J.P.C. - Jason Clarke
Software, Hockey, and random ramblings.
Flickr Sucks - They Don’t Respect Their Users
Author: Jason10 Jan
I just received an email from Flickr, stating that my account has been reduced from Pro status to Free status. What pisses me off is that in the email, they say that they usually warn people ahead of time before this happens, but with the holidays blah, blah, blah, basically “tough shit”. What I heard? “You’re not important enough to us to treat with respect.”
Now, I didn’t pay for my Pro account - I earned it. I got 5 of my friends to sign up for it in a very short window of time to earn my Pro account, because I believed in their product. Now I regret that I did that. I don’t want my friends to be associated with a site that treats people this way.
For the record, here are the contents of the message that I received:
Subject: Flickr Pro Account Expired
Hello Friends and Flickrrs!
We’re writing to let you know that, not only do you rule, but your Flickr Pro Account has expired. We usually let people know this a week in advance, but things have been nuts — nuts! — here at Flickr HQ (in a good way!) and then the holidays happened.
Your Flickr account has reverted to a Free Account, which means that you can upload 10 MB of photos a month, and only the last 100 photos are visible in your photostream.
ALL your photos are still there, and will be restored if you upgrade to a pro account!
There is more information here:
http://www.flickr.com/upgrade/There are a lot of fantastic features, upgrades and improvements coming with the 1.0 release, so stay tuned.
This is the last email you will receive about this, unless of course you resubscribe, at which point we’ll probably send you another email to let you know when *that* account is expiring.
Joy!
Caterina, on behalf of Flickr
———————————-
PS: I am writing this from my personal account, so please don’t write back here. If you have questions, check out the help page here:
http://www.flickr.com/help.gne
At this point, Flickr can kiss my ass. I won’t be recommending them to my friends, and I will be warning any friends that I know currently have Flickr accounts to beware. This is very not cool.
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Caterina
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(Writing the email in a cute and fun tone does not make the company come across easygoing and personable. Content like this is not that easily glossed over.)
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We need more sites like this all over the web.
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Here is the reply that I received when I had problems with conflicting yahoo accounts. 2 accounts in question, 1 needed to be deleted so that I could proceed with transferring my photos to my new account.
Here is FLICKR's response:
Hello,
Thanks for writing in and sorry for the late response.
Your account is not deleted.
Regards,
Do
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I'm also a Pro user and received no previous warning that my account was expiring. It just did! "Don't panic, but your Pro account has expired.".
It just happens that I tried to upgrade but the upgrade price is not in my currency (i'm in Portugal and the prices appear in Brazilian coin), and the process fails in the end (using Visa).
I've been waiting for a solution from Flickr and after after 6 days I received this answer :
In response to your email, our engineers released a fix on this issue 11/08/2008 where users should be able to change the country they are in so they are not forced to pay from a Brazilian pay site. If you choose Brazil as your country then you will need to pay in Brazilian Dollars.
If you are not able to change the country please reply to this email with the information below and we will research this further. We do apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."
Obviously the problem was not solved yet. Still waiting to be able to change the country for the currency and upgrade.
:(
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T
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They give u option of downloading or deleting pics one by one...taht would take teh whole weekend..but I would still do it...and not give my business to dishonest aholes like flickr.
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When my pictures finally came through i verified them against the backup copies i had, got a couple that i hadn't saved and then deleted all of them off flickr and terminated my account and told them to kiss my ass.
What i find odd is Yahoo owns flickr yet doesn't take responsibility for what the flickr staff does and the flickr staff points the finger at yahoo.
The pro status is a joke, they hold your pictures that you have the rights to hostage unless you wish to pay for their services. Sure you can delete to get them back, but come on if you have 1000 pictures thats really stupid to force your users to do that. .
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There has to be some incentive to pay, or who would? It's business. And it's not stupid.
Any free site I've ever been too limits or changes the size of my picture. Flickr Pro does not, which is why I pay.
I will say their newest uploader sucks, and I switched back to the older version. But it took me less than five minutes, so I can't complain.
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Perhaps I just blocked someone who was too closely connected to an employee or perhaps my account fell victim to a disgruntled employee. Hopefully, when microsoft takes over, they will end the free reign of flickr employees and start thinking about rational things, like making money, rather than allowing a bunch of adolescents to run the show. They run things way too much like one would run facebook or myspace, without realizing that photos are what make them money and draw views to their advertisers. When they delete high-end accounts like mine that were getting lots of views and ordering lots of prints, they are not maximizing profits. They need to go back to buisness school.
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Should we do the following:
A) Kick their asses and let them suffer.
B) Get my help to make Yahoo sue Flickr.
C) Bury the Flickr Customer Care in the sand on the beach.
Team Flickr only does the forums, and they might help you if you have used the help by email/report abuse link. Flickr Customer Care should really be fired because they're f***ing gay.
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I just started a technical discussion in light of flickr staf:
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/74977/
And no mails, no warnings, no suspension.. direct deletion of my PRO account!
I hope you take up the voice of all the victims. Its not the frustration that i want others to know, but the gentle reminder: PLEASE DONT BUY FLICKR PRO ACCOUNT you may be deleting next day without a single email conversation.
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"Hello James,
As stated on the order page there are no refunds on pro
accounts. If an
account has been closed before the pro term is up it cannot
be
transferred to another account and the unused portion is
non-refundable.
Thank you again for contacting us. If you have any other
questions, please feel free to reply to this email.
Regards,
Emily"
My account was deleted yesterday for reasons unknown. It simply stated TOS violation. Flickr does not feel it needs to explain which terms of service were violated.
However, I have no intention of going into that good night over this issue. This is theft-pure and simple.
-James Dupree
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