Groovymarlin.com

Yeah, you heard me. Fuck Flickr. They just pissed me off in a big way.

A while back, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. They started asking people to sign in to Flickr using their Yahoo IDs, but they gave people who had already been members (“Old Skoolers”) the option to keep using their existing Flickr logins. I chose this option because I really HATE Yahoo, their spam, their annoying ads, and the abusive way that they treat your personal information.

Fast forward to tonight. Flickr sent out an email notifying all of us Old Skoolers that as of March 15, we’d HAVE to sign in with Yahoo IDs, or we wouldn’t be able to sign in at all. Annoying, right? Yeah…but here’s the thing. They did this even to Pro users, the people who PAY for the Flickr service (like me). SINCE WHEN is it OK to tell your paying customers that they HAVE to have a Yahoo ID to sign in to your service? Nobody likes to sign up for Yahoo…they take any personal information you provide and whore it out in the most appalling way (not to mention their happy censorship in China and other abuses). I was really angry, but I bit the bullet. I have hundreds of pictures on Flickr now, most of them of my daughter, and I link to those photos from everywhere. I didn’t want to screw that up, so I merged with one of my existing (and almost never used) Yahoo IDs.

Mistake. Now I can’t log in to Flickr (except with my Old Skool account, which technically isn’t supposed to work). Yahoo thinks I don’t have cookies enabled (even though I do), and won’t let me log in at all. Thank God I can still log in with my Flickr ID (for now). I submitted a help request by email, as prompted, and got an email back saying:

Just a quick email from Team Flickr to let you know that we’ve successfully received your recent Help by Email query and we hope to respond within 10 days.

TEN DAYS! Nice.

Oh, and here’s anothing thing I find really annoying…when you have problems with cookies and logging in, their help advises you thusly:

Set your cookies to enable ALL cookies

Right. Great idea. I’ll just enable every tracking site on the internet to store a cookie on my computer, just so I can log in to Flickr with a service (Yahoo) I don’t like and didn’t want to use and did not pay to join in the first place. Nice! I think it’s really insulting that their instructions don’t tell the user to “make sure that cookies are enabled for the following URLs/domains:” and then present a list.

So, in summary FUCK Yahoo and FUCK Flickr. I’m giving them until the end of this week to sort this mess out. If it’s not resolved by then, I’m canceling my account and looking into Picasa or Zooomr or something else.

What a disappointment. It sucks when a company treats their customers with disregard, but it sucks twice as much when it’s a company you thought was really different and cool.