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Old 04-26-2004, 09:08 PM
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zhugeliang zhugeliang is offline
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Exactly. Basically, the servers act as a proxy server. Because of the way that chat rooms work, all messages are sent to the yahoo server and then forwarded to everyone in the room. It would cause a lot of problems to have all the messages sent in a chatroom go p2p to every user in the room directly from each other. Not only that, but you'ld also get the "IRC wars" that happen on IRC (where users boot each other by flooding a persons IP address with pings and DoS attacks) in order to take over a room. Granted you still have that in a way, with the booters, but there are 3rd party chat clients that help to deal with that problem. I hope this helps, if you have any more questions, feel free to ask! ^_^