Yahoo! Closes User Created Chat Rooms

karvind writes "Chatmag News reports that Yahoo! has disabled all the User-created Chat rooms. According to Yahoo's chat log page:'The ability to publish user-created chat rooms in the public Yahoo! Chat directory is currently unavailable. We are working on improvements to this service to enhance the user experience and compliance with our Terms of Service'. This may be true but Yahoo! is also facing a $10 million lawsuit that accuses it of cashing in on some disturbing chat rooms. The companies are paying huge fees for their ads to appear on Yahoo!. But many are now canceling those ads because of the report."

Comments

Re:who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares what you think anyway either.

This is really too bad,

[Adult film producer]

Yahoo chat as its described in the story is about as close to efnet irc for people that want voice+chat as there ever was... it was chaotic, crazy, tons of people from all over the world.. what made it special imho was the lack of authority any person could have in chat rooms, there was no way to /kick a person. If enough regulars in a room were sick & tired of hearing someone scream into the microphone, there was a threshold 9-12 people that would have to ignore that person so they couldn't be heard anymore... it was really a democracy in chat.

ya, there were some disturbing chat rooms... the "school & education" user created section was full of "young boyz for dads", "preteen girls looking for fun" type of shit.... there were also lots of arabic rooms that the Al Queada may have been hanging out in, I can't really be sure because most were in arabic font.. very cool stuff.

the only other realistic option for voice chatting is Paltalk imho but there's way too many wanna-be-mini-dictators running chatrooms on their servers, there's just too much authority and their foul language policy is just fucking absurd.

Re:I have no sympathy for the family

[agent dero]

omfg liek wtfwtf, think of teh childran!!!!!11 lol hahah jk jk

Shows you what $10,000 U.S. will get you

[micheas]

From the article:

"Short of changes in the law in Congress, we may be limited about what we can do in this area," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said.

Gonzales told the station he can't use the laws now on the books to shut down Yahoo!'s child sex site. But back in 2002, the station broke the story when federal officials shut down a Web site called "Candyman" with those existing laws.

The "Candyman" site was geared only toward trading child sex pictures and stories, just like the Yahoo! rooms.

Call me cynical but I was suprised to find out that Yahoo! had given a mere
$10,000 to the Republican National Committe, and an equal amount to the Democratice National Committe.

Personally, I suspected larger more frequent donations were required to keep the current administration paid off.

Unless, Alberto Gonzales is allowing Kiddie Porn to further his own political agenda. Personally, I hope that the current administration is just cheap. The alternative of the Bush administration not prosecuting kiddie porn because it will make a new bill easier to get passed, ... do I even need to go on?