May 03, 2005

• That's very strange. I wonder why their policy is not to tell the account holder why it's been deleted? Surely this isn't the first group that's been yanked over a misunderstanding?
• Also strange that they can't talk to anyone about it. You would think that they would advise about the nature of the breach of policy conditions. That trekkie thing in the article was pretty unwarranted given the nature of the story, I thought. Of course a group called SciFiNoir is going to go to town on it. This doesn't do Yahoo any public relations favours.
• Wow. That's fucked up. I remember, way back when, I was on AOL and they regularly did the same thing (arbitrary policing of TOS), but at least they'd talk about it.
• Especially weird considering that this group obviously wasn't a haphazard bunch. Judging from the looks of the faq the moderator put togetether in such short time, I'm assuming the group will quickly re-materialize in another dimension far better than yahoo groups.
• ya know...you get what you pay for... in this case they paid nothing, now they have nothing... Anyone with an investment in a community such as this should want to have more control and security than is offered by ANY free service.. Looks like they've figured out that a paid domain is the way to go... too bad they lost everything in the process..
• And nobody backed up any data. Bloody stupid.
• It looks like they also deleted the owner's yahoo account. I wonder whether she(?) had paid for her mail account. This kind of thing is why my husband and I run our own server.
• Yahoo has a consistent policy of not offering any customer service for anything, in my experience. I had a phishing incident where someone pretended to be Yahoo and asked me for my password. Not being an idiot, I didn't reply, but I did forward the message on to Yahoo's customer service to let them know what was going on. They did absolutely nothing, then sent me a survey to ask me how I felt about their (lack of) service.
• "Apparently, Yahoo won't let people talk...." Just wait till they have go at Flickr.
• Yes, they should have backed up the files. They are probably large enough to run their own list, if they have the knowhow (I know I don't). It's not so frightening that Yahoo is "censoring", but it does make me worry for my own lists that they are apparently too stupid to know the difference between child porn and a discussion about child porn.