Back in August, Yahoo! decided to use word verification also called captcha, in order to fight bots in Yahoo! Chat. I suppose it was the most trivial solution available to them. It's a big annoyance to have to enter the distorted word each time you go to a room. It's a nightmare for room hoppers like myself.
If you regularly go in to one room or only a the same few rooms all the time then you shouldn't mind the captcha. When Yahoo first rolled it out, the rooms were emptier cleaner. And the common chatter was wondering what bot creators are doing now that captcha was keeping their bots from invading Yahoo! chat? Well they were getting prepared to fight back. Once they found a way around the captcha they must have praised Yahoo!'s name for allowing them to be even more present in the chat rooms than they've ever been in the past.
There were days when you would quickly change rooms when the one you landed in happened to be occupied by bots only. Now before you get into a room you say a quick prayer hoping that you wont land in a bot-only room. Because you fear having to go through captcha again, again and again before you feel tired of trying to chat and never being able to actually do it.
To know how the Yahoo chatters feel about the change read the comments to a blog post announcing the captcha on the Yahoo! messenger official blog.
I also left a comment there. If you don't want to leave my blog for the Yahoo messenger blog (I love you!) here's the comment I left there
"The latest commenters have summarized what Yahoo! chat room users have been experiencing, inconvenience with the captcha and annoyance with bots. Word verification is never fun but people accept to go through it when they feel that it’s helpful in fighting spam. Real people have to endure word verification every single time they want to go in a room (and not just once while entering Yahoo Chat which is how I think it should work), added to that they still have the same problem with bots. I didn’t like the captcha solution when the bots hadn’t yet found a way around it but since most chatters felt better to have clean rooms I cheered with them thinking the days of bot filled rooms were over. Unfortunately it’s not the case and I think that with the current situation there are two factors driving people away from Yahoo chat, the bots and the word verification. As I like to say, I’m a room hopper, when I chat I like to go from room to room doing that with the captcha is discouraging to say the least."
Image taken form blog.messenger.yahoo.com
