Chat

All versions of Yahoo! Messenger have included the ability to access Yahoo! Chat rooms. On June 19, 2005, with no advance warning, Yahoo! disabled users' ability to create their own chat rooms. The move came after KPRC-TV in Houston, Texas reported that many of the user-created rooms were geared toward pedophilia. Many regulars in these rooms used the rooms to set up meetings to have sex with children and trade lewd pictures. While it was thought this move came as a result of several advertisers pulling their ads from Yahoo!, a more likely cause was a $10 million lawsuit filed by watchdog groups of internet portals on behalf of a 12-year-old victim of molestation.[11].

Yahoo! has since closed down the chat.yahoo.com site (which is now a redirect to a section of the Yahoo! Messenger page) because the great majority of chat users accessed it through Messenger. In August 2007, it began requiring word verification in order to use Yahoo! Chat. Officially, this is to guard against spammers and automated bots, which had been a source of frustration for many chatters (This method has proved highly unsuccessful, as many rooms now have more bots than users). However, as this also logs users' IP addresses, this feature could presumably be used to monitor against the type of behavior that prevailed in the pedophilia-oriented rooms. The company claims to be still working on a way to allow users to create their own rooms while providing safeguards against abuse.

As of November 2008, Yahoo's inability to control chat bots and spammers continues to be a major issue. Over 90% of all chat messages, even in supposedly family oriented chat rooms like genealogy, appear to be originated by automated spam bots spewing solicitations for adult activities, web cams and pictures.

On October 16, 2008, the Yahoo! Profiles community rolled out a new “beta” profile network with no prior announcement. According to customer feedback, the new profiles now resemble a “stripped-down version of MASH.”

This unexpected move resulted in hundreds of thousands of existing profiles being cleared of all information and images.