Online or offline on Yahoo Messenger?

[protesto]

Many people nowdays prefer to stay offline while using Yahoo! Messenger - mostly done to avoid someone. There are many ways of finding people who are online but yet invisible:

First Method: Doodle Method

1. Double Click on the user whose status you want to check.

2. A message window will open.

3. Click IMVironment button, select See all IMVironments, select Yahoo! Tools or Interactive Fun, and click on Doodle.

4. The last step and the most important step. After loading the Doodle IMVironment, there will be two possibilities.

a) If the user is offline, the Doodle area will show "waiting for your friend to load Doodle" continuously.

If the user is online (in invisible mode), after few seconds (it can take up to one minute, depending on connection speed), you will get a blank page. So the user is online!


Second Method: Voice Chat Method

1. Double Click on the user whose status you want to check.

2. Click on "Voice" icon on the toolbar, or select "Contact" menu and select "Enable Voice Chat" .

3. The deciding part... there are 2 possible results:

a) If the user is offline, you will get this message: "Internal server error. Cannot obtain voice token to start voice chat."

If the user is invisible (actually online), you will see the Voice Toolbar.

Third Method: Conference Invitation

1. Right Click on the user whose status you want to check.

2. When the menu appears, select Invite to Conference.

3. A window will appear. See at the right pane, the username you selected will be there. Now, click Invite.

4. The deciding part... there are 2 possible results:

a) If the user is offline, you will get this message: "None of the users in the invite list are available to join the conference. Please try at a later time."

If the user is invisible, you will get a window similar saying: "You are now logged into voice conference "

Fourth and the best Method: Buddy Spy

1. Get Buddy Spy

2. Go to configure and enter your login details.

3. Now go to Buddy Spy option and enter the username you want to track. You can also check multiple ids also.

Not only Buddy Spy tells the status of Chat but also Room Chat and WebCamera status of that user also!

4. You can edit other options through Scan Options menu.

(Note: Buddy Spy will automatically logout you of yahoo! messenger if running since yahoo! messenger supports only 1 login. To enable multi logins you need a Multi login patch for Yahoo! Messenger. Search Google for them.)

Link to original post:
Amit Patil: Offline or Online on Yahoo Messenger

[tim2679]

This is old information that most people already know. Also Buddy Spy does
not work right anymore after Yahoo changed the way the P2P works. This
also includes all of the other Online Checkers that use the P2P to check
someone's online status.

[niq6566]

The above mentioned methods (except Buddy Spy, which does not work properly at the moment as Tim said) will show you if the user is offline or invisible.
Nevertheless, if a user is invisible, they will notice what you are doing.
If somebody has already set you on permanently invisible or is logged in as invisible,they will have a good reason for doing so, and it is likely that they won't be too happy about frequent conference invites etc. popping up on their screen.
Speaking for myself, i would delete somebody from my list or even put them on ignore if they did that too often to me.

[Oreo]

I completely agree Niq...besides, if some one goes to ALL of those lengths just to see if some one else is online...that's just sad. I mean, get a clue...things like that almost amount to stalker-like behaviour IMO.

[Dermot]

1. Doodle will load if the person is online or offline and imv's can be disabled.
2. If person you call for voice/call dont answer it goes to voicemail or just loads voice in old builds
3. If a person dont accept and leaves conference invite on screen you join conference alone and these invitatiosn can be disabled.
4. Buddyspy does not work, see http://www.buddyspy.com

Yahoo! does not want its members openly available to stalkers or online predators reasons for them disabling a lot of features that were been used maliciously.