It appears that there is a good possibility that the Yahoo! chat rooms will be back online sometime in the future but at what cost? Yahoo announced on Thursday [http://www.aunty-spam.com/yahoo-chat-rooms-you-must-be-over-18-now/] that only users 18 or older will have access to the chat rooms. In addition the “Teen” chat channel has been closed and the chats will now be patrolled for sexually explicit content regarding minors [http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3556196]. This comes after an agreement with both Kansas and New York’s Attorney General Offices to control the content in Yahoo! chat rooms [http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2005/oct/oct12a_05.html].

Getting the Yahoo! chats back will be a big step in getting Yahoo! back to normal. If you have not been in the rooms lately, they are quite simply DEAD. During the traditionally busiest times when at one time you could simply sign on and have unlimited conversations, now you are hard pressed to find a halfway decent conversation for hours. I don’t know how much Yahoo! depends on their chat rooms for revenue, but I am sure that the financial people have been screaming bloody murder the past few months. With the new no under 18 restriction, I have a feeling that Yahoo! is cutting off 80% of their users. Not to say that people will not just lie about their age, but this may create a huge bump in the road for Yahoo! From what I can see, teens are the primary users of Yahoo! for one simple reason, price. Most of the other sites charge money for their services which is an age deterrent in itself. Should Yahoo! just give up and close its doors now that the new restrictions are in place?

In somewhat related news, Yahoo! and Microsoft unveiled plans to merge their user base [http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1956]. Similar to Trilian, now Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft MSN users will now be able to IM each other form their native applications.

Way back when I had Messenger 6.0 I came across a fairly unique add-on to Yahoo! Messenger that added the “join user in chat” function that was taken away in the migration from 5.0 to 6.0. The program simply consisted of a file that replaced a Yahoo! DLL and re-enabled the join user in chat function. Once I upgraded to 7.0 the program of course did not work and I started my search for a replacment. At long last I have found it and not only does it add the join user in chat, it also adds view webcam and much more that has been missing since the days of 5.0. The add-on is called Yahoo Messenger 7.0 Menu Update 3.5 and is discussed at WackyB [http://www.wackyb.com/zzub/index.php?s=972c7e6861367d7cae002fb4700ff342&showtopic=7835]. The executible is mirrored at Jesters Jungle [http://galileo.spaceports.com/~jester26/yahoo.html] Thank you very much vb_packets for such a fine program and thank you even more for sharing it with the world.

A secondary program that may be of use to some is Yahoo Multi Login for 7.0.0.437 [http://www.wackyb.com/zzub/index.php?showtopic=8587], mirror at Jesters Jungle [http://galileo.spaceports.com/~jester26/yahoo.html]. This program, as the name implies, will allow you to run more than one instance of Yahoo! Messenger at a time.

In other news it is rumored that Yahoo! Messenger 7.0 brings a new protocol with it. The default standard is YMSG12 but 7.0 is YMSG13. I have just been too lazy to confirm or invistigate this myself. When the latest Messenger come out one of my first thoughts was “I wonder if this has a new protocol?” 7.0 behaves so much like 6.0 that I did not give it a second thought. I came across a thread at http://bot-depot.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=48425& which showed that apparently there is a new YMSG13. Very minor changes are made to YMSG12 and apparently the change was brought about because of the new voice features. This will require more investigation indeed.