Fortunately there are some third party tools and chat clients available that you can use in such situations to protect yourself and to have some extra fun.
YaHaven!
Yahaven is anti-boot, anti-flood third party Yahoo! Chat Client. Yahaven has Chat, IM, Voice and Webcam. All the features of official Yahoo and then some more. Such as flood protection and boot protection. It also has effecient ignore filters. What I personally liked about Yaheven is that it has Custom messages. When pressed these buttons you send a text message to the room. These messages can be edited. For example, when I select a user from user list and press custom message one it says:
%s >> hi how are you today? %s is the nick of the user.
YaHaven is a bit complicated. With all these extra features it could be a little difficult for a new user to get it working right. But once you get it working, you will be amazed by performance.
YahElite
YahElite is a feature rich Yahoo Chat Client. It is around for sometime now and is widely used. It promises better spam, flood and boot protection.
YahElite has an easy to use interface but it is so feature rich that the buttons for all these features may confuse a new user. But don’t worry YahElite has better support and help options available on their website. They have tutorials, forums, FAQs and contact options under the help menu on the official website.
There is something interesting and totally new with YahElite. Its called Personalitys. Loadable personalitys are simple text files that contain patterns that transform your text into another form that can be dramatically different from your normal speech. You can create different personalitys and even share them with others. Read official instructions.
Pidgin
Pidgin, (previously Gaim) is an open source universal chat client that not only supports Yahoo but also MSN, Gtalk, AIM, ICQ, IRC and countless other protocols. The downside is that it does not support voice and webcam. You can join Yahoo Chat rooms but there will be no voice, no audio conferencing and no video chat. It also does not have any extra spam features to protect you from PM floods. But if you just want to text message then Pidgin is a great tool to chat with friends on different protocols at once.
YAM (Yet Another Messenger)
YAM Chat Client is my favorite third party Yahoo Chat Client. It does not support webcam but it fully supports voice and audio in Chat rooms. It also has a very easy to use interface and all the features are easy to understand and easy to use. It also has very nice sound effects and has themes support. It lacks web cam support and while other chat clients open word verification CAPTCHA right there in the chat window YAM opens it in new browser window.
These third party chat clients are fun but if you want to use the official Yahoo Messenger then there are some tips that you can use to protect yourself from abuse, spam, flood and booting. We will discuss these tips in the next post. Meanwhile, please let us know if there is some other yahoo chat clients you have tried and found useful.
