Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Long-time Yahoo user sick of website’s buggy services

Dear Marissa Mayer:

I know you have your hands full as CEO trying to revitalize the storied Internet company that is Yahoo. You’re taking Yahoo in exciting new directions with mobile apps and online media.
But you really need to pay attention to Yahoo’s core services like Yahoo Mail and news sites like Yahoo Finance. These are important services that I use every day throughout the day and they’re getting unbearably buggy.
Yahoo Mail is terrible now. I’ve been a user of the service since it launched in 1997. In fact, I even used Rocketmail, the predecessor email service that Yahoo purchased to jumpstart Yahoo Mail.
Lately retrieving my Yahoo email using my desktop PC has been a frustrating process. Often the page locks up when I try to load an email and all I see is a blank email window and the spinning progress wheel of death.
The page is so slow and unresponsive it makes me feel like I’m using an old dial-up connection instead of broadband.
I’m not alone in my frustration. Whenever I post a tweet on Twitter or write about Yahoo’s problems on my blog, Tech-media-tainment, I get me-too comments from readers.
What follows is a gallery of goofs and error pages I have encountered on Yahoo’s services.

The spinning progress wheel of death on Yahoo Mail.
 
Sometimes Yahoo Mail times out with the message “There appears to be a problem loading the message list.” Ya think?!

Or “There appears to be a problem loading the email.” No duh.

Other times you might get Temporary Error message No. 14.

OK, this next one is minor, but it still shouldn’t happen. These Yahoo reminders about upcoming birthdays couldn’t produce an apostrophe in the subject line. Instead of an apostrophe it used symbols. That’s like a cartoon swear word replacement. And for the record, the same mistake also showed up in Yahoo Mail on my iPhone.

Just as infuriating are Yahoo News pages that won’t load. I’ve gotten the message, “We are experiencing some temporary issues, please bear with us as we restore your personalized Homepage.”

More common is the error page that says, “Yahoo! Will be right back … Thank you for your patience. Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue.” (Close-up image at top.)

And finally, check out this error image from Yahoo Finance. Yahoo can’t even get its display ads right.

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