I don't know if this is news to you, but it is to me. About 2 months ago I signed up with Flickr. I found they provide big storage over 30Gb for free, which I could then use to store 30GB of images. I can then access the images online from a IPad with a Ipad Flickr App. I thought this was a good solution, as the IPad doesn't have that much storage space far from 30GB. The storage is online to access images from any device for the future. You have to sign up with a Yahoo account to get a Flickr account. It was possible to sign in with a Gmail or Facebook account but not anymore, it has to be exclusively a yahoo account. I have signed into the account first few times about 3 months ago then didn't use it for 2 months. About a month ago I tried to sign in but happened to forget the password. No problem, I email the password from the forgot password option. The service was down and unavailable from Yahoo side. About week later I retrieved the password. Few weeks later, I try to sign into Flickr with the @yahoo.co.uk account and was greeted with: The account has been deactivated. Your account is being recycled. Plese sign up for a new one. Big Gasp. It turns out, if you do not sign in once every 2 months(or maybe it's 90 days) you lose your Yahoo account! As your Yahoo account is tied to the Flickr account, You lose your Flickr account as well! So I lost 30Gb of pictures after spending long time uploading them. Luckily they were backed up on a PC. In the Yahoo help it mentions reactivating a Yahoo account by completing the CAPTCHA verification. There is no CAPTCHA verification. This is for the UK Yahoo. If you do manage to reactivate your account. It tells you that all your emails and data is lost. If you try to contact Yahoo by email you can't you have to ring them. They purposefully avoid to help you by popular communication means. How abysmal is Yahoo? I read an answer from a woman at the top of Yahoo in charge and she said "We recycle Yahoo accounts so users can get the user account name they want that was previously unavailable" That is rubbish. I picked a username that nobody would ever choose Besides more importantly. Yahoo are actually saying, defining themselves that they don't care about your account, emails or data. There would be many many users that would not sign into there Yahoo account within 2 months, such as when they are ill for instance. So I ask again in this day and age when online resources are more important to users than ever: How stupid and shortsighted are Yahoo? I read a news article in which a user used a Flickr account to hold his thousands of images and referred to those images in many blogs and articles across the web. Yahoo deactivated the Yahoo account and so also the Flickr and so all related images disappeared from all news articles and blogs across the web. Others tales off the web report losing 10 years of emails. Users cannot access Facebook. Users signed upto Facebook with a Yahoo account. So for long term future or precious use my advice is DO NOT USE YAHOO UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Why does Flickr not have it's own accounts? Because it now belongs to Yahoo. Do not rely on a service that relys on another service for it's accounts! DO NOT USE FLICKR. FIND something else. In fact when you click on Flickr help, you are directed to Yahoo help. You cannot contact Flickr for help. I have found two online services offering 50GB for free. Adrive and Mega. The only trouble is IOS Apps don't work with these services. Dropbox provide 2GB Google+ or Google Drive 15GB total Edit: I found the Yahoo UK phone number. This is the alternative to the costly 0800 number. The number is 020 7131 1000. For Flickr issues you would have to ring this number as well as you can't contact them by mail. In fact in the past when Yahoo were starting out getting popular i always considered them not quality. The graphics and fonts looked awful for starters. It no wonder Google and Microsoft came along offering far better online services. What a s*** outfit Yahoo are.
Well, I had also some issues with Yahoo Account/Flickr. Sometimes I was logged out without any reason. Then, they asked me to reset my password (even if I have phone authentication enabled). Funny was, you cannot set a password that contains ANY of the letters of your username. For example, when my username is dogbite I cannot use any of these letters in my password. Since I use a password generator, it's virtually impossible to generate an acceptable password. I have to manually create one. What a ****. Luckily, my account has never been disabled/deleted, since I am storing lots of pics in Flickr. However, I also store them elsewhere, just in case **** hits the fan. About other apps, MEGA Ios app works great (at least on iphone). If you want to store stuff online (not confidential) just take a look at shared.com (100GB, you need to log-in every 60 or 90 days as well, no mobile app) or ozibox (100GB, not sure about log-in policy. Maybe they have a mobile app). Stay away from surdoc (100GB but after the first year they "expire"). Better long term alternative (not free, though): amazon glacier or backblaze.
While that sucks, it's not just Yahoo. You have to be careful with any of these services to check out their policies on inactive accounts if you don't plan on logging in regularly. I had used an email service for a single account but later found it had been deactivated - this one turned out to be 6 months but it varies (I've read it's 9 months for Gmail). It's something to consider when creating an account you may never log into again except in a password-reset situation. Actually, that's why recycling accounts is so bad. An attacker could take over a recycled account and use it to reset a password on another account.
Strange? I just signed in to my Flickr account (via Yahoo! of course) and all is well. When I first signed up for Flickr it was independent of Yahoo! I rarely use it.
It's all a big con. It only becomes deactivated if you do not login within 12 months. Going round in circles. You ring the Yahoo phone number and all it say is automated robot reply, goto the Customer Care help on the yahoo webpage and look for your specific question. There is no option to email them. How can a company provide social media services and do there utmost not to be contacted. It's a contradiction in terms. We want to help you but if we screw you we do not want to be bothered by you. What a bunch of ~ Snipped as per TOS ~ I do not want to deal with companies that seem to work ok until you get a problem. Too many deal with these ~ Snipped as per TOS ~ companies with abysmal customer support. Yahoo making millions of $ and £.
Good news for those who need more than 30GB online storage for free. Mega online cloud service are offering 50GB free as i mentioned before and there is now a Apple IOS app to connect to the Mega cloud to upload files.
I have a yahoo question unrelated to the subject in this thread, but yahoo related. I hope someone can help. I own a Samsung smart phone, and for some reason, although I have never had anything to do with yahoo, I get a text from yahoo about 2 or 3 times a day that simply says a yahoo related number of about 6 numbers is activated. I delete the text. I am guessing that my phone number was obtained from some app on my phone by yahoo. Does any one know how to make it stop?
Just buy Office 365, $50 or so for household license, and you get 1TB EACH for up to 5 people, and it never goes away. Or Amazon Prime, unlimited photo storage. Problem solved!
