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Yahoo...must...DIE!

aggle-rithm

Ardent Formulist
aggle-rithm
Joined
Jun 9, 2005
Messages
15,334
Location
Austin, TX
I have had a personal website since the summer of 1997. Think about what that means in web years...this website is older than Twitter, older than Facebook, older than YouTube, even older than friggin' GOOGLE! I had sixteen years worth of content on there.

This weekend, my website disappeared.

I searched frantically through my emails to see if there was something I missed. Just over a year ago, I was informed that AT&T/Yahoo Small Business, which hosted my site, was being discontinued. AT&T and Yahoo were going their separate ways, and I would need to sign up with one or another. I got this notification from AT&T, which said Yahoo would be contacting me shortly with instructions to continue service.

Yahoo never contacted me.

Nevertheless, the deadline passed and I still had my service. My credit card was still be charged, and I was still able to get in and modify content. I later learned from AT&T that the service automatically passed to Yahoo if no action was taken. Good enough.

Except that my site died this weekend. I Googled "Yahoo web hosting" and "Yahoo small business", but in every case I was forwarded to an obsolete AT&T/Yahoo site that led nowhere. I finally found a site that had a phone number I could call, but it was a billing number, and I had to call during regular business hours to get hold of anyone.

Acting on a hunch, I logged in to an ancient, rarely-used Yahoo account that had received maybe two emails in the last ten years. There, I found multiple cancellation notices from Yahoo, dating back a year. It seems I was supposed to click a button saying I agreed to their new web-hosting policies, and I hadn't done that. The message included the ominous warning: "Any loss of data stored on your site is NOT OUR *********** PROBLEM."

I followed links from these emails to get hold of someone at Yahoo, but was told that, since I was NO LONGER A YAHOO SMALL BUSINESS CUSTOMER, I wasn't allowed to call them OR EVEN SEND THEM AN EMAIL.

Today I tried to call their billing number again, the only contact number I could find. All I get is a busy signal.

So, that's where I am now. I have already chosen a new web host, but it will take me some time to try to reconstruct my blogs and other content as best I can. Also, Yahoo still has control of my domain, so there's nothing I can do until I can either contact Yahoo or it expires.

Perhaps this is my fault for not intuiting what was in the mind of Yahoo when they decided my old email account was more appropriate for correspondence than the one AT&T/Yahoo had been using for several years. Maybe I'm expecting too much of them to make the changes to their service as transparent as possible to their loyal customers. I'm sure this will be the position they take when I FINALLY get hold of them.

In the meantime....DIE, YAHOO!!
 
I guess the horrible people at Yahoo must have ignored the contact email configured for the website account, and instead chosen an obscure email address that they knew you would never check, to send you repeated account closure warnings. All so that they could gratuitously and with great pleasure delete your website for no good reason.

What tipped me off to their clear malice towards you was the phrase, "[a]ny loss of data stored on your site is NOT OUR *********** PROBLEM", which I am sure appeared verbatim in all of their communications with you.
 
Today I finally got through to their billing department...or at least I didn't get a busy signal. After navigating the phone tree, I heard the following message:

"Our offices are now closed. Thank you for calling Yahoo!"

....at 11:00 AM on a Tuesday.
 
theprestige said:
I guess the horrible people at Yahoo must have ignored the contact email configured for the website account, and instead chosen an obscure email address that they knew you would never check, to send you repeated account closure warnings. All so that they could gratuitously and with great pleasure delete your website for no good reason.

What tipped me off to their clear malice towards you was the phrase, "[a]ny loss of data stored on your site is NOT OUR *********** PROBLEM", which I am sure appeared verbatim in all of their communications with you.
Click to expand...

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence."

They appear to have it in spades at Yahoo.

I'm glad I'm not depending on my site for my livelihood, as I'm sure a lot of people are who are unable to contact them. Apparently a lot of people did get the notice, did fill out the new user agreement, but still had their accounts cancelled.

Hence, repeated busy signals when I try to call them.
 
I am surprised you were able to log onto that old yahoo account. I have had old accounts closed and recycled due to lack of use.
 
Hmm... I have one of those.

Nope, I guess I don't any more. I don't remember a notice about it.

Anything useful in the wayback machine? Almost all of my page is there.
 
aggle-rithm said:
Acting on a hunch, I logged in to an ancient, rarely-used Yahoo account that had received maybe two emails in the last ten years. There, I found multiple cancellation notices from Yahoo, dating back a year. It seems I was supposed to click a button saying I agreed to their new web-hosting policies, and I hadn't done that. The message included the ominous warning: "Any loss of data stored on your site is NOT OUR *********** PROBLEM."
Click to expand...


Was that the only email address that you had registered with Yahoo? If so, you can't blame them for not trying to contact you via an alternate email address that they had no knowledge of. Maybe you should have checked that account once a year and you'd be OK.

ETA: Sorry, just re-read your post and see that they had in fact been previously communicating with you via a newer email address. Sounds like it was a mixup between AT&T and Yahoo.
 
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aggle-rithm said:
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
Click to expand...
No, I'm pretty sure "[a]ny loss of data stored on your site is NOT OUR *********** PROBLEM" is a clear indication of malice.

They appear to have it in spades at Yahoo.
Click to expand...
Are you sure? They appear to have acted with reasonable competence in this case. They contacted you repeatedly via the email account associated with the site, and waited a year before taking any action. What were they supposed to do?

I'm glad I'm not depending on my site for my livelihood, as I'm sure a lot of people are who are unable to contact them. Apparently a lot of people did get the notice, did fill out the new user agreement, but still had their accounts cancelled.

Hence, repeated busy signals when I try to call them.
Click to expand...
If you say so.

But customers have been known to form bizarre and unreasonable expectations about the level of service they should receive.
 
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AdMan said:
ETA: Sorry, just re-read your post and see that they had in fact been previously communicating with you via a newer email address. Sounds like it was a mixup between AT&T and Yahoo.
Click to expand...

Yeah, pretty much. It's been very annoying to have two different Yahoo ID's, but I didn't actually set either of them up. One of them was created automatically when my Geocities site moved to Yahoo, while the other was created automatically when I got my DSL connection from Southwestern Bell.

I probably should have set up one of them to forward emails to the other, but I've been told that doesn't work well with Yahoo mail.
 
I finally got hold of them, sort of. Their billing phone line finally calmed down enough for me to actually get some hold music. There was a recorded message saying, basically, "You're never going to get through to anyone. How about sending us an email?"* The message then quickly read off the email address, which was just a little shorter than an article in the New Yorker and was repeated exactly zero times. I had to call back several times to get it all.


*Note to the prestige: They didn't actually say this.
 
Sorry to hear your woes, but...
1) Why wouldn't you get better hosting than Yahoo like, ten years ago?
2) You sound upset at loss of data. Does this mean you don't have backups?
 
Morrigan said:
Sorry to hear your woes, but...
1) Why wouldn't you get better hosting than Yahoo like, ten years ago?
Click to expand...

Too lazy. I took the path of least resistance when Yahoo bought Geocities.

2) You sound upset at loss of data. Does this mean you don't have backups?
Click to expand...

A lot of it was in the form of blog entries that were in process. I probably should have created those locally and pasted them into the editor when I was ready to publish.
 
aggle-rithm said:
No company would actually say this in an email. That's what makes it so very amusing.

See what I did there?
Click to expand...

Then I really don't see the problem. Take away your hyperbole, and your story sounds like they made every reasonable effort to contact you in a timely manner, and that your data loss is attributable to your own carelessness more than any incompetence or disregard of theirs.

And it's no surprise you're having trouble getting in touch with them now. They've already sunsetted the service and wound down support for it--and rightly so. They're certainly not going to invest a lot of resources in catering to those who managed to remain oblivious for an entire year.

Just out of curiosity: How much were you paying them to host your data and back it up? How much are you proposing to pay them to restore your data in a format convenient to you? I suspect that you are getting exactly the service you paid for.
 
theprestige said:
And it's no surprise you're having trouble getting in touch with them now. They've already sunsetted the service and wound down support for it--and rightly so. They're certainly not going to invest a lot of resources in catering to those who managed to remain oblivious for an entire year.
Click to expand...

They have cancelled MY account, but they still offer the service. They just make it extremely difficult to contact anyone unless you have an active account...and, during this past weekend, even if you DO have an active account. That was one of the reasons their billing department was apparently inundated with calls and I kept just getting a busy signal.

This sort of thing is a sure sign of a large company making a transition without thinking it through. I know they can't possibly anticipate EVERY problem, but this time there are apparently so many problems that their support system has been brought to its knees.

(I could be wrong, of course, but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.)

At this point, all I want is to get control of my domain name. I don't think that's an unreasonable request, even if the cancellation is entirely my fault.
 
Here is the problem as I see it. Again, I could be wrong about the internal politics, but here is my speculation:

Yahoo bought Geocities and each person with a Geocities account was transitioned to a Yahoo account.

Yahoo formed an alliance with AT&T to provide a Yahoo account for everyone using AT&T as an internet service provider. There was no attempt to reconcile accounts in this group with the accounts created for the former Geocities customers.

Yahoo formed ANOTHER alliance with AT&T to provide web hosting services and offered people with a free Geocities account an opportunity to upgrade to a small business account. For those customers falling into both of the first two groups, the AT&T/Yahoo account was used for correspondence, however, the site was still tied to the Geocities account.

Since I used FTP to upload files, I didn't give much thought to the fact that the account associated with the site was different from the account used to communicate information about the site.

I does make sense for Yahoo to correspond with the customer through the account associated with the site, HOWEVER, the alliance with AT&T created a confusing mess that made it unclear to the customer which account was the right one.

You could argue that it's just my problem, that I should have been able to keep the complex relationships between the website and the two accounts straight in my mind. And I probably would have, if the website were the only thing I had going on in my life.

Think about how many Geocities sites there were. There were millions of them, even back in the 1990's when it was fairly new. These were automatically transitioned to Yahoo. Maybe half of them never bothered to follow through with this, but this still leaves millions of customers.

Out of these, how many would have gotten their web access through AT&T, and thus would have been given a second account? Considering how big AT&T and their marketing budget is, I would say that hundreds of thousands would be a conservative estimate.

Out of these, how many moved to a small business account? Thousands, perhaps.

Out of these, how many would have been able to stay focused on the fact that the account that the site is tied to is different from the account that is used to communicate about the site?

Yahoo may believe that this subset of customers is at fault if they don't figure this all out on their own. But the bottom line is they have still lost these customers and have created a support nightmare for themselves.
 
Wow...it just keeps getting better and better.

Yahoo has unloaded an unprecedented shipment of fail here.

I finally got a response from my e-mail inquiry I sent three weeks ago. It gave me a link that would allow me to re-activate my account.

The first sign of trouble was the requirement that I would have to create a new Yahoo ID and associate the web site with that one.

The entire mess was caused by confusion between the two Yahoo accounts I already have...and now they want me to create a THIRD one.

As it turned out, this was a non-issue. When I followed the link to go and re-associate the website, it said that I didn't have a website. The message said to send an email and someone would get back to me shortly.
 
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