Of Messengers and Yahoo

Frust....that is all messengers have left me with ,the last two weeks. Explanations later on but the statement at present is that Yahoo's help sucks.

And that Windows XP can be fallen in love with (more of that in next post maybe or even later).

Well,back to the topic of 'messengers'.

To connect through Yahoo messenger has been an awful experience,thanks to Sign In problems and IIT's mahaan proxies set to block chats. The problem began someday when I signed into my mobile and Yahoo messenger refused to sign back in from my comp giving some crappy error that my account has been signed in through another device. Then why the heck am I able to sign in through meebo and now Gaim ,my default messenger for all other accounts other than Google's.

Another hell of a trouble has been Windows Live Messenger.Beautiful as it looks ,it hides such a poor troubleshooting wizard that the end result can be guessed even by a layman.Guess what it points out!!!It tells you that your Internet connection is alright but the connection to Live Messenger cannot be made. Oh Thank you!I never knew that!???

Mention must also be made of the stupidity in cookie handling by Firefox.And thanks to Google's intelligence(hello...I'm kiddin), I cannot open my Gmail and Orkut accounts simultaneously since they are not the same 'Google Account'. I never asked it to verify that,did I ,or did you?

Courtesy Pranesh, I came to know of a website http://www.firefoxmyths.com . Please note that it will redirect to http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyths.html(just in case the former link does not work).

And yes, I almost forgot,to speak of Yahoo's great customer care.It sucks and the worst part is that only the Indian portal(http://in.yahoo.com) has this big problem.The international(more correctly ,the US portal page) is much better and in fact very good.The Indian portal does not have a single mention of where to mail your queries to. Right now I just have the address to contact in case you have a problem with your messenger, and here it is(the Indian version) : in-messenger@cc.yahoo-inc.com

And a scan of the main page of the portal gives you two pages of link errors(those elements on the page which have been hyperlinked to an unavailable address) excluding those with Error 403 : Forbidden.

Click here for screen shots

And to end this story of the portal that has made it real big, I must confess that my problem hasn't yet been solved, thanks to a reply from customer care very politely saying

"
Hello Naveen,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! India Customer Care.

We're sorry to hear that you're currently experiencing difficulties when
attempting a connection to our servers.

Please be sure that you have established your Internet connection before
attempting to sign in/connect with Messenger. Launching Messenger will
no longer initiate a connection to the Internet.

<......All that was already tried out....>

Further, we recommend that you upgrade to the current version of
Microsoft Internet Explorer. If you use Netscape or Mozilla Firefox as
your browser, you don't have to switch to Internet Explorer, or even run
Internet Explorer. However by upgrading to the current version of
Internet Explorer it will offer you increased functionality and
stability with the latest version of Messenger.

"
That was it and then another mail from Yahoo! Customer Care with the subject line "Yahoo! would like to get your feedback for Support Case".

Sorry, I did not oblige.Just too pissed off that day.

The only point I wanted to make was that I was really shocked not to find a single helpline on the Indian portal.If Yahoo was always like this it might not have shocked me like this.But the US version also has a Premium phoneline service!!!Why don't we have it?Why don't we pull up our socks.Why does a portal that looks so glitzy on its homepage have such an unattractive help page(yes ,yes there exists one). And why does it not care to update it when it does to its services pages.Would another hundred hours of work on the Help page really matter or is it that voices like mine will never be heard for they form a minority in India( we do have a large population, don't we? :D).