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.

CamTrack 2.5 Free 30 days Trial and $14.95 to buy.

CamTrack 2.5 lets you add video effects, text and images to your webcam video chat. But the plus point of CamTrack 2.5 is not the cool animations but the feature of “Face Tracking”. Face tracking automatically locates your face in the video image and zooms in on it, keeping your face centered in the middle of the frame at an optimal size.

CamTrack also allows you to zoom in and out. Combine this feature with face tracking and you never need to adjust your webcam with your hands. you can do it with your keyboard and mouse.

ManyCam Free

A free software, ManyCam allows you to use your webcam with multiple programs which means that you can use your webcam with Yahoo, MSN, Skype and Google Talk simultaneously.

ManyCam allows you to add text to your webcam stream. You can use display images or create a slideshow of images from your computer and broadcast it to your webcam. You can play videos on your webcam. I have used this feature to share a birthday video with my aunt on yahoo. Using Manycam and yahoo voice chat it was fun to share the video with this new way. I mean of course I can upload the video to youtube but it was a huge file and I didn’t have time.

Using Manycam you can create many effects like change the color, brightness and contrast of your webcam. Add visual effects to your webcam there are some really cool effects built in and they are a lot of fun. You can rotate and zoom in or out of your webcam video.

If you know of someother cool software please let me know. I want to make my Yahoo chat more fun. I am also looking for software to change the voice make it girly, high pitched or childish.