Hello there fellow chatters of PL8. Here is what I have managed to find out regarding the yahoo fiasco - this information has been taken from the yahoo blog site, the yahelite forum site and another site which nitwit kindly pointed me to.

Yahoo servers have reached their maximum capacity therefore Yahoo decided to go ahead with their much needed server maintenance and updates. This is currently being done. One of the causes of the overload is the problematic bots which can create hundreds of Id's very quickly. In an attempt to resolve this apparently Yahoo are coralling the bots in the server space for the politics lobbys and will be running a catchum programme to erradicate them. They have also begun to alter their codes etc to enable them to block bots in future, however this has a knock on effect for third party chat clients like yahelite, cheetah chat, yimlite and yazak, the new yahoo cannot tell the difference between these and bots so all of the authors of these programmes have been toiling away like wee trojans to write programmes for us which will work - many thanks to their efforts.
One frustrating consequence of yahoo working on the servers is that we are currently frustrated in our efforts to join a room that we wish to join - this is because for the time being you will be put in the first available room within your topic of choice until that room is filled. This is a way to make new freinds but makes it bloody difficult to meet existing chat freinds. However, if you can manage to get there - we are managing to congregate in Washington Watch 5 - hope you make it - good luck and in the meantime use this space to post.