Since last week (27 Feb) Yahoo! yet again trying to stop spam bots at game lobbies but that didn’t work!

What’s new

When you enter to a Yahoo! Pool room ( i didn’t say any game room on Yahoo! cause it seems they didn’t apply this to all games like Mahjong solitare but it was at the first day) you will see new announcements which says;

If you are a new player you will see this announcement

if you are an old player you will see this announcement

Bugs:
The announcement continues spamming lobby after some time but i see that announce 12 in a row !
Make your pop up screen wide and narrow and you can see some parts of the announcement goes black from blue font

Yahoo! also added a Report Abuse button
to player information window for us to report abusers quickly. You have to double click on the spammer id from player list to reach this window. When you click on the report abuse button you will
see the report result at the lobby (only reporter (you) can see that)

What’s that mean

Simply you can not type anything at lobby till you become a trusted player. Well i didn’t figure it out yet but it seems you have to complete 5 games to able to type in lobby but i see bots still spams without played any game so it may be a login type solution like login 5 times ?. If you read my old post My basic idea about Yahoo! pool bots and spammers you will see that i did suggest this some time ago .

Will this stop the spam bots ?

No!

I was said, people have to play 50 rated games to type at lobby but Yahoo! chose 5 games which is not enough. I know my idea would not stop bots but it would take time for bots to complete 50 games but sure Yahoo! should stop boosters to help it. Now bots simply will play 5 games or non in 1 minute and will continue spammimg like hell

See how a zero game played bot spamming like hell after 5 days Yahoo! took action

I already reported this bot 3 days ago but it still in action.

Who we should report

Announcement says if you believe a player violating the Yahoo! Games Terms of Service ( such as advertising for another site ) report it. I couldn’t find Yahoo! Games Terms of Service but there are tons at
Yahoo! Terms of Services .

So i believe Yahoo should clarify this mess so you may know what behavior to report beside spammer bots. I believe some players will report who they think cheats. But Yahoo! says “It’s impossible for us to completely stop people from cheating. As a player, your best recourse is to ignore anyone you suspect of being dishonest.” You may read it here

What about other custom leagues except Yahoo! leagues ? like my league ? They are in all rooms and their staff spams rooms every minute for tourneys. This doesn’t bother me but i see people cursing to lg staff’s. They will report this innoncent stuff whom trying to help players to have fun and good time. Leagues actually helping Yahoo! by keep coming their players to Yahoo! rooms almost everyday.

About cursing; you shouldn’t report cause you got the option to ignore persons or can use strong filter from the options window.

Most players boot players from their tables for many reasons what if the booted person reports abuse ?

What about the bots which don’t spam a website address but says pics on profile, web cam etc ?

So Yahoo! Games team please clarify abuse, what we should report or not so you can stop having tons of non relevant reports everyday.

What this abuse reports says to Yahoo ?

What Yahoo! gets with the report ? How they can decide who is guilty who is not ? we need to know what the reports says to Yahoo!

I don’t know what they get but here is my idea about what should a report says

ID of the abuser
ID of the reporter
Tıme
Room name
Last 30 seconds logs of lobby to read what happened
Last game table logs of the abuser (if the reported player was playing a game)

I suggest Yahoo! to have an operator team to handle this reports . This team can have mature peoples whom never played games on Yahoo! or can have some trusted players so i can work . Don’t forget Yahoo! you are earning much money from us non All Star players!

What will happen to reported ID’s ?

Yahoo! should also clarify what’s the punishment ? What will happen if someones reported ? If you punish the innocent players, other people will hear that and you may lose many players cause of this. Oh by the way you already lost many players whom sick about cheaters!. I had an email short time ago whom saying she been banned from rooms till 2020. Of course i can not judge her cause i don’t know
what she did or if she deserve that or not.

What about the wrong reports ?
Yahoo! should do something about this persons too. This will help Yahoo! to have less and relevant reports everyday and this can stop immature persons to abuse the abuse report.

This example is not about wrong report but it is strange. If you have sub accounts will your main account gets punish ? or main and sub accounts too ?

Look at the screen shot below, i reported abuse about a bot called stussy411 and read the lobby to see which ID reported

What about fast spammers ?

If you are playing at Yahoo! Games for a long time you may know the fast spammer bots. If you don’t please read my blog post about it How to ignore fast yahoo pool room spammers. I don’t see this kind of spammers for a long time but i don’t sure if Yahoo! stopped this or spammers stop using it. If the bot owners are clever they will be back with this way and the players who don’t use Yahoo! Messenger will nothing to do. If you read my blog post you know how to stop this fast spammers with Yahoo! Messenger but Yahoo! has something to do. Yahoo! should make the ignore list unlimited.

So if you don’t use Yahoo! Messenger you have no change to report or ignore this fast bots. I have two ideas here but not sure if it is possible by coding side. If it’s possible Yahoo! can make the id’s at lobby clickable so we can click their ID’s even after they leave. Second thought is when someone leave a room,lounge hang their names in the room players list like 10 seconds so we can catch those enter spam leave kind fast spammers.

Hope Yahoo! wins this war soon so we may have clean lobbies like good old days

Yahoo! celebrated it’s 14th birthday at March 2, wow i’am getting older (but i feel 20) .They ask where were you in at 1995 at their blog, well i was in the army till August 1995 and age was 27 . I wasn’t have a computer at that time, i bought my first at April 1996 and it has a 12k modem . I met with Yahoo! at 1998 and Yahoo! Pool at 2000.

Check out the official page

If you care here is my blog post about History of Yahoo! Inc.

Happy Birthday

glad you are around.

こんにちは Japanese

Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 just released in Japanese . It doesn’t has the full features for now but i hope it is good to go.

See the features

Download Yahoo! Messenger 9 Japanese

Way to go Yahoo! Messenger Japan team

p.s: Hey Hatta hope it’s good for you and your people

One again good news for Mac lovers (i am one of em)

So lets see what’s new

- Performance and memory bug fixes (over three dozen).
- Clearer messaging when receiving anonymous messages from your Pingbox.
- A new message style called ‘Kobi lite’ . To try it out, go to Preferences > Messaging, then change the Conversation style.
- If you want to cancel automatic sign-in when you launch Yahoo! Messenger for Mac, hold down the shift key.
- When you report an IM as spam, it also adds the sender to your ignore list .

If you want to participate don’t hesitate to send your feedback

Download Yahoo Messenger for mac beta 3.0.

As you may read or see Yahoo! was finally back to fight with lobby spam bots a while ago . But that was a bad captcha (confirmation codes) which using six hard type (bold) letters to us to verify but i was having very hard times to read them on my 1920×1200 screen resulation , especially the bold fonts. That was a bad confirmation code for humans but it was no problem for the spam bots to solve so it didn’t effect them.

Now Yahoo! change the old one and have a new confirmation code .It has only 4 letters which can be read easier. If you still unable to read them Yahoo! add the audio code which is a good move.Of course this update means they got that humans can’t read the old confirmation code and it didn’t stop the bots.Oh and i know this new code will not stop bots also.

I saw some players using strange characters even in bold fonts in Yahoo! game lobbies. I was thinking script kiddies hacked something again but after Hatta’s comment (Thanks Hatta for your input) i realized that it may possible they are using some different language characters in global game rooms. Here how they look

This may look cute but Yahoo! Games team should really patch it before more users learn it and spam our lobbies like hell.

We got this kind of Yahoo! booter stuff from time to time but this one is worse and Yahoo! should patch it immediately.

Your opponent just boots you DURING THE GAME from the table and room. When you log back to room you’ll see that you lost that game and points. I don’t think that we can detect if our opponents has this booter before the game start . I suggest you don’t play with strangers for a while and you may join to a pool league cause they won’t have this kind of players in their leagues after someone use it one time.

Let Yahoo! know about this so they can find a solution immediately .

I was trying to edit one of my Yahoo! Id’s profile and discovered that it has changed. The new beta looks like web 2.0ish and has a guest book which people may leave comments. You can setup whom may see your profile. Bad thing is some players were putting poolskill.com to their cool websites area but now Yahoo! doesn’t allow to put web links in our profiles. Anyway if you want to keep supporting this site you can still mention it under anything else section.

Check and edit your Yahoo! profile

This small update is yet again about the ghost cue ball. Color changed to thin brown from bold yellow like the one we had at Yahoo! Pool update 22.

We were having only @yahoo.com email addresses till last week but if you want to create a new Yahoo! Account now you may see our new email addy options as @ymail.com or @rocketmail.com beside @yahoo.com .

You will still have unlimited email storage, integrated instant messaging, free text messaging, and localized versions around the world.You can use your new email as with all Yahoo! services as usual.

Read Official Press release
Get your new Yahoo! email