Users Revolt Over Yahoo Groups Update 331
An anonymous reader writes "The new NEO format of Yahoo Groups is being rolled out to users and there is no option to go back. Users and moderators are posting messages asking Yahoo to go back to the old format. Yahoo is responding with a vanilla 'thank you for your feedback we are working to make it better' comment. Most posters are so frustrated that they just want the old site back. One poster writes 'Yahoo has effectively destroyed the groups, completely, themselves.'"
Is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is this news? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Yahoo only has crazy dog lovers groups left. Check out the complaint.
"The home page is gone. People join my group to get photos of their dogs edited and honored by being posted on the group home page which is now GONE! Only ONE of the photos can be seen at ALL."
So these are the ones that complain...
While there are also other valid complaints, those are being fixed. I've used Yahoo groups and the past and it really kind of sucked. Glad to see they are working on it.
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Re:Is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when USENET allowed everyone to choose the platform with the look and feel they found most attractive and productive? This is why we have standard protocols. This is why we have clients and servers. This is why content and presentation should be strictly separated.
exactly....when? (Score:3)
you say yourself, very succinctly I might add, why this is 'news'
Exactly! EVERY TIME...virtually...it's ridiculous and embarrassing to be that bad at design. Have you no shame??? Imagine this in another industry. Something pre-PC...say Craftsman Tools.
If Craftsman 'upgraded' from solid steel to a cheaper allow, stopped making Metric completely, and told users it was an 'improvement'
That's where we are at here...only it is worse, b/c Yahoo! spent
Ignoring your users is the new mantra (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring your users is the new in thing for corporations. From Microsoft cancelling Technet to their lack of Start Menu to Apple's upcoming flattening of IOS to Mechwarrior's ignoring users being pissed about changes or Digg's substantial drop in users with their new version a while back.
The attitude seems to be "it doesn't matter how many users we lose or alienate, were right and your wrong". Once upon a time marketing departments measured their success by number of new users gained. Nowadays UI departments seem to measure their success by number of users they lose.
Re:Ignoring your users is the new mantra (Score:5, Insightful)
This, and Agile. Here's one from the Yahoo feedback page:
"Previous / Next links missing while reading messages and topics is now fixed!"
In the non-Agile days, we'd have a functional spec. If it's a message board, being able to navigate from the previous/next message is probably core functionality. It doesn't pass QA, it doesn't ship unless it's, you know, at least as functional as the old version.
In the Agile days, for some reason unbeknownst to any end user, something that basic didn't make it into the MVP. The end user doesn't matter. Somewhere, some Agilistard decided "Meh, it's in the backlog, we'll get it in the next sprint. It can wait a week or two."
If you have no userbase, the Agile concept of ship (garbage) early and ship (garbage) often even before you really have an MVP actually makes some sense. If you have a 6-month runway of capital before you go belly-up and start over (oh, I'm sorry, "pivot"), there's no point in wasting another month to get it right.
But if you already have a userbase, the developer-centric attitude of leaving what, to users, is core functionality in the backlog while you release half-assed stuff that merely shows off how good you are with AJAX, or how quickly your UX people can change the design from one week to the next, doesn't work. It's bad for your customer base, it alienates them, and it eventually drives them to your competitors.
But what do I know? I think discussion boards were a mostly-solved problem with USENET. (And discussion systems like /.'s actually works pretty well, although moderating something at Yahoo-sized scale is a difficult proposition, and utterly impossible for something like USENET where the platform isn't controlled by the hosting company.) Acknowledging that a problem has been largely solved and could use a little facelift isn't agile enough anymore. Better throw the whole codebase out, and re-invent it from scratch, poorly, and use the userbase as guinea pigs. Who cares if the business actually improves its product, so long as everyone in the development chain gets to tick off boes like "learned new framework" "developed new UI" and "implemented agile release process in old stodgy company" on their CVs before they move on to their next jobs.
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Usenet has had its problems with trolls and spam (the latter having been the far worse problem since trolls were easily recognized and ignored) but it's main problem these days is a lack of traffic. Well, the text-only groups that is; the binary groups are, of course, saturated. But on the other hand, that lack of traffic does have a certain blessing; the few Usenet loyalists who remain are actually interested in the topics of their subscribed groups. They tend to stay largely on topic, avoid the rare troll
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Meh, the people destroying those companies must be from the future, who have seen the machines rise (or just any other group, including various ethnic groups, that they did not approve of...), and their idea of 'fixing' things is to destroy as much as possible...of course, this could be the very paradox that triggers the apocalyptic event that they are trying to avoid....'Whisper Down the Alley' and all that...they destroy the technology companies that would give rise to an AI that terrorized them, the AI (
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Re:Ignoring your users is the new mantra (Score:5, Insightful)
They are definitely NOT ignoring their users.
They are pandering to the emergence of the Idiot Elite.
Think of it, all those features could be argued as "power" features, which have been stripped out or dumbed down to pander to a growing populace of people too lazy or otherwise unable to figure out how to learn something a little more advanced than point and click.
I mean Microsoft pulled the start menu because ALL iOS and Android users are used to accessing apps by slapping a hairy knuckle against a grid these days, no fancy "tree" lists, categorizations or having to type to find something. Microsoft might have pissed off their power users, but guaranteed there are more people that actually like the Metro interface then the vocal minority that hate it. People are NOT complaining about the dumbed down simplicity of other Tablet OS'es these days.
So nerds, geeks, and dweebs do not rule the tech universe anymore, we are just along for the ride. We used to drive the market by wanting faster and better and more powerful in every generation, but eventually companies could not keep up and realized taking a large regressive step backwards made these products more accessible and desirable by the non-tech elite. Instead of upgrading to a new more powerful 16 core desktop, the idiot elite were dazzled by the simplicity of a tablet or phone with only a small fraction of the processing power and abandoned traditional computers, as they are with other services and games. People would rather fling a bird at pigs or harvest Smurfberries for 6 hours a day rather than exploring a world in an RPG or even getting out their aggressions in a state of the art FPS.
Every company today is crafting their services and products to pander to the Idiot Elite because they know they can profit more from them rather than trying to appease the power user. Consider the idea if an FPS like Crysis came out where you would have to buy your ammo with real world money. The GEEKS and NERDS would have revolted and the game would never be successful. However today the Idiot Elite are throwing millions of real world money at companies buying their fucking Smurfberries.
Companies are not ignoring their demographic, they are just beginning to realize how naive they are.
We lost, even Slashdot is slowly slipping into a social site where people would rather debate the qualities of cat breeds rather than ripping into the merits of a new CPU architecture.
No company makes a change to their service or product just to piss of customers, they do so because they are realizing there is a growing market of users that simply do not give a fuck!
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... to Apple's upcoming flattening of IOS...
Huh? People are actually clamoring to keep the look of iOS the way it is? Why (and where)?
Re:Ignoring your users is the new mantra (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot to end your sentence with a period.
Thank you for your feedback we are working to make it better.
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Meant that to be "funny" and clicked the wrong option. Now I have to post some comment to erase that moderation. I hope /. is paying attention to this feedback about feedback about feedback. @_@
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Yo dawg, we heard you like feedback...
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Change is hard (Score:5, Interesting)
Change is hard for a lot of people. Yahoo Groups, unfortunately is stuck running some really ancient "forum" software that really isn't designed to be a forum at all. It's designed to be an email list. I use Yahoo Groups daily, and it really needs to incorporate modern features. Neo brings a lot of basic forum features to Yahoo Groups, like inline attachments. The people asking for the old format back, change is hard, embrace it and move forward. Ask Yahoo to fix bugs you find in Neo, that will be much better for the community than to continue being stuck in the old ways.
Joseph Elwell.
Re:Change is hard (Score:5, Interesting)
Change is hard for a lot of people. Yahoo Groups, unfortunately is stuck running some really ancient "forum" software that really isn't designed to be a forum at all. It's designed to be an email list.
What is (or was) nice about Yahoo Groups was the way it blended email lists and forums. Some people like to use it one way, some the other, and some use it both ways.
Re:Change is hard (Score:5, Informative)
All the people who only used the e-mail side of it just got their accounts deleted for "inactivity" since they never logged into Yahoo!, and thus never saw ads or otherwise generated revenue.
Group membership is dropping like a log with their effort to reclaim addresses.
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Perhaps everyone who needed Yahoo Groups to be different had already left. By forcing current groups to change they didn't necessarily give them any new functionality that they wanted, and might have taken away functionality that they did want.
Just another example of sacrificing current users on the altar of UX. Funny how changes to improve UX so often piss off users.
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Perhaps everyone who needed Yahoo Groups to be different had already left.
In the groups I participate in, this is exactly what is happening. People are leaving. I can't imagine any successful business model that involves no new users, AND the current userbase shrinking.
By forcing current groups to change they didn't necessarily give them any new functionality that they wanted,
Inline attachments seems like a pretty big deal. You no longer have to mention, search the files for this picture that only relates to this post. This seems especially useful for email users (seemingly the core of users) - which I am not one of.
and might have taken away functionality that they did want.
There are only 2 features listed as having been removed. Everything els
Re:Change is hard - Extrapolated (Score:2, Funny)
Change is hard for a lot of people. Yahoo Groups, unfortunately is stuck running some really ancient "forum" software that really isn't designed to be a forum at all. It's designed to be an email list. I use Yahoo Groups daily, and it really needs to incorporate modern features. Neo brings a lot of basic forum features to Yahoo Groups, like inline attachments. The people asking for the old format back, change is hard, embrace it and move forward. Ask Yahoo to fix bugs you find in Neo, that will be much better for the community than to continue being stuck in the old ways.
Joseph Elwell.
Her's a kick in the balls.
I know change is hard and you want to go back to not having swollen-blue-balls, but embrace it and move forward. Sooner or later, you'll become accustomed to me kicking you in the balls. Don't be so resistant to change.
Re:Change is hard (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a nice bromide... and it's easy to blame unspecified 'people' but it's bullshit in this case. Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been rolling out change after ill thought out change in page layout, UI, and functionality. They're trying to be 'hip' and 'modern' and failing miserably while alienating their existing userbase.
Like what? And more importantly why? The system worked, and worked well.
Change is hard - and godawful software is harder (Score:3)
.
Tell you what. Let'
Standard operating procedure (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is there anything Yahoo! hasn't fucked up? First they killed Geocities; OK that one is probably not bad.
I hated to see GeoCities go... I didn't mind losing all the blink tags, but I used to use my GeoCities account for "cloud storage" before someone invented the "cloud". Too bad I didn't manage to get all my personal files (mostly university papers) before it shut down...
Yahoo (Score:5, Funny)
I'm becoming convinced that Yahoo is the secret troll branch of Google.
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same song different day (Score:5, Insightful)
The protests on Flickr after changes months ago had the same result: no changes, no apologies. /. published a story about protests when some other Yahoo page changed, same result: no change, no apologies.
And just the other day
People need to understand Yahoo is marching off the cliff to the beat of its own drummer, and complaints mean nothing to them.
So what? (Score:2)
The platform sucked ever since they bolted their in-house crap onto the acquired (far superior for its time) eGroups system.
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The platform sucked ever since they bolted their in-house crap onto the acquired (far superior for its time) eGroups system.
I got tired of having ads shoved in my face all the time. Still hate that my ATT.net email has to go through a bevy of ads for me to read it. A mail client on your computer becomes a must. Currently using The Bat, which I'm rather fond of.
In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
Ah well, at least Slashdot limits its retarded UI crippling and eye-bleed-inducing changes to twice a decade. Hmm, probably due any day now...
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And in other news, Google has rolled out their monthly gratuitous GMail revamp. And no one even noticed, because we've all gotten tired of hunting down the "please give me back the old interface" checkbox somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of the user options pages.
...And yet, companies seem unable to acknowledge that there is, in fact, a very rational reason why people like me resist Teh Cloud(tm).
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Gmail interface? What's that?
IMAP FTW.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:3)
Ah well, at least Slashdot limits its retarded UI crippling and eye-bleed-inducing changes to twice a decade. Hmm, probably due any day now...
Here it is. [slashdot.org]
No surprise (Score:3)
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Totally with you.
I actually tried, but I can't think of any site revamp in the history of site revamps that I liked.
As someone above said, there seems to be this movement where UI (or in newspeak, "UX") experts are brought in with their doctrine of "right" and "wrong" interface design practices, and their egos which prevent them from re-evaluating their decisions when the entire user community tells them consistently and loudly that they don't like it.
When it's all over, a user either likes something or they don't. There will be an initial resistance to change, but once that's past if they are still complaining, regardless of whatever design laws you can use to justify your decision, it was wrong.
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Great example: T-Mobile's US site. This is a morass of scripts, so loading on anything less than the fastest currently available machine is very slow. Furthermore, I have yet to discover how to download a PDF file of the current month's bill. I can download pdf files for prior months' bills, so why can't I download a pdf of the current month?
Perhaps the current month's pdf is in locked filing cabinet stuck in a discused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"?
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I have almost never viewed any major site's overhaul as an improvement. It usually ends up just complicating (or even rendering impossible) the things I use it for. Invariably, there was nothing "wrong" with the site's functionality as it was that needed "fixing," but they decided to mess with it anyway. Maybe I'm an old fuddy-duddy, but when something works fine as it is, I'm a firm advocate for leaving well enough alone.
So every website was always at it's best only on the day of launch, and can never be better?
Don't like how Yahoo is handling upgrades (Score:2)
Just for comparison, Google's UI updates seem to be clearly superior. They're more in your face, intuitive, and I always feel it's a vertical move. Yahoo's updates are so-so and sometimes hide old functionality and just give me the feeling that it's a horizontal change and probably not related to making my experience better. You used to be able to see Yahoo profile updates (I'm on their answers forum a lot), but now that menu bar icon is gone from almost all Yahoo pages (oddly, it shows up as an artifact
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They would be getting even more complaints... (Score:3)
...if anyone could get the new Gmail compose to work.
I find Google has done much the same to Groups (Score:3)
Back when Google acquired Deja News I had a terrible premonition about how it would all turn out. It languished for a while, with trolls and spammers flooding groups through Google accounts and then Google finally started working on making the interface horrible.
I had some really neat newsreaders on my Sun Linux box, where were awesome for surfing news and posting, back when you needed a verified account to post. Now Google Groups is nearly abandoned, because Google opened Pandora's box upon it. A real loss there.
Vocal Minority (Score:2)
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You think Microsoft is good at corporate suicide? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, try Yahoo! The comics page has gone from "intermittently updated" to "virtually unusable." The mail apps now make it almost impossible to delete email in any other way but one at a time. Good usable interfaces are being carefully and methodically destroyed.
Is there some committee at Microsoft and Yahoo that goes around finding anything that's simple, obvious and workable and making sure that it's made unusable as quickly as possible? How does this work? Have ex-congressman moved to the software industry?
Yahoo Groups was horrible anyway (Score:2)
It needed a redesign. How hard is it to show a topic tree properly? The initial page is buggy right now, enter a search and that search stays persistent on everything you click on. Had to edit the URL to get rid of it. Once you're browsing a group it looks mostly like I remember except for the huge picture banner up top. That needs to go.
Let's go back to Usenet for groups (Score:2)
There's still Usenet. Peer to peer, fully distributed, works with multiple clients, no ads, fully operational.
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I miss the Usenet too, but its job has been replaced by web forums almost entirely. I hate that you're now at the mercy of whatever the forum software has feature wise, with the Usenet you picked the reader that worked best for you and got the same interface on every discussion. Most forum software outside of Slashcode can't even thread
And, If You Do NOT Like The New Gmail Composer (Score:3)
You can sign a web petition to ask Google to let people turn it off
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/say-no-to-the-new-gmail-composer/ [ipetitions.com]
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Google responded to the hatred for "conversation view" by including an option to turn it off.
If enough people sign the petition, it is likely Google will include an option to turn the composer window off too.
Simpler (Score:2)
New designs always stress how much 'simpler' they are. The only way to simplify things that work well is to simply remove functionality. Gmail is a good example of this philosophy. Apparently users keep getting dumber so user interfaces have to keep up with them.
Yahoo has no choice (Score:2)
The real mistake Yahoo made was in taking way, way too long to overhaul any of its web properties. So when the necessary change finally happens, it's now a lot of pain for the users. If Yahoo had made incremental changes over the years there would not have been nearly as much furor.
I hope they do ignore the users, because over time issues will get fixed and most users will get back to using the systems - along with a bunch of new people that may finally find it usable instead of being driven away by a te
Where is the tech coverage? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh hey this stuff again.... (Score:2)
"One poster writes 'Yahoo has effectively destroyed the groups, completely, themselves.'"
No, they did that back in 2006, along with that stupid avatar stuff.
The 2006 diaspora was huge.
But it sure did reduce their traffic costs.
--
BMO
Fantasy Football too (Score:3)
There's a similar though smaller revolt going on over the changes to Yahoo's Fantasy Football [uservoice.com]. The nasty thing about the Fantasy Football changes is that they didn't roll them out until two weeks before the start of the season, after lots of people had already paid as much as $250 to join pro leagues.
Yahoo went so far as to post an announcement to every league that they won't be going back to the original format (but they really appreciate your comments!).
Ya who (Score:2)
A couple of things... (Score:2)
1. Are any of the morons posting actual Yahoo users? (I know the answer to this one... didn't think so)
2. I personally liked how google did with the whole upgrade to our new interface when you're ready and we'll bug you periodically to do so approach. Radical UIX changes have almost never been received in a positive light... ever. Doesn't mean they're bad changes, it's just proven that average users can't deal with rapid change of a UIX like developers can. But again, the customer is the average user, s
Usenet (Score:2)
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is you have a service that fills all your needs, is free, and requires absolutely zero knowledge of how anything works.
Why wouldn't the average person want something like that, and why are there so few alternatives out there that do the job?
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:5, Informative)
Why are there so few alternatives? Because egroups and onelist merged and yahoo bought them
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Why are there so few alternatives? Because egroups and onelist merged and yahoo bought them
And Google bought up Deja News and made a complete mess of that.
Reading the Yahoo official resonse...
We deeply value how much you, our users, care about Yahoo! Groups ... we launched our first update to the Groups experience in several years and while these changes are an important step to building a more modern Groups experience, we recognise that this is a considerable change.
We are listening to all of the community feedback and we are actively measuring user feedback so we can continuously make improvements.
I can only surmise they are arrogantly looking down their nose and their user community and scoffing "Stupid cretins, we are gods, do not anger us with your squealing like pigs.
It is this sort of thing that drives customers and related business away. Perhaps the better line of attack is to deluge advertisers ... or buy some premium tweets. ;-)
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Re:Lesson not learned (Score:5, Funny)
Product stages:
- crap << current Yahoo Groups
- alpha
- beta
- pray
- live!
Unless you are Google, Then it goes
Product stages:
- crap
- alpha
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- Product Canceled due to excessive usefulness or popularity!
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:5, Funny)
Then there's the Microsoft release cycle:
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
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Why wouldn't the average person want something like that, and why are there so few alternatives out there that do the job?
The problem is that, when you rely on another person to provide information, then it can disappear. They can do that a moment which is really really inconvenient to you. The "average" person has some problem thinking straight about this and will always tell you "oh I don't do anything important there" just like they say "oh there's nothing important to backup" and then find out that they lost all their grandchildren's photos. Even most of the rest of us that "know better" simply don't have the time.
Look,
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a silly answer for most non-technical users.
Ignoring the extra hassle of hosting, an open source project can head in a direction you don't like just as easily, and unless you are prepared to fork the product (which a non-technical user probably can't) or just let it stagnate in a soup of unpatched exploits, you are just as helpless.
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Not all posts advocating FOSS as the solution to all of lifes problems in the face of pragmatism are trolls. Some people legitimately have this mindset. I recognized the nick from an earlier discussion, otherwise I would have assumed troll (there's probably some meaning that can be taken from that).
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He's trolling, you idiot.
I totally read this in the voice of the dungeon master on the Dead Alewives' "Dungeons and Dragons: Satan's Game" spoof. This is advanced, Mark!
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Indeed: with private dedicated servers and VPSes getting cheaper and cheaper, there's less and less of an excuse to rely on public servers.
-uso.
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to run my own web site. The modest fees didn't bother me; but the image leaches did. There were a few other PiTA type things, but image leaching was the worst. Yeah, there are little scripts and things using the referrer tag; but then I couldn't preview my pages on my hard drive. OK, I suppose I could have run a server on localhost... but... you see where this goes. You get pulled into "tag soup" and having to install every scripting language that begins with 'P' just to show people some stupid pictures.
So. I was drawn towards Flickr. In the back of my mind I knew it could always morph into something I hated; but for the longest time it didn't. Then it got Marissa'd.
So here we are again. Some company with a business that somebody finds unsatisfying even though it's profitable. They throw away the existing customers in hopes of attracting other customers. I hope Yahoo ends up like JCPenney now.
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:4, Insightful)
If it is on the internet, it will be stolen. Deal with it.
If you don't want your "images" stolen, then don't put them up on the internet. Period.
Alternatively you can put low res images up, and let your paying folks know that they can have higher res images for whatever you think you can get out of them. If you're not charging people for your images, then leeches aren't stealing anything.
Fact of the matter is, this is settled. You can make it hard for people to leech, but it will still happen, and there is nothing you can do about it. Those people are NOT your customers.
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:5)
Fact of the matter is, this is settled. You can make it hard for people to leech, but it will still happen, and there is nothing you can do about it. Those people are NOT your customers.
I run a small site that is mostly a personal photo blog. I keep an eye on the logs, and when one of my images gets a lot of hits, it's obviously being leeched. I just replace it with Goatse or something similar. If it happened often enough, I'd automate it.
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:5, Informative)
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Tim Berners-Lee created the web specifically so that you could link back to the original document/image/whatever
By your reasoning, outright stealing of images is somehow "better" than linking to them.
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:4, Informative)
Didn't you understand his point? It *is* better for him for them to copy his images than to link to them. It doesn't cost him as much.
If he were running a high volume site, and this were done by a low volume site, this wouldn't have much effect. As he's running a low volume site, it can significantly raise his expenses.
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:5, Informative)
If you're not charging people for your images, then leeches aren't stealing anything.
Except your bandwidth. Image leeches typically do things like linking your images to their MySpace page, or using them as the background image for some other website full of ad spam links, so you end up paying for their site. It wouldn't be so bad if they just "stole" your images by downloading them and using them themselves. The problem is that they don't download your images.
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:5, Informative)
If it is on the internet, it will be stolen. Deal with it.
I didn't care about non-commercial copying of the images. It was the bandwidth usage that bothered me. My site could go down and/or I could be charged if exceeded. If I was running my own server, I'd have to get hotter hardware to handle it. That's the theft that was bothering me, not copyright violations.
Yeah, stuff gets stolen on the Internet. I DID deal with it--by no longer hosting my own web site. In fact, I frequently saw leeching from my Flickr account, and it didn't bother me one bit. I was like, "fine, now it's Yahoo's problem"; but I realized I was trading one problem for another and it ultimately bit me. On to the next trade. Get it?
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That's sort of the point though. Most of Yahoo's properties have been stagnant for years, some even for over a decade. Yahoo was the place for people who wanted web 1.0, are change resistant, and are stuck in their ways. Everyone who wanted new features or could embrace new things migrated along as better alternative popped up. Those that can't/won't remained. It's the AOL of the new millennium. It's a real challenge for Yahoo because it's a gamble that the people they will lose will be offset by newcomers.
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There were a few other PiTA type things, but image leaching was the worst.
I believe you mean 'image linking'. If you don't want people accessing your images, don't put them on the web. Similarly, if you don't want your images to disappear, don't put them on someone else's web site, particularly one where you don't pay for storage.
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You should have used an Apache configuration directive to send requests for an image to tubgirl if it didn't have an appropriate referrer..
FTFY.
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OK. So (to get back to the thread) your recommendation is that non-technical users should run Apache with a custom configuration? This seems a bit silly to me.
Also, he already stated that there were technical solutions to the problem. But clearly this was just the final straw that caused him to decide that it wasn't worth running his own web site.
FWIW, I, also, don't find it worthwhile to run my own web site. I'm sure I could, but I don't want to bother. I can't even maintain enough interest to maintai
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This is why users should use open source software and run their own web sites.
That's a whole new level of technical difficulty. Many people who run yahoo groups are barely able to do it, and if you've ever used one you'll know that hosting your own is much more difficult. Not difficult at all for a tech, but for an average user?
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Heck people will be happy with Geocities again.
People hate change. But people need change.
You tweak any thing on the internet you are going to get a bunch of whiny complainers.
I have gotten complains back in my BBS days.
Why have you switched to using color ANSI, ASCII text was so much faster.
Why have you added an option to use RIP graphics, I don't want to download a new terminal emulator, but I want to see the new graphics.
Your BBS is too slow for me using my 300bps modem.
You have added a new door game, a
Re:Lesson not learned (Score:4, Informative)
But, there's always the possibility that Yahoo rolled out a shitty, ugly, and useless update and people are genuinely pissed off.
Based on what they did with email a few months ago (stuck with them since they host the webmail for my ISP), Yahoo is certainly capable of rolling out something pretty awful.
Yes, someone will always bitch about change. But sometimes, change isn't for the better. It's amazing how often web sites update their site and produce something which is utter crap. And I'm perfectly willing to believe Yahoo has done that in this case.
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(Wizard of Id reference there!) (Score:3)
"Marissa! The users are revolting!"
"Let them eat our new interface."
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Marissa! Marissa! Marissa!
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where is the
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
????
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So Yahoo doesn't roll back (just like any other company who makes changes), and instead are replying to threads in the forums by saying "we are aware of the issue, this is planned to be fixed", but it is not fast enough for you.
You then write a blog about it. When that doesn't get what you want, you go to slashdot?
Sounds like someone is having a tantrum.
Sounds more like it's how the internet is supposed to work - someone does something you don't like, and instead of just having to just live with it like you would in the real world, you can actually make some noise about it and get thousands of people to listen to you. It still may not change anything, but at least you know your complaint is heard unlike when you get a form letter response saying "We are aware of the issue, and we plan to fix it. Some day. Probably. Well maybe not - who knows if anyone is
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Yahoo was always a joke. Yahoo is the company that started around the idea of having people index the web.