wherein Liz is annoyed at ff.net (what else is new?)

[edenfalling]

At some point in June, as part of their recent... upgrades? changes, anyway... ff.net killed a bunch of my settings, which I just noticed today. That neatly explains why I haven't received any story or author alert emails for several weeks, nor any review alerts -- the site had unchecked those options. So I have been going through manually trying to identify and respond to newish reviews, because I decided years ago that I would make a point of responding to everyone I could respond to.

Annoyingly, the old automatic review response function I could access via the alert emails no longer exists. I can respond via ff.net's PM function or not at all, and if reviewers have disabled PMs? Tough luck.

...

When I am done dealing with reviews, I must start checking my author and story alert lists and seeing what I've been missing on that front, too.

...

Probably there were notices about this on the site's homepage, but I so rarely go there via that page -- I tend to follow direct links from email alerts or rec lists -- that I don't think it's a very effective way of getting the word out to users. :-(

Comments

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

I didn't know they did that....know I have to go check things too. You'd think, since they have ppl's emails they would have emailed something about it....

[edenfalling]

My specific problem appears to have been a miscommunication between new code at ff.net AND new code at Hotmail, which I think I have now fixed. But ff.net had also turned off my PM function, which should not have had anything to do with Hotmail, so perhaps other things got turned off for no reason whatsoever. :-(

And yes, they have everyone's email! It's not very hard to send mass notifications.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

Also, all of your old inbox and outbox has been archived somewhere else with the new settings. I really cannot see how this is an improvement, though the PM function now comes in colors. Hooray for that, what?

The interface is also peculiar with it now all on the left side of the page. I don't like that either, but then I don't like change. It's strange -- I don't think there was any change to my settings -- I continued to get alerts and such.

[edenfalling]

I looked at the settings again, and I think I figured out what killed my emails. It was a combination of ff.net's new code AND Hotmail's new code. Hotmail (or more technically, Windows Live) recently changed some things around in one of their "No really, we promise you'll like the new bells and whistles even though you've never used a single one of them in the past and in fact have repeatedly resisted our interface pseudo-facelifts!" fits of idiocy.

Anyway, either ff.net changed the email address they use to send alerts, or Hotmail decided out of the blue not to recognize their address, or both. And Hotmail didn't file the alerts in my junk folder -- it simply blocked them. This meant I had no chance to tell Hotmail that the address was safe, and ff.net, having had a couple messages blocked, automatically assumed that I didn't want any more messages ever.

IDIOTS.

I will give ff.net minor points for providing directions on how to add their address to the safe list in several email programs. I have fixed this issue, and theoretically I will get alerts from now on... but I have lost about a month's worth of notifications that I can never recover.

I am not enamored of ff.net's new interface, but then, I am one of the people who has continued to use their "legacy" story stats function for years rather than switch to their new traffic stats, which I have always found both useless and needlessly confusing. :-(