I just noticed the abnormality with Pidgin 2.5.5 (running on Debian) these few days — I couldn’t connect my Yahoo messenger account at all. According to the discussion of Bug #389278 it appears that Yahoo was trying to change its protocol.
A quick way to have Pidgin connecting to Yahoo messenger server again is to change the Pager server setting for the Yahoo account in Pidgin.
To do this, from Pidgin:
- Manage Accounts (Ctrl + A)
- Select the Yahoo account from the list (assuming you’ve set one up before), and click Modify
- Click on Advanced tab, under the Yahoo Options, in the Pager server field replace scs.msg.yahoo.com with cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com
Try to connect to Yahoo messenger server again. It worked for me.
Credit: Bug #389278 in pidgin (Ubuntu)
Update:
Please cosider upgrade your Pidgin to version 2.5.7. I just upgraded mine and the problem seems to have gone away. Don’t forget to change the Page Server back to scs.msg.yahoo.com.