yahoo. Go check 'em out. It's a complete spam fest.

nah , thats all bullshit basically , almost the entire article..

I dont doubt thats what they "said" but, its mostly whitewash.. there were a few rooms like what they were saying but almost nothing. I think its a good move , but its really mostly all talk..

They will "review" room names every so often and they will be purged for 24 hours ( the rooms ) hahaha , anyone who knows yahoo knows you can create rooms every 3 seconds that would be idiotic unless they had fulltime mods and they dont.

They will have "filters" and "reviews" , but nothing will change without mods..

This started months ago when a Texas news program exposed Yahoo chat as having a lot of child abuse related room titles. After the story aired, advertisers canceled their campaigns in droves. So Yahoo pulled the user created rooms.

The NY AG investigated the matter, and Yahoo announced that if they ever do bring back the user created rooms that all room names will be monitored by Yahoo staff.

Pretty simple stuff.

I tend to believe them...Out of the user created ones in some sections...i'd say 80% were around KP. We had bots in there and in the romance section especially...and imagine the teen section...just pure KP.

Glad to see that they're doing this. It was a little out of control

-- the one employee they assign this task will get overwhelmed and just give boilerplate responses to complaints like every other abuse complaint form.

-- yahoo will make some "safe use of chat" article that nobody will ever read.

-- yahoo will donate less than one days worth of profit from yahoo chat

:1orglaugh

80% ? cmon now , i never even seen one. i had seen like " teen girls who like to flash" rooms and such , but those are teen boys starting them i assume.. all those rooms are for bots anyways.. and that wont change without mods , and that costs money and they just wont do it..

80% in the teen and romance sections....


And i count the ones that done have direct titles when the only girls in there are under 18 and all guys are 30+

I couldnt disagree with you more on this one...

Like i have never seen rooms like this before , maybe once or twice , but those are like one fat horny guy starting them and nobody goes in them.. i suppose its bad , but then again i never went into "schools and education" room or "teen" etc

The last paragraph made me laugh , it reminded me of the southpark episode with cartman going into a chatroom and asking for older men to be his friend , and his chat service lights up ith like 50 messages.. one guy says " im 8 inches " and cartman says " midgets piss me off "

you could be right about that i never really went in those rooms so i never got to see what user created rooms there were . guess i just assumed it wasn't..

We had bots that spidered essentially and went into all rooms with keywords...it recorded all convos for the purpose of training our bots to seem real. It was all 30 year old dudes scamming on young chicks. Our bots were "18-21"....

but those guys didnt care if it was 16, 18, 21...

i mean...its the old saying....

"If you could have sex with the hottest 15 year old who looked 20 and nobody would know...would you?"

That poll was in a magazine 3 years ago...something like 70 something percent of men surveyed said yes.....internet is totally anonymous so its even more escalated.

It really brings up a good debate because i tend to think that some guy chatting with a girl online is a victimless crime if the girl wants to for fun.....but when it goes beyond cyberspace then there is a problem and its too hard to differentiate. So thats why they have to do this in my opinion

my :2 cents:

sooooooo many bots now

it's very 2k1 style :upsidedow

even a couple years back you could often find hot horny 18-20 year olds with a few minutes of skillfull surfing.. .

then the people recording told many of the regulars and the word on that got out so many hotties vaporized.. .

they probably went to their own chats and only had people they know etc.. .

I can't say that i know for sure it has been months at least since I went there but that last time I did get hit VERY hard by the spam bots... .

This place awc

promote it here, now!

I actually rockin the Men's Niche t-shirt from Winter Internext right now. :thumbsup

Bwaahahahahahahahah

i am on yahoo almost everyday and i personal saw many user-created rooms for underage sex.
so... u apparently weren't looking hard enough :disgust

*edit* whoa... not implying that i was though. i found them by accident.

cheers!

I still do visit some chat rooms to view some shows.