Jesus, that was a pain. I noticed a bunch of my wordpress flickr-embedded videos were no longer working — such as my awesome post of my college video experiments — despite me following embed instructions.
1) I sent notes to WordPress support, who basically told me it was Flickr‘s problem. I was pretty damn convinced they were wrong, as I had changed nothing on my side. They kindly investigated further at my behest, and it turns out that Flickr had set my account to not be in public searches — which had the undocumented side-effect of making my embedded videos no longer worked.
2) I had to send a note to Flickr‘s help. I then waited 5 business days after they said to wait 3 business days — they had escalated my issue up the chain, according to them — and sent another email, which was also ignored. Finally on day 6 I opened up a 2nd ticket with reference to my 1st ticket, and was rewarded with a prompt response a couple hours later:
[Flickr Case 1368805] Other issues
Hello,
I have classified your account as “public”/”safe”.
Regards,
-Terrence
What?!?! My account wasn’t “public”/”safe”???? Greeeeat.
By examining random photos from my FlickR, I see that most do not have the “hide from public searches” checkbox checked anymore! Yay! But does this mean that the pictures *I really want hidden* are no longer checked? I don’t know! I had tried to avoid the wrath of various corporate entities by hiding selected photos that are otherwise public.
Anyway, I always thought my stats were pretty good… But I had noticed a dropoff to about 2500-5000 views a day, whereas in the past I got closer to 7500. However, despite being hidden from public searches, I still got a lot of referral traffic from both Flickr and Yahoo Photos [Yahoo owns flickr], so it seems like “hide from public seraches” still leaves you open to plenty of other referral methods. Anyway, hopefully these stats improve now that my account is no longer censored:
And yes, it bugs me to be a paying user and to be censored. But if I were to make my own photo album off of flickr, nobody would view it. Sort of how my blog gets read through Facebook a lot, but hardly anyone actually goes to it directly. People need to get over their technical laziness. Our technical laziness funnels us into social sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr — thereby putting us under the umbrella of corporate and community censorship. If only we could all just run our own stuff on our own hardware, nobody could censor us! But it would be much harder for us to all stay together. Maybe that is an issue that Web 3.0 will address. . .
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