Tripod continuing to offer that merry f*** you to its users
Joseph Dunphy
Referencing this post on my Yahoo 360 blog: http://tinyurl.com/2dxbwx
The short form: I decide to update my site at Tripod, which for now is
located at
http://commonsense666atlast.tripod.com/
I've been talking about posting some recipes there for a while now,
and decide that the time has come to start posting a few, but discover
that I can't, because Lycos' system won't let me log in. What happens
when I enter my userid and password, or really click on practically
anything on the tripod homepage, is that I find myself on the Lycos
search engine page, logged into nothing. Even clicking on the link to
create a new site lands me there.
Reading a few reviews of Tripod, I find that I'm not the first person
to have run into misalignment problems on that site, or to have
witnessed what followed. I wrote to Support at Tripod, describing the
problem, and got BOFH standard reply #38 (or is it #37): the
responding individual insisted that the problem didn't exist, and told
me to clear my cache, which of course I had, along with rebooting my
computer before trying again. I pointed this out, discovered that our
friend at Support wasn't going to budge. The latest exchange can be
found below. If I'm sounding a little unfriendly as you're reading
this ... what's a friendly way of saying "would you please stop being
a pathological liar and just do your job"?
Not that this is a first. I can still remember a church group whose
site I was doing the volunteer webmaster thing on, over on a provider
that was definitely not free, and how even as I confronted the sysop
with cancelled check in hand was told that the provider had not
received payment, until I brought up the magic words "I guess we'll
just have to be in touch with the district attorney's office", at
which point somebody's memory miraculously improved. Praise Jesus, or
something. There is something about this industry that seems to draw
people who live to see what they can get away with, and our friend
"Tyler" is definitely one of them.
Message by Tyler on Wed, Jul 18th 2007 11:42 am
Once again, please note that we are in fact able to log into your
account with your username and password, without problem. Clearing
your cache often solves login troubles as login cookies tend to
interfere with each other or get courupted overtime, leading to login
failure.
Other possibilities for this issue may be security settings on your
computer that are preventing login cookies altogether, or you may
simply have incorrect login information.
LOST PASSWORD:
To have your password sent to the e-mail account you registered with,
please visit https://registration.lycos.com/forgot.php?&m_PR=26
For your security, we are only permitted to release account
information to the registered email address. See below to update your
address.
If you have an older account and have not signed up for a Lycos
Network passport, you'll be asked to enter your member name and date
of birth. Your password will then be sent to the e-mail address to
which your account is registered.
LOST MEMBER NAME:
If your URL is http://user.tripod.com or http://members.tripod.com/user,
then "user" is your member name.
LOGIN PROBLEMS:
If you have login problems, please clear the cookies on your computer.
Doing so will allow you to successfully login to Tripod if you are
cookied as another Tripod member, another Lycos member, or a member
that has recently been removed for terms of service violations.
Also, if you need to log in to more than one Tripod account from the
same computer, please use this link each time before you attempt to
login.
UPDATE YOUR REGISTERED EMAIL ADDRESS:
To update your Registered Email Address, please submit the following
information:
- Tripod URL
- Registered First Name
- Registered Last Name
- Registered E-mail Address
- New E-mail Address
- Registered Street Address (Including Zip Code, State, and Country
- Date of Birth
Once this information is received, we will make the change and email
your password to the updated email address.
PLEASE NOTE: Tripod reserves the right to refuse a request if we
believe that the request is fraudulent.
--
Tyler D.
Customer Service
Lycos Services.
My Reply:
Your message on Thu, Jul 19th 2007 9:05 pm
Tyler,
1. Kindly note that when one clicks on the first link that you
provided in that last message, the one that supposedly takes one to
the password restoral page - one bounces back to the Lycos search
engine page. This happens before cookies even become an issue, so it's
not debatable. There's a problem at your end and it needs to be fixed.
The manual entry you cut and pasted doesn't cover this, but you don't
seem to want to accept this, so
2. May I please speak with your supervisor. You response has been
unprofessional and unacceptable.
Your message on Thu, Jul 19th 2007 9:33 pm
PS. The other two urls you gave take one to pages which don't exist on
your system. The page is clearly out of date, but you cite it as if it
were scripture, and as if you were incapable of comprehending the idea
of the system malfunctioning.
Tyler, if that is your real name, you are obviously doing nothing but
reading from a script, and by the way, I've written to the
administrative contact for tripod.com with a complaint about your job
performance and been blogging about the whole incident, apparently in
front of a few hundred people at this point if site stats are to be
trusted. We can start handling this pleasantly and professionally, or
you can be personally responsible for your employer looking really,
really bad in a place where lots and lots of people will see and
rumors will start spreading. Especially when it is so easy to find
corroboration out of those who've reviewed your service in the past.
Apparently, I'm not the first user to have been treated to this
"ignore the man behind the curtain" act, while running into
misdirected links on your site, and I seriously doubt that anybody is
going to think that it's OK for a hosting service to refuse to fix a
broken login.
This is outrageous. I want to talk to that supervisor now, please.
-------------------------------------------------
At this point, that is where things stand. All that I want to do is
login, as I have so many times before, and update my site, and all I'm
getting is resistance, but hey - it's that site for the pictures from
New Mexico and Arizona. Maybe Lycos saw just how controversial all of
those pictures of cacti and sagebrush were going to be.
Recommendations are subject to change as new information comes in, but
my best advice right now would be to avoid Lycos as a provider. I was
going to set up a Math site at Angelfire, something which (given my
background) I would have been unusually well qualified to create, but
obviously if Lycos is going to let something like this go unaddressed,
I just have to look for a different host. I'll hold off a bit and give
the company a chance to respond to my complaints about its employer
and his actions before relocating anything off of Angelfire, but
seriously - if they aren't going to care about this maintenance
problem, how bad would things have to get before they would fix
something? No news on this one will be very, very bad news, indeed.
Return to the blog post: http://tinyurl.com/2dxbwx
Joseph Dunphy
OK - a little fuzzy headed and clicked on those last two urls a little
too quickly, but the rest of what I said stands.
Return to blog post
http://groups.google.com/group/joseph_dunphy/web/lycos-redirection