A Rant About Yahoo

Well, golly, so that's what happened to my post about feeding parrots! I thought I was logged into my other blog and couldn't imagine why it wasn't showing up there!

Anyway...this isn't about that. This is about Yahoo. And I will preface it by saying that yes, they provide a whole slew of great free services, and yes I am thankful for them, since they've helped me stay in touch, make friends, meet my husband, and many other things. So, yes, I do recognize I've been getting a lot of something for nothing for a lot of years.

At 2:33 a.m. yesterday I started getting notices that my password had been changed, and then that my alternate email addresses that I use for yahoogroups (among other things) were being deleted. As the notices were coming in, I tried to access my yahoo account, and sure enough, my password didn't work. I contacted them immediately via email, and also forwarded all of the messages to them, with complete headers.

Meanwhile I went to their support site and accessed the help files, which actually were no help - I can't change my password if I can't access my account. They sent me a form to fill out, and I did so, to the best of my ability. However, when I signed up for yahoo, it was well over a decade ago - probably closer to 15 years - and I don't remember where I lived at that time, or the answers to several of the other questions. But the one that REALLY gets me is, "What is the answer to your secret question?" Huh? What is my secret question, and I'll answer it! Do I remember what it might have been after all this time? Even if yahoo was the only thing I ever signed up for I wouldn't remember after all this time!

So I filled it in to the best of my ability, and where I didn't recall the answers, I told them that.

Now I got a note back that I MUST answer ALL of the questions correctly, no exceptions, to recover my identity on Yahoo. So, if that's the case, I will never recover it. Especially after my stroke, my memory is simply not that good going back a dozen years! In that time I've had so many life changes that, gee, the most important things - like my yahoo secret question - have taken a back burner.

I have been chiaowl online since day 1 with yahoo, as well as elsewhere. It has been my online identity almost since I've been online. (I was ^OwlLady^ for a few years before that...yeah, I've got a long history on the internet...) I have never found another chiaowl. If I lose that identity, then life without yahoo will start. No more yahoo groups, no more yahoo games, no more yahoo messenger, no more yahoo spam...er...email, no more yahoo shopping, none of it. I'm too old to become someone else.

No, I'm not feeling spiteful, just tired. A hacker can, within a few seconds and without jumping through ANY hoops, just take what's mine and yahoo didn't protect me from that...but when I try to get it back, NOW they're protecting my account, to the extent that I can't even claim what has been mine for so many years. Where is the justice in that?

Chiaowl may soon be dead, for good.