Today, I'm announcing the creation of an open project that welcomes all contributors of the Yahoo! Chat community, specifically Yahoo! Messenger users, for their cooperation and input. Having 3rd party Yahoo! Chat developers on-board would be all the merrier. This new project has one goal, and it's simple, to improve Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo!'s chat servers in any and every way we possibly can. While we don't have the source code to Yahoo! Messenger or their chat servers, we can still collect bugs, find glitches, and security vulnerabilities (which will be handled with higher priority, and some may need to be reported privately if they're of critical/severe nature) for categorization and submission to Yahoo!'s chat development team (Yahoo!'s Security and Privacy departments being applicable as well).
The Y!Mprovement project will be in the public domain, with the exception of privately disclosed security vulnerabilities of the aforementioned nature (only 'critical' or 'severe' natures need be private), for all to add to and for reference purposes in general. In essence, this will be the creation of a centralized, actively maintained, and reputable repository for bug tracking and for listing client/service improvements. The project will aim to cover LOTS of issues with the Windows version of the Yahoo! Messenger client, but will not be limited to just the client itself. Ideas/suggestions for improvement of existing Messenger features and reporting bugs/issues effecting the chat servers themselves are equally as welcome.
Implementation: The project can start here on our forums and branch out to it's own public Wiki and/or through a bug tracking system, such as Flyspray. Each issue reported will be verified accordingly (by myself and others) so it's able to be confirmed to exist within the proper environmental stimuli through the necessary means (steps/procedures) of reproduction. Each issue and improvement proposal will be categorized by type for organization. Priority scheduling can (and should) be used to rank importance of each confirmed issue/bug reported. For example, the audience affected will be of great importance due to the fact that some issues may be broader than others, such as issues pertaining to the chat servers themselves, which may globally apply to all Messenger versions and builds. These will be ranked higher on the "Needs Fixed" scale than client-specific bugs and issues in most cases, not necessarily all cases.
Goal: To improve (obviously) the most current version and build of Yahoo! Messenger and the Yahoo! chat system and network as a whole. Submissions concerning the client should only apply to the Windows US-based version of Yahoo! Messenger. Bugs dating years back that still exist can and should be listed, preferably first, as well as any new ones discovered. Reported issues can range from slightly annoying to extremely severe, both in the context of security, privacy, and client<->network operation (ie. a crippling bug that needs to be addressed by the Messenger development team).
Procedure/Steps for Reporting: All volunteers can report issues to the list. Including as many details as possible would be strongly appreciated. Hunting for new/unknown bugs independently, or jointly, would be extremely helpful. I will do much of this on my own and will collaborate with whomever, which, in fact, is strongly encouraged. A forum will be opened for users to start listing bugs and the issues they've found and isolated. After a sizable amount of bugs have been reported I will confirm each one, if possible, to make sure they're verifiable and able to be reproduced by Yahoo!'s development team for fixing. Any volunteer is welcome to try and confirm the issues themselves and report back to the forum with the results.
Lastly, if you are a technical user, researcher, or developer, feel free to include a proposed fix/solution to each issue you've reported. By doing the grunt work for Yahoo!, it will potentially make this project that much more useful to them as a valuable resource. The bugs will have already been identified, isolated, confirmed, and listed with/without additional proposed solutions to fix them.
Messenger feature and service improvement suggestions will be handled separately since they will be lower priority to Yahoo!'s development team, I can assure you of this. They've never been too good about taking user feedback into account regarding new features and improvements but collecting and aggregating many bugs into a single reference point (open document project model) is something that I believe will be much more successful. Rather than receiving scant, scattered, mostly publicly unverified reports from random chat users, we will have and maintain the master list of all that are known and newly discovered with the required existence confirmation procedure already handled for them.
-Each reported issue must have reproduction steps attached upon submission so they can be investigated and verified by myself and other project volunteers.
-Platform details such as your operating system version and edition (32/64-bit), service pack, and other relevant environmental details must also be included.
I will open the Y!Mprovement Project's forum immediately so we can start building a good foundation of issues that need to be addressed by Yahoo!'s respective departments. Hopefully, our list will grow and serve as an important asset to the Yahoo! Chat team for improving, and above all, actually fixing these issues with their client and servers. We ALL could benefit from this project, not just YTK users, but everyone using the entire Yahoo! Chat network, regardless of the operating system, and of course the (Windows) Yahoo! Messenger users directly. 8)
If the forums are down, which recently they've been quite unreliable (more on this later), you can alternatively e-mail me your bug or improvement suggestions directly. You may e-mail me them here --> security@ytkpro.com ~Text files ONLY!
Let the Collaboration Begin!! ;D