So, lots of people using third-party IM clients noticed last week that their Yahoo connectivity broke.  This is because Yahoo discontinued older versions of their client protocol, and this broke a lot of third-party apps that used those versions of the protocol, notably multi-IM apps.  Pidgin and Carrier (a branch of Pidgin) are notable examples of cross-platform open source multi-protocol IM apps that were broken with this.

I’ve personally gotten spoiled and lazy from Carrier (and Trillian before that), having one app that I can use for most of the IM services I use all together, not having to hassle with multiple seperate clients (though occasionally I’ve loaded up a distinct client for specific features that Carrier doesn’t support – but for just general, chatting with people, having 1 app to use is nice).  Having one of the core points of functionality broken on Carrier has been an irritant for me the last several days.

Pidgin already released a 2.5.7 upgrade, which fixes the Yahoo issues.  Carrier has a 2.5.7 release in work on the SVN, but for most people, trying to checkout/download files from the SVN, get all the stuff together to compile the code yourself, build the installer, etc., is just way too much work.  There’ll probably be a new installer for Windows out for Carrier 2.5.7 sometime this week.

Until then, if you happen to use Carrier and want to fix your Yahoo . . . there’s a pretty simple fix – you can snag the new libyahoo.dll from Pidgin 2.5.7 and overwrite the one in Carrier 2.5.5, and it seems to restore Yahoo functionality.  Here’s a download for just the libyahoo.dll, zipped up for easy management (since you can’t easily install Pidgin to get it out without messing up your Carrier install): libyahoo.zip

Unzip the libyahoo.dll and overwrite your current one (the new one Will be smaller than the one in Carrier 2.5.5), in your Carrier/plugins/ folder – make sure Carrier isn’t running when you do that.  Start up Carrier, and you should connect to Yahoo again.