Can't claim site

I've since heard back from "customer support".

Anybody who has dealt with Yahoo in the past will probably find what happened extremely familiar. Support refused to do anything other than send me a series of form letters that had nothing to do with the situation at hand. The first person, "Cid" told me to use the page for adding my site to MyBlogLog.

Note that the site is associated with a MyBlogLog community, one which currently has no author listed. The site has obviously already been added to MyBlogLog, as "Cid" would have known, assuming at s/he had taken the time to read my letter - all of the information you see above was included in the message I sent in to customer support at MyBlogLog.

I responded, explaining this without making an effort to hide my annoyance. The site has already been added, and trying to add it again would only produce an error message. We already know what needs to be done, and that it can be done, because Mannie did it a lot, before Yahoo replaced him for no discernable reason. I pointed Cid in the direction of Mannie's profile on MyBlogLog, telling this supposed employee that if he (or she) didn't know how to manually confirm a blog, Mannie could surely offer the needed enlightenment.

I heard back from somebody called "Rex" who, remarkably, asked me to provide him with a screenshot. Of a process failing to run. Yes, you read that correctly. He wants a still picture of something that takes time to occur. Or at least, so the second form letter would suggest. So Support has been utterly worthless, in a manner shamefully typical for Yahoo, which seems to believe that handholding and the sending of form letters is an adequate substitute for fixing the problems that arise. Like this one, which has arisen because MyBlogLog was designed under the unrealistic assumption that blogging software would never alter the links that users had inserted into the text; not only is that not always true, in fact, it usually isn't.

But at least there's this forum, right? Maybe not. Notice how Tilly never seems to answer anything? Let's take a look at the MyBlogLog contact information, recently updated:

"Heya Gang!

Here at MyBlogLog we are very proud to be a part of the Get Satisfaction project, and are HUGE fans of what they do! But being that this is not our primary channel for support, official responses from the team here at MBL HQ may be delayed.

If you require personal assistance, or if your concern is time sensitive, I strongly encourage that you drop us a line at our official help channel

http://www.mybloglog.com/support/ "

sending the user to the very same worthless support staff that does nothing other than send out irrelevant form letters. The appeal of this change for Yahoo is obvious; if one is going to make a career out of scr**ing up, one does best to do so in private, where the whole world isn't watching. But the appeal for the user is harder to see.

So, what I've going to do, right now, is start looking for a replacement for MyBlogLog, and recommend that anybody reading this do likewise. If experience is any guide, I can now expect a few shills, probably paid ones, to show up and start talking about how different "their experience" has been, but look to your own, and ask yourselves how often you've personally seen Yahoo do anything other than send out form letters. This is more of the same. Yahoo, having taken over another company in a long line (eGroups, Webring, Flickr ...) has finally gotten around to integrating its own staff with that of the aquired company, and scr**ing up the acquired company in the process.

Time to find a competitor.

If anybody is reading this ...

I recommended an alternative to MyBlogLog a few days ago, arguing that it would an improvement. I was quite wrong.

I'm not even going to name the place, but encountered the community that has grown up around the site. Really, not somewhere you want to be - picture a high school where the in-kids have taken over the administration; just that unsavory and just that childish. As usual, I regret any problems that some of you might have encountered, but that's the Web - you never know what you're about to stumble into, until you're knee deep in it.

Thanks for the great tips!