For those unfamiliar with the service, Flickr is one of the more popular photo sharing communities on the web, having won the 2005 Webby Breakout of the Year Award and this year's Webbys for Best Practices and Best Navigation / Structure. Personally, I'm a big fan of Flickr given it's given a lot to the Web 2.0 community in terms of what are now common internet practices like tagging. It changed the way we thought about photo sharing and I've long been considering getting myself a paid account just to be able to fully utilize the service. However when I read this article, I did become rather concerned.
The article talks about the plight of Appy, former Flickr user and now the owner of the Badflickr website. It seems that his account was deleted one day for violating the sacred Yahoo! Flickr Terms of Service (TOS) somehow, although it's not clear how exactly he violated it. The main issue is not just the deletion in itself but how Yahoo! Flickr has appears to have decided on the deletion quickly without warning or consulting the user in question - definitely not a nice way to do business with people.
A lot of the user forums question the authenticity of the story and I have to agree that we're not seeing everything here. However, given the dedication of this one person, I have to admit that I think for the most part he is telling the truth.
Moral of the story - be careful what you post. Big brother Yahoo! may be watching.
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