AllTopix.com Attempts to Step Into the Breach Left by the Closure of Yahoo Chats to Teens   10/16/2005 - 1,244 views,

AllTopix (AllTopix.com) is an online teen forum which has taken it upon itself to take the place of Yahoo Chat, now that Yahoo Chat is no longer available to those under 18 years of age. Yahoo announced last week that it was closing all of its chat rooms to anyone under the age of 18, following an investigation by and agreement with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Here’s what AllTopix has to say about it:

“AllTopix.com, a teenager community, launches “Ex-Yahoo! Chat Users Re-connection Program” after Yahoo! closes all chat rooms to anyone under eighteen.

(PRWEB) October 17, 2005 — AllTopix.com, a teenager community, launches “Ex-Yahoo! Chat Users Re-connection Program” after Yahoo! closes all chat rooms to anyone under eighteen.

“We understand Yahoo! is trying to protect children and teens, but instantly disabling a teen’s favorite to chat makes things simply worse. We at AllTopix.com believe the right move would be adding chat advice areas and employing chat room moderators to protect kids and teens.”, Mr. Hilders (AllTopix Community Manager) said.

Speaking of chat room moderation, Mr. Hilders may be right, as everybody who frequently visits Yahoo! chat rooms knows about chat issues such as “sexual content” and “extreme dating”.

“Companies like Yahoo! have enough money. They (Yahoo!) could even outsource chat moderators to save some money. Kicking teens out of the Yahoo! chat will simply result in new account creations with fake profiles.

Teenagers will -sooner or later- find a new place (and maybe a more dangerous place) to chat and that’s where the problems begin. Imagine one million teenagers in thousands of chat rooms.

Closing the Yahoo! Chat to teens will result in additional workload for the police and other protecting agencies, as they (the authorities) do not know every single chat room provider.

The worst case scenario would be teenagers joining IRC chat rooms - simply because most of the IRC service providers don’t even try to protect a chatters privacy (hints at IP lookup / hostname lookup)”, Mr. Hilders added.

AllTopix.com, a teen community, invites all ex-Yahoo! chatters to meet at his community to find old Yahoo! chat friends.

“Kicking teenagers out of the Yahoo! chat rooms means destroying friendship. Many people don’t add chat friends to their “friends list” - simply because they meet inside the chat rooms.

That said, it will be a hard job to find old friends (since most Yahoo! teens will create a new nickname by providing wrong birthday details to be able accessing the chat rooms anyway) because their nick names have changed.”, Mr. Hilders added.