Yahoo is now recycling handles

[bicknell at ufp.org (Leo Bicknell)]

On Sep 3, 2013, at 10:47 PM, Peter Kristolaitis <alter3d at alter3d.ca> wrote:

> The issue was studied thoroughly by a committee of MBAs who, after extensive thought (read: 19 bottles of scotch), determined that there was money to be made.
> 
> whatcouldpossiblygowrong?

Apparently it was implemented by a group of low-bid programmers in a far off land.

I have, err, had, a Yahoo! account I used for two things, getting e-mail from Yahoo! groups and accessing Flickr.  I was on Flickr not a two or three months ago to fix a picture someone noticed was in the wrong album.

When I saw this I thought I should log in again to reset my one year ticker.  Off to www.yahoo.com and click sign in.

Enter userid, enter password.

Drops me to a CAPTCHA screen, that's odd, never seen that before, but ok.

Enter CAPTCHA and it redirects me to "https://edit.yahoo.com/forgot";, which when reached from said CAPTCHA screen renders as a 100% blank page.

That's some fine web coding.

I went to the flickr site, tried to log in.  At least there it tells me my userid is in the process of being recycled.  No option to recover.

Try creating a new account with the same userid, sorry, it's in use.

So as far as I can tell:
  - The must be inactive for one year is BS, and/or logging into Flickr didn't count in my case.
  - No notifications are sent, so if you're a person who is there for things like Yahoo groups and forwards your e-mail elsewhere you may be using the service in a way that generates no logs.
  - There is no way to get an account back that is in the recycling phase, which is frankly stupid.

As a result Yahoo! has lost a Flickr and Groups member, and I'm not sure I see any reason to sign up again at this point.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/



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