* break the batch uploadr in an effort to quickly release the new UI: check
* don't respond to features in Google Photos people care about: check
Everything they did to Flickr since Mayer's takeover has been half baked. They concurrently had the new UI and the old one, but most damning of all as another user mentioned was the impossible miserable sign in process.
That was it for me. After this I couldn't login because of a combination of Yahoo's convoluted username+password requirements and their broken password recovery process. I gave up after multiple attempts over a couple of years. I mentally filed 'Yahoo' under 'corporate dysfunction'.
After exhausting those two options it sends you to the yahoo help website. The first page asks for your yahoo email address. I don't have a yahoo email address and one was never associated with my flickr that I am aware of.
I've tried but have no clue how I can access my own photos again. I'm a customer just sitting here begging to use their service again and they don't want me to.
This might help things if you mentioned it to them...
I know a bank that purposely reduce their Internet banking security. To cater for specific elderly customers who constantly forget their password. They are not going to force their customers to walk into the bank everytime.
These accounts are at a risk of getting hacked. It's called a tradeoff. As a bank, do you want customers or not? Do you like money or not?
As for the Yahoo situation. If they gave a shit about customer service: they can accept copies of drivers licence/passport signed off by a justice of peace.
> It's your (or your parents') responsibility to remember password or security answer, don't blame customer service for that.
It is, but it's customer service's job to help out the customers. Elderly people aren't known for great memory. It's got to be expected that people in general might not remember to update the account when they change a phone number, and might not remember the security answer that they provided years ago.
Yahoo on the other hand basically tells you "go fuck yourself." I literally had a Yahoo agent curse me on the phone after I asked for the supervisor. And then she hung up. I gave up on recovering my parents' yahoo account. Yahoo deserves the demise it suffered. Unlike the big 5, its processes are kludgy, even when it comes to customer service and people stuff. Good riddance.
They made their service unusable for years as explained in the article and in many comments here. It's not uncommon to change email address over a period of year, and that's for places where we tend to keep addresses around China is a totally different approach. With the lack of option to recover access to your account you are now locked out of your data. This would not happen with other third party service provider hosting your data.
But as always do have backupS and do not rely on third party for your data. Host it yourself and have a copy on those services. At least if you care about the data.
You don't know your password, don't know the associated phone number, and can't check the associated email. You're lacking every credential required for access, so WTF do you expect them to do that wouldn't also be a huge security loophole?
If you can call and get access, then anybody could call and get access, so they're erring on the right side here as far as I'm concerned.
Yahoo's handling of flickr push user away for years. do you remember the password of that email account you have not used for 5 years ? good not try to log in and discover that this address has been deleted or reclaimed by hotmail for being inactive.
Do you still have the phone number you had in 2005 ? chances are you have changed several times.
I don't even know most of my current passwords, I never give my phone number for privacy reason (still have about 2-3 telemarketers calls a day for having given it a few times in the past) and I usually can't check the associated email because I don't even remember which temporary email address service I used to register with your service to protect myself from the spam and reselling of my address.
I've learned a lot since the 90's and I trust the web services for exploiting, reselling any piece of info I may give them so everything is single use or fake, it has proven very effective at keeping annoyances at a very low level.
Funny that you would mention a potential security issue when yahoo's credentials and user data has been breached, twice.
Did you have a specific act in mind when you linked this to Mayer? They bought Flickr in 2005 and it's hard to think of anything positive which happened in the 5 years before she was involved.
yep. fta:
> Yahoo's RegID solution turned out to be a nightmare for the existing community.
It was such a pain for me to have to recover my old and never-used Yahoo account that I just quit using Flickr. Just like that.
By the time GPhotos launched, was there anybody still invested in the rotting carcass of Flickr? I bought Flickr Pro almost 10 years ago and immediately regretted my decision when they broke some blog-integration thing I relied on.