Last week, after receiving the ”Important updates to your Flickr account” notification email I deleted my Flickr account, associated with my Yahoo account. Today I received two new copies of the ”Important updates to your Flickr account” email. I tried to access the old Flickr account to make sure it has been deleted, but logging in with my Yahoo account only creates a new Flickr account, which is not what I want.

What I want is to have no more email messages sent to me from Flickr.

I also tried logging in using my Gmail address (which also appears to have a Yahoo account associated with it), but opening flickr.com after that also just creates a new Flickr account every time. I keep deleting these accounts, only to be handed a new one every time I go back to flickr.com.

Back in April-May, I received altogether 5 separate messages informing me about the SmugMug ownership business, so something’s clearly not right with your emailing system, or with the records you have of me.

Your email messages should follow the semi-standard practice of including a footer with a clear explanation of why exactly am I receiving the email and what I should do if I wish to stop receiving them. The ToS and Community Guidelines links (currently in the footer) are all but useless in this context.

I’m a heavy Yahoo Pipes user, and recently deployed Huginn to Heroku to see if I could use it to replace Pipes. My main motivation for this is ensuring continuity (should Y! decide to pull the plug on Pipes), but an almost equally important one is that managing Pipes has become nightmarish with the amount of individual pipes I’ve accumulated, currently more than 150.

With Huginn I see I can employ Scenarios to group agents together, which is already more than what Pipes offers. But duplicating just a couple of my Pipes’ functionality in Huginn has already produced six agents. Additionally, unlike Pipes, Scenarios can’t be nested (into Scenarios of Scenarios), so I fear that finding and managing individual agents, and perhaps even Scenarios, would eventually become as complicated as managing Pipes once I’d get in double- and triple-digit amounts.

So what I’d like to have in the UI is more means to classify and search for agents. My old-fashioned instinct makes me suggest a directory-like tree structure, but more modern and semantic solutions such as tagging could work just as well if not better. Being able to select an Agent Type could also be one way to narrow down the main agents list (/agents). That list also doesn’t seem to have a search function. The popup list for selecting agents in the Scenario editor does have a search and it seems to work nicely, with real-time results and all, although I’ve not yet created hundreds of agents to see how well it scales.

(In my case, another natural way to reduce the clutter would be having a true singular RSS feed filtering agent (fetch a feed, filter the results, emit the filtered feed), which is my main use-case for Pipes. Currently I’m using an RSS Agent to fetch the feed, a Trigger Agent to filter the results and a Data Output Agent to output the filtered feed, resulting in three separate agents for each of my Pipes. But this is a separate ”Agent Suggestions” issue from the one I’m reporting here. And of course there might already exist a smarter way to do this which I’m just not aware of.)