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About Yahoo Chat Rooms

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Related Tags: chat | yahoo | rooms | bots | messenger

Instructions

The Facts

Step 1:
If it's been a while since you've been in a Yahoo chat room, you may remember being able to get in via a Yahoo website. That's changed.

Now, you have to have a Yahoo messenger account and download the program in order to chat. However, Yahoo makes it easy for you. You just have to go to messenger.yahoo.com/ to choose a screen name and set up an account or to upload the newest version if you have an older one. Once you've done that, you can access the chat rooms by going to the "Messenger" menu at the top of your messenger window and choosing "Yahoo Chat."

Type

Step 1:
Your main two choices are text-based chat rooms or voice chat rooms. There are more topics under the text-based chat rooms than there are for voice chat rooms.

If you're doing text chat, the menu of rooms is organized by topic. For instance, you can browse the topics in "Cultures & Communities" to find others who share a common interest in a second language or to debate hot topics. You can look through the "Romance" topic to find others who are interested in finding a date, either by specific interest or by location. Or, you can go to the "Regional" menu to find people from your state or even your specific city if you want to talk about upcoming elections, fun things to do or other hyper-local issues.

Benefits

Step 1:
The benefits of joining a yahoo chat room are that you can find someone to talk to on just about any topic, no matter how obscure- for instance, under "Business & Finance" there are rooms where you can discuss Asian markets or Biotechnology. You can also find people nearby who want to hang out or hit a club with you, debate religion and politics or get new insights about your hobby.

Features

Step 1:
Most of the chat rooms are text-based, but there's also a menu item for voice-based chat as well. You'll need a fairly high-quality microphone to enjoy the voice-based chat rooms.

For the text-based chat rooms, you can watch the general conversation and add comments. You also have the ability to send or receive private messages and have one-on-one conversations via the messenger if you find someone in the chat room that you click with.

Additionally, when you look at the list of users who are in the chat room with you, you'll see a little smiley face next to their name. If you mouse over it, it'll tell you if the user is active or idle. If she has stepped away for a minute or two, a pop-up window will say "Idle- 2 minutes." If the smiley face has a headset, that person is able to do voice chat. If the smiley face is square with antenna on top, that means the person has an active web cam.

Expert Insight

Step 1:
One of the annoying things about Yahoo chat rooms are "spam bots." These are automated accounts that will try to lure you to accessing another website by posing as a real chatter. They will try to get your attention by sending you a message. When you reply, they'll respond with something like, "Why don't you check out my website?" and then send you an address.

Yahoo has made an effort in recent years to try to cut down on the amount of spam bots you'll encounter in their chat rooms. It had gotten so bad at one point that more than half of the "users" in a chat room might be web cam girls inviting you to watch them perform. Recently, Yahoo has begun using a screening method to keep spam bots out. When you choose a chat room, it will ask you to click a link and then enter a series of letters and/or numbers to verify that you're a real person. This has cut down on the number of spam bots in chat rooms, but you may still counter a few from clever and persistent marketers.