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Yahoo Changes User Profiles, To Massive Outrage
Wiseleo writes "Yahoo decided to massively screw up their entire userbase by changing all user profiles to blank. No warning, no automated way to get data back, and other unwanted changes. The blog has such choice quotes as 'We know this has been a rough transition for some of you and, and are committed to helping you use, understand, and (hopefully) enjoy your new profile,' and, 'We also know lots of you worked hard on your old profiles and want your data. If you feel like you're missing data, we've saved a copy of your old profile (and alias) and our Customer Care team can retrieve this information. You won't, however, be able to revert back to your old profile format, but you will be able to get any data that you think is missing. To do this, please go here to contact Customer Care.' There were 850 comments posted, all negative, on the first day. There are hundreds more today. There is even more outrage on the Yahoo Messenger blog."
And nothing of value was lost.
Seriously, what could be in your profile that you don't know about yourself?
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Can we get Facebook and MySpace wiped clean, too?
When hotmail was new, before Microsoft owned it, there was genuine discussion over how appropriate it would be to trust a service that you don't pay for.
Seems like for the last ten years or so, that's not even been on the table. It's just one more service that people expect, and expect to run with utter reliability
I know these companies make a buck from advertising revenue, or whatever. But YOU don't pay them a penny, unless you want to. Most people don't want to.
If you're complaining because the least part of a large service that you have been using for free, perhaps since the dawn of the commerical internet, has made an unexpected change... well, really, you need to have a long think about whether or not that makes you an ass.
Even if it doesn't, relying on a free service to keep ANY of your data probably makes you one.
I know that online profiles are stupid, but why did they do that. They should have implemented a migration process or something like that. Now Yahoo risks losing some of its userbase for some braindead decision (from the users' point of view).
Actually, it's sunday.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
I can't say I'm happy about this - among other things, I had to reset my profile with absolutely no notice whatsoever, and all of my online friends are going to have to do the same. But, I'm not paying any money for this service - I don't even use the official Yahoo client (I use Trillian instead) - so it is theirs to do, no matter how annoying it is.
However, I want to know something. When you look at the profile screen, an important word stands out in one of the corners - "BETA." "Beta" means that the service is still being tested, and isn't ready for full release. So, what I want to know is why the entire user base of Yahoo was put onto a profile system that hasn't moved out of beta testing yet. There is no way that is good practice.
In all seriousness, this should have been finished and declared done before a change like this was made.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Are they not dead yet? Next you'll tell me AOL is still around.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They're just practicing for when Microsoft buys them out. Microsoft has a long history of losing user data.
Clearly, this is monumentally bad customer relations, and some people are going to say "they did it because they don't care". But there must be some business / technical explanation. Does anyone know what they are trying to achieve by reseting the profiles? Is this a necessary fallout from some change in their profile infrastructure? Or did they just plain screw up?
Isn't this just the type of thing that Stallman was referring to not long ago? Granted, the particular details of this instance are not THAT alarming (people's profiles) however, it certainly goes to show . . .
I agreed with him then, and will certainly keep it in mind.
Moe
SARAVA!
I wasn't even aware that people actually USED their Yahoo profiles.
I just logged in for the first time in a couple of months and did not see much change, other than increased clutter on the screens getting me to yahoo mail.
What changed? Am I supposed to be outraged too? Inquiring minds want to know!
I don't get it. If they still have the data, why is it so hard for them to write up a script to fix the mistake?
It shouldn't take one of their programmers more than a few hours to whip up, and would save them all this headache.
I wonder if there's more behind this "accident" than we're seeing.
Seriously, couldn't this space on /. be taken up by something that matters on the intarweb?
According to Alexa, Yahoo! is the most popular site on the internet. I'd say that that's more than enough to make a website matter, personally.
Goo goo g'joob.
Nobody is complaining? Everybody in the Relevant Google Groups are complaining! http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Web_Search_Help-Personalizing/topics
Most of the trackbacks for the Google Blog post announcing the change were negative, although Googleblog admins have since removed those trackbacks.
Most people dislike the wasted space of having the tabs to the left. People Also dislike the removal of the plus feature in rss feed gadgets, since the replacement (the first 20 words or so of the text of each article) is not nearly as nice looking or functional. (This change has since been reverted.) Lastly, many people are upset that gadgets can no longer be collapsed and expanded with just a single click.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
There used to be clever hacks in the old Yahoo Profiles to modify your profile to do things like play MIDI files and change the background and run Javascripts via a series of exploits in the way the Yahoo data forms worked.
Yahoo wants to get rid of the exploits by wiping clean every profile after it fixes the exploits. Some of the exploits stole passwords and other data and some even installed malware.
I don't mind having a blank profile, I am not really notable anyway. I am a pirate ninja and just love to blend into the background so nobody can notice me as I turn invisible. :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
10 PERSON has good idea and sets up internet COMPANY
20 PEOPLE eventually flock to COMPANY and use their services
30 TIME passes
40 COMPANY bosses get itchy and need to scratch, read: they feel they need to be 'innovative' and/or they feel they aren't making enough money
50 CHANGES happen to site which affects users ability to conduct their business (buying/selling/communicating etc.)
60 PEOPLE are fucked off with CHANGES and complain bitterly
70 COMPANY ignores PEOPLE
80 GOTO 30
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
And this is a perfect example of why I will NEVER use 'cloud computing'. My data on my hardware that I have complete control of, thank you.
I worked at Yahoo for five years. I have no idea who's left (most folks I knew have also since left), but this is a clear sign of losing focus on the user. First there was the draconian booting of everyone off the old version of My Yahoo! & now this.
Why do people get to make decisions like this & keep their jobs?
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
Yahoo is popular yes, but profiles.yahoo.com, not so much.
I believe that everything is still there at the old address right? http://edit.yahoo.com/config/eval_profile Or, am I missing something?
Suppose you have a PC that's infested with all sorts of malware. Your first instinct is to just format and reinstall, right?
ok, with that in mind, who's to say that the staff at yahoo saw the thousands (millions?) of spam profiles with links to porn/malware sites and decided "you know what, fuck it, we can just start with a clean slate. The users who aren't bots can always get their data back anyway."
You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, you know?
Yeah. When I drop my daughter off for school at 8:00 am local time, I always say "good afternoon" to the other parents. The idiots think I'm crazy.
But that's only among the subset of browsers with their toolbar installed. If we look at Netcraft's take on the subject, Google is 14 of the top 16 Most-Visited, (Yahoo! #23) Hitwise also counts Google the best. Among my friends, nobody under thirty still uses Yahoo! except those who're still clinging to their fifteen year-old mail accounts, which again, Google does better.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Welcome to the exciting world of time zones, many people still think it's saturday, these are of course american idiots who wouldn't know what a GMT was if you told them and can't read a 24 hour clock to save their lives. It's not their fault that the US doesn't uses a single international standard, their country is screwed up.
I'm not aware of any country that requires its citizens to refer to Greenwich when stating what day it is, regardless of their own time zone. I kind of thought not having to do that was one of the good points of time zones, e.g. so that people in Japan wouldn't have to change their dates at 9 AM every morning. What time zone are you? Do you always check GMT before posting on Internet forums?
-- Joren
Some friends and I were discussing general utility questions and the issue of what we'd be willing to pay for Google (the search engine) and Gmail (the email service) if we had to.
The consensus opinion was $50/year for search, $20/year for email. Take that for what you will: it's a water cooler discussion.
I have a similar feeling. I'd be willing to go higher, though, considering how useful Google Docs has become. I'd happily pay something like $50 a year for exactly the service I have now (including ads) with GMail just for the guarantee that if they had to shut down, they'd bank the money to keep things operational so I'd get like a month's notice to transition. Going dark is fine. Going dark suddenly, that's what scares me.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
for insisting on 38DD blondes. There is a fixed brain to boob ratio and it can't be violated.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Last I checked, although you can customize your yahoo page, you can't remove the F***ING HOROSCOPE! That actively pisses me off every time I set eyes on the page.
You're just saying that because you are an Aquarius -- so eccentric and passionately unwilling to fit in with everyone else.
... but the biting irony of posting this on Slashdot as anything but an AC is just too delicious.
/. profile from a yahoo profile, really?
I mean, how much different is a
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
> its about competition. Other free services would never do this. And though we don't pay
> them, they get money from us.
If you don't pay them they don't get money from you. They may get money from people you buy stuff from, but that money stops being yours when you spend it. Try to understand that to these advertising agencies you are the product, not the customer. Nothing wrong with that as long as you remember that the services they give you are just promotional gimmicks. They have no obligation, legal or ethical, to deliver anything at all to you.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's one thing to be user-friendly, but Yahoo's content always suggested to me a culture that was more about looking good than being good. Obviously, their target is the mainstream computer user, but my impression is that beyond that, their tone is almost anti-tech, definitely anti-nerd. Don't ask me to cite examples, I won't bother. As I said, this is "my impression," and it's a general one. I'd guess that in their hiring decisions, they consider "fitting into the company culture" far too much, and qualifications far too little to be a place I'd like to work, so I haven't applied. Google asks the right questions of applicants: numbers of patents, entrepreneurial successes, programming awards won. So, I'm not at all surprised to see this happen to Yahoo!
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p