6 ms·

* make it impossible to sign in: check * break the batch uploadr in an effort to quickly release the new UI: check * don't respond to features in Google Photo

* make it impossible to sign in: check * 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.

randomsofr 9y ago
Also signup was a pain.
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
I want to use Flickr again but I don't have access to my Hotmail(!) account anymore. I don't even recognize the area code for the number they have on file for me. 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.
- jfktrey 9y ago
  To be fair, it seems like it would be very difficult to guarantee you own the account without access to your email or phone number.
  - goldenkey 9y ago
    They wouldn't even give my parents' account back when I offered to send pictures of their drivers license / social security cards / passport in. All because they forgot a dumb "secret answer" question. Yahoo has beyond terrible customer service.
    - cat199 9y ago
      You're a customer too? How much ad space do you purchase? This might help things if you mentioned it to them...
      - goldenkey 9y ago
        My parents paid for the yahoo mail plus for years. But Yahoo didn't care at all. They offered no way to get the account back.
      - wolco 9y ago
        I'm the product lose me and the customer will have nothing to match the ad against
    - dchest 9y ago
      How is this a terrible customer service? Sending easily faked pictures of documents is not a proof of account ownership. It's your (or your parents') responsibility to remember password or security answer, don't blame customer service for that.
      - goldenkey 9y ago
        A human is behind an account. There need to be ways to recover an account when certain measures fail with non-tech savvy folk like my elderly parents. Yahoo offered no way to recover the account.
        iamatworknow 9y ago
        And those same methods you mention are how people get "hacked". Everything that would make it easier for your parents to recover their account also make it easier for someone to social engineer.
        csin 9y ago
        The H word is such a lazy excuse. Techies overestimate how much the common folk give a shit about getting hacked. 99% of the population are not celebrities. 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.
- dchest 9y ago
  Sorry, but it doesn't seem to be their fault, it looks more like the usual case where the user doesn't want to take responsibility for their actions and blames customer support for it.
  - goldenkey 9y ago
    Yahoo has a really crummy recovery system compared to the big 5. If things really go wrong, Google will let you recover your account provided authorized forms of identification -- obviously forgery is an issue and Google is very thorough with regard to this (like checking if the account is still being used by the regular IPs or has gone inactive.) 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.
  - JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
    There is no customer support! I can't even see any way to contact them or email or call flickr customer support from the pages they show me.
  - kharms 9y ago
    I've lost a flickr account because yahoo deletes emails that don't get used.
  - jameskegel 9y ago
    It felt good to see this on HN, and it felt better to read it in bold, dark, black text.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    Sorry but it does seem to be their fault. 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.
- jlarocco 9y ago
  Flickr's (and Yahoo's) account handling is terrible, but your story isn't an example of that. 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.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    How could it not be ? 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.
gertef 9y ago
> don't respond to features in Google Photos 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.
acdha 9y ago
> Everything they did to Flickr since Mayer's takeover has been half baked 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.
riazrizvi 9y ago
> The first community problems became evident when Yahoo decided all existing Flickr users would need a Yahoo account to log in. That switchover occurred in 2007, and was part of the CorpDev integration process to establish a single sign on. Flickr set it to go live on the Ides of March. 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'.
- yuhong 9y ago
  Recently it has been improving though. I was able to successfully recover my account myself.
  - sverige 9y ago
    Maybe the people that stole all the login data have taken over that function.
  - riazrizvi 9y ago
    You got my hopes up. I tried again after all this time. Remembered they gave me a new account instead of granting access to my old (PRO) account that had all my photos from a once in a lifetime road trip. You can't contact a human to fix it as far as I can tell. Now excuse me while I walk into the street and take my frustration out on an innocent passerby.
    - yuhong 9y ago
      I remember https://twitter.com/YahooCare https://twitter.com/YahooCare for example.
      - riazrizvi 9y ago
        Nope, their support humans live in an impregnable fortress of circular forum links and ContactUs decoys. I give up.
brandonmenc 9y ago
> make it impossible to sign in: check 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.
dickbasedregex 9y ago
I wanted to root for Mayer in the beginning but omg was her run a shit show.

randomsofr 9y ago

Also signup was a pain.

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

I want to use Flickr again but I don't have access to my Hotmail(!) account anymore. I don't even recognize the area code for the number they have on file for me. 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.

jfktrey 9y ago
To be fair, it seems like it would be very difficult to guarantee you own the account without access to your email or phone number.
- goldenkey 9y ago
  They wouldn't even give my parents' account back when I offered to send pictures of their drivers license / social security cards / passport in. All because they forgot a dumb "secret answer" question. Yahoo has beyond terrible customer service.
  - cat199 9y ago
    You're a customer too? How much ad space do you purchase? This might help things if you mentioned it to them...
    - goldenkey 9y ago
      My parents paid for the yahoo mail plus for years. But Yahoo didn't care at all. They offered no way to get the account back.
    - wolco 9y ago
      I'm the product lose me and the customer will have nothing to match the ad against
  - dchest 9y ago
    How is this a terrible customer service? Sending easily faked pictures of documents is not a proof of account ownership. It's your (or your parents') responsibility to remember password or security answer, don't blame customer service for that.
    - goldenkey 9y ago
      A human is behind an account. There need to be ways to recover an account when certain measures fail with non-tech savvy folk like my elderly parents. Yahoo offered no way to recover the account.
      - iamatworknow 9y ago
        And those same methods you mention are how people get "hacked". Everything that would make it easier for your parents to recover their account also make it easier for someone to social engineer.
        csin 9y ago
        The H word is such a lazy excuse. Techies overestimate how much the common folk give a shit about getting hacked. 99% of the population are not celebrities. 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.
dchest 9y ago
Sorry, but it doesn't seem to be their fault, it looks more like the usual case where the user doesn't want to take responsibility for their actions and blames customer support for it.
- goldenkey 9y ago
  Yahoo has a really crummy recovery system compared to the big 5. If things really go wrong, Google will let you recover your account provided authorized forms of identification -- obviously forgery is an issue and Google is very thorough with regard to this (like checking if the account is still being used by the regular IPs or has gone inactive.) 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.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
  There is no customer support! I can't even see any way to contact them or email or call flickr customer support from the pages they show me.
- kharms 9y ago
  I've lost a flickr account because yahoo deletes emails that don't get used.
- jameskegel 9y ago
  It felt good to see this on HN, and it felt better to read it in bold, dark, black text.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Sorry but it does seem to be their fault. 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.
jlarocco 9y ago
Flickr's (and Yahoo's) account handling is terrible, but your story isn't an example of that. 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.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  How could it not be ? 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.

gertef 9y ago

> don't respond to features in Google Photos 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.

acdha 9y ago

> Everything they did to Flickr since Mayer's takeover has been half baked 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.

riazrizvi 9y ago

> The first community problems became evident when Yahoo decided all existing Flickr users would need a Yahoo account to log in. That switchover occurred in 2007, and was part of the CorpDev integration process to establish a single sign on. Flickr set it to go live on the Ides of March. 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'.

yuhong 9y ago
Recently it has been improving though. I was able to successfully recover my account myself.
- sverige 9y ago
  Maybe the people that stole all the login data have taken over that function.
- riazrizvi 9y ago
  You got my hopes up. I tried again after all this time. Remembered they gave me a new account instead of granting access to my old (PRO) account that had all my photos from a once in a lifetime road trip. You can't contact a human to fix it as far as I can tell. Now excuse me while I walk into the street and take my frustration out on an innocent passerby.
  - yuhong 9y ago
    I remember https://twitter.com/YahooCare https://twitter.com/YahooCare for example.
    - riazrizvi 9y ago
      Nope, their support humans live in an impregnable fortress of circular forum links and ContactUs decoys. I give up.

brandonmenc 9y ago

> make it impossible to sign in: check 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.

dickbasedregex 9y ago

I wanted to root for Mayer in the beginning but omg was her run a shit show.