On February 7, I attempted to update my GeoCities Plus website using Microsoft FrontPage 2000 (a popular web editing and publishing application that allows site updating from the program), as I have been doing for 2 1/2 years.
I kept getting the error message "The server sent a response which FrontPage could not parse. If you are connecting to a FrontPage server, check with the server's administrator to make sure that the FrontPage server extensions are installed properly." I figured that GeoCities was having some problems with their servers, so I put it off for a while. (Note: the last time I updated my page, on February 3, it updated without any problem.)
When I went back later in the day, the same problem came up again. This time I picked up the phone and called Yahoo's main office in California. My previous dealings with them have been without problems, so I expected a quick resolution.
When I explained the problem, the customer support technician told me that they no longer allow customers with the GeoCities Plus package to use FrontPage to update their accounts and that they have to use the web-based interface for site management. I asked since when this policy had come into effect, and she said it had been in place since January 1.
I then asked her to escalate the call to her supervisor. She did so, and I was sent to a technical support person with GeoCities. I explained the problem to him and mentioned that I did not receive any notice by email that my service was changed. He then asked for my phone number and asked if he could call me back later in the evening after he looked into the problem. He called me back later in the evening (9:00 pm EST) and told me that he could not do anything about it at his level.
I then asked him to escalate it to whoever is in charge of setting these rules, and he did so. I told him that I expect to hear from someone higher up at Yahoo by 9:00 am PST (12:00 pm EST) to explain why they changed their level of service for paid accounts without informing the customers of that fact by email, which Yahoo did when they announced the change of their POP3 email access to a paid service.
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