Remove Yahoo Messenger 8 advertisements

Yahoo! Messenger is a great instant messenger client. Well, not when it has annoying advertisements shown at the bottom of the screen. I don't mind seeing ads on websites, but I really hate adware, especially when its something that I use almost all day. Fortunately, there is a solution for almost every problem. Here's a batch file (.bat) that you can run to remove advertisements from Yahoo Messenger 8 and above.

Click here to download Yahoo Messenger Ad-Remove batch file. ymsgrads.bat (1.02 KiB, 1050 bytes)

Now the how-it-works part. Yahoo Messenger keeps the advertisement URLs in the Windows Registry and in a urls.xml file. The batch file creates a registry file (.reg) and executes it, which in turn puts a non-existent address (http://0.0.0.0) in place of all advertisement URLs. YMsgr tries to fetch advertisement from this address, which does not resolve, and the whole advertisement window is gone, without a trace.

If you feel unsafe to download and run a batch file from the internet, I've copied the contents of the file below. You can copy and paste it to notepad and save it as a batch file (.bat) and execute it.

@echo off
title Remove Yahoo Messenger 8 advertisements

> %temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo REGEDIT4
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo.
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Yahoo\Pager\YUrl]
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo "Messenger Ad"="http://0.0.0.0/"
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo "Webcam Upload Ad"="http://0.0.0.0/"
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo "Webcam Viewer Ad"="http://0.0.0.0/"
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo "Webcam Viewer Ad Big"="http://0.0.0.0/"
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo "Webcam Viewer Ad Medium"="http://0.0.0.0/"
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo "Change Room Banner"="http://0.0.0.0/"
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo "Conf Adurl"="http://0.0.0.0/"
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo "Chat Adurl"="http://0.0.0.0/"
>>%temp%.\ymsgrads.reg echo "Y Content"="http://0.0.0.0/"
regedit /S %temp%.\ymsgrads.reg
del %temp%.\ymsgrads.reg

attrib -r "%programfiles%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml"
echo "" >"%programfiles%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml"
attrib +r "%programfiles%\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\urls.xml"

ipconfig /flushdns

Enjoy instant messenging without annoying advertisements.