I logged onto Yahoo and found that my profile had been changed. The first of Yahoo’s “Top Questions” is “What happened to my profile?” but the link just goes to the aggressively cheerful “Welcome to the Profiles Tutorials!” page, which does not actually answer the question.

Another question is “What happened to my alias profile?“, which includes this heap of committee-spawned obfuscatory hooey:

If you had a profile page associated with your alias prior to migration to your new profile on Yahoo!, it will not be viewable moving forward.

I’m not sure that “migration” would be a good way to describe what happens if millions of birds are pulled from their nests and moved to a another location without warning, but whatever. And I suppose that being given a pretty much profile sort of counts as getting a “new profile,” in the same way that if a bunch of pirates looted the house you rented, you’d end up with a “new house” because it no longer resembles the old one.  Because the auxiliary verb “will” already conveys “in the future,” I wonder what someone thought the adverbial phrase “moving forward” would add to this linguistic mush.  It seems to be a euphemism for something like “anymore” or “ever again.”

Many of the comments on Slashdot point out that Yahoo! is a free service, so it’s not like we should really expect much of them.

Another writes, “Yahoo please die already, noone has liked you since ’96.”