Another thing to keep in mind. Over the last 9 months, Yahoo has been revamping their servers. What seems to be happening is that if you are logged in, but are not talking to anyone, and are just sitting on desktop with no activity, then after a certain period of time (and I haven't yet been able to pinpoint the time yet), yahoo will log you off for inactivity.
This has never been a problem in the past. Users could literally stay logged in all day without even being home. However, due to The yahoo messenger team, redoing chat from the ground up, I think this is the majority of the problem. As stated by Yahoo in an article in May of 2007, they are working to get rid of the bots in a room, so maybe this could have something to do with the "logging off" process. I do know that it doesn't matter what version of messenger you're on, it seems to happen to everyone. It also does happen if you're sitting in a room talking away and then poof, you're logged off. This does NOT happen as frequently as when the person is not doing anything in messenger but is just logged in. Below is an excerp from the article, and the link to the entire article follows below that "Stability: For the past year, we have worked on rebuilding the entire back end of the chat room system. The original chat room servers are over seven years old, fossils in the world of the internet. They have been re-written from the ground up and are already running in "alpha" mode in our data centers. They will be rolled out to our everyday chat rooms users in the next month. This will greatly improve the speed and stability of chat rooms in the short term. In the long term, it will enable us to continue improving our chat rooms more quickly and efficiently. Bots: In the next few weeks, we will begin rolling out new security measures to distinguish the humans from the machines. Humans are welcome, machines are not. The result will be a dramatic decrease in the number of "bots" that are spoiling chat rooms. Mac chat rooms: We are already beta testing a new version of Messenger for Mac that includes, among its many improvements, native support for chat rooms. Yes you read it correctly, native support for Mac chat rooms! Client software is tricky, of course, and sometimes the "bug fixing" takes longer than we anticipate. But we believe it is more important to have a delay and get it right, than to rush and make a mistake. Like the chat rooms team, the Mac team is a small one, but they make up for it with their talents. As a Mac user myself, I am very glad that we continue to actively support such a great platform as the Mac OS. We appreciate your patience while we get this next version ready." http://blog.messenger.yahoo.com/blog/2007/05/25/chat-rooms-state-of-the-union/ I guess we shall wait and see.
