Few days back, as usual I was tired… bored and thought of killing time so I fired up Y! Messenger and logged in and straightway went to chat rooms…and voila… I was shocked… each and every category I saw… Computer and Internet, Gujarat Global Chat, Gaming, etc was flooded with users. Each room was running on top of its capacity. Instantly I came to know that some massive and pretty smart Bot-Net was in action and was playing Havoc on Y!’s network. Infact there were some funny side effect(This is an assumption, I am not sure about it though), I was getting random users in my Y! popped up and some other random users were seeing me signing in ie even though I was not in their list, they got the notification when I logged in and logged out. It was funny… and not-so-funny for Y!. However within few days this got fixed and I was relaxed. I really don’t like strangers asking me question how I popped up on their screen..and for that matter you also will not really like that. So actually I had to log out as it was virtually impossible to locate the room with real people… everywhere there were BOTS and I sighed.. and signed off…
And today… right now I logged in again to the Y! chat and I see one new one-inch punch from Y! for all the spammers and BOTs. No it is not some kind of Digital Martial Art, its a technology that is in use from quite a time and very popular among Web 2.0 outcomes – CAPTCHA. Y! has introduced CAPTCHA for Chat Rooms so whenever you try to go to any of the Chat Room it gives you a link to open when you open this link it presents you a nice interface to enter CAPTCHA information and once you do it successfully it allows you to enter and I must tell you it is working really fine now I see rooms much cleaner then they were ever used to be. And though it looks pretty lame to go to a web browser window before you actually can sign into a Windows based application but for what it is worth, I must say it works like a charm. Though I was wondering maybe this browser based authentication is meant to provide support to non-Y! Messenger chat clients like Trillian(Oh! Only I know how much eager I am for Trillian Astra!), YahELite, Pidgin(formerly known as Gaim) etc.Lets hope that soon they will have some built-in mechanism so atleast you can enter CAPTCHA in the chat client itself and enjoy Y! Chat Rooms.
