I have been having awful problems with Yahoo lately. Any suggestions?

Answered by: Oregilby

On your Yahoo Bridge session, it usually pours. For what it is worth, I had terrible problems three or so months ago and they do seem to have straightened out. I think about half the time the problems are at your end and the other half the time the problems are at the Yahoo end (roughly).

It is probably not your hardware or it would never work. So it is (a) in your connection, or (b) in what Yahoo is putting out that moment.

I found it helpful to totally back out of Yahoo and the Net, restart my computer, and log on again. This worked about a third of the time. I think the question asked about servers really concerned your ISP ... internet service provider. Very often they are really overloaded at peak times. They laminate responses by breaking the lines up and sending multiplex messages that are unscrambled and allocated to appropriate users. If you are downloading, say, a picture this works fine, just a little slower. If you are playing an interactive game it does not. So who your ISP is and how they handle busy times could be a big clue to your problems.

I use AOL and they have multiple numbers here in Portland. I have found that shifting access numbers will work about 15% of the time.

Finally, try asking for Yahoo's help ... they deal with these issues all the time. Usually you get kind of a cookie-cutter response (a long one, too) but in all that gobbledygook there may be something that works.

I think you can take some comfort from the fact that many of us have experienced these difficulties and in ways we do not understand have "healed" and pull cards and taking losing finesses and go down in doubled contracts with alacrity.