Although I’m an everyday Digg user, I thought I’d take del.icio.us – one of the less known social bookmarking sites -for a test drive today.
Said and done - I created my account, and uploaded a bookmark file with 1500 or so entries. These were successfully imported, and each bookmark was assigned “tags” according to the names of the bookmark folders it had resided in. “Tags” are what del.icio.us uses instead of “categories”, “folders” or similar containers. Anyway, no problem so far.
Imported bookmarks are by default private, so my next task was to select which ones to share. I would have liked to publish entire categories at a time, like “share the entire contents of my SMTP folder and all its subfolders”, but couldn’t find such a selection. I concluded that I needed to publish one bookmark at a time.
This seemed like quite a chore, but my curiosity had been whetted. As it turned out, however, I was not to spend hours clicking on share and yes, because after a while, this occurred:
Unfortunately we are unable to process your request at this time. This error is usually temporary. Please try again later.
If you continue to experience this error, it may be caused by one of the following:
- You may want to scan your system for spyware and viruses, as they may interfere with your ability to connect to Yahoo!. For detailed information on spyware and virus protection, please visit the Yahoo! Security Center.
- This problem may be due to unusual network activity coming from your Internet Service Provider. We recommend that you report this problem to them.
While this error is usually temporary, if it continues and the above solutions don’t resolve your problem, please let us know. (link to tagged support request page deleted)
Intermittently I also received another error page, which was even better – unfortunately I didn’t grab it in time. The page suggested that I had worked too fast, and requested that I try again later, in a gentler manner.
So, here is big bad me with my laptop, clicking on share, waiting for yes to appear, clicking on tt, waiting for the page to refresh, clicking on tt, and so on. At the other end of the pipe, the tiny little del.icio.us/Yahoo server farm hurts because I’m too fast for it, and screams for compassion…
I did file a support request, but only received a boilerplate reply – no timely answers to my questions. After grabbing a snack, and returning to my desk only to notice that my access still was denied, I decided to delete my account. Of course I couldn’t do that from my normal workstation, since access was denied. I didn’t even bother trying other boxes inside my NATted network, but instead SSH’ed elsewhere, and nuked my account in style, using Lynx.
In other words, good riddance. However, what still bugs me is the “this problem may be due to unusual network activity coming from your Internet Service Provider. We recommend that you report this problem to them” garbage. It is absolutely useless to have a user call their ISP just to say “I can’t get to del.icio.us, and they said to contact you”.
If the del.icio.us folks really wanted to report some kind of malicious traffic, they would have to provide the ISP with detailed information so that the problem could be tracked and remedied. - Of course, contacting the provider just to demand that the user click on their mouse “in a gentler manner” would be considered humorous even in the presence of detailed logs.
External links:
Post a Comment