Excuse me? “You have not paid for the services” makes it sound like this is theft or was won in a contest from Yahoo!. The subscription was paid for by a family member at the same rate that I would have paid. I guess what I have learned in this is to longer ask for gift subscriptions because Yahoo! will not support the Flickr customer as if they are a paying customer. I can honestly say this leads me to believe that my next Flickr help request may be treated differently because “I have not paid for the service”.

Not only that, my Flickr account should have effectively had a “balance” of 2 months because all notifications said my account would not be downgraded from pro until February. I used the gift subscription to “recharge” or reload my balance with +12 months yielding 14 months of pro service. Under any reasonable and fair method of accounting this is how the transaction should have been processed. This is the method of operation I was assuming otherwise I would have waited until February to enter my gift code.

I find this denial to be quite a disappointment and I will certainly be notifying others (friends, family, blog readers) to not give Flickr gift subscriptions to myself or others in the future.