Fixing Yahoo Messenger in Pidgin in Windows and Ubuntu 8.04

If you've tried to log into your Yahoo Messenger account with the Pidgin instant-messaging application on any of the many platforms on which the latter runs, it hasn't worked.

It seems that Yahoo is upgrading/reconfiguring its servers, leaving Pidgin users with non-working Yahoo Messenger accounts when accessed through the IM client that brings together the instant-messaging accounts of everything from Google Talk and AIM to Yahoo Messenger and MSN, plus a few more I haven't heard of.

For a few days I used the Yahoo IM client built into Yahoo Mail. I'm somewhat fond of Yahoo Mail and its IM feature, and I do use it from time to time, but I like having the option of using all my IM accounts in one app.

To fix the problem in the Windows version of Pidgin, I first changed one of the server names in the configuration. That didn't work. In Windows, DON'T DO THIS.

Instead, go to the Pidgin site and download the latest version of the app. That will fix the Yahoo issue.

In Linux/Unix, different distributions are handling the problem differently. Some are pumping new versions of Pidgin through their repositories, and those should show up in the updates on your system.

But in Ubuntu 8.04 — the LTS (long-term support) version of Linux, unless you want to install a new version of Pidgin manually, you'll just have to fix the old one.

Luckily it's easy (I figured it out from this Softpedia page):

Once you're running Pidgin (the version in Ubuntu 8.04 is Pidgin 2.4.1 in case you wanted to know), in the menu, click Accounts, then mouse down to your Yahoo account, mouse over to Edit Account and left-click it.

Then click on the Advanced tab, and under Pager server, if you have this:

scs.msg.yahoo.com

Change that line to read this:

cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com

That's right, just add cn. to the beginning of this line, then click Save, and the fix is done.

I don't know if you necessarily must quit and reload Pidgin to make the fix work, but that's what I did. Once I saved my change, I went to Buddies - Quit to kill Pidgin, then I restarted it from the menu.

For now, at least, Pidgin is working with Yahoo Messenger buddies. I'll report back if that changes.

As far as fixes go, this is a minor one.