Disappointed in WordPress!!!

Yes i am and disappointed is putting it mildly.

If you look at my posts dated from January 2006 to December 2011, you will notice that all the images are missing! i just discovered this a few days ago when i redirected someone to a previous entry from November 2011.

From 2006 and 2011, our family blog was on Livejournal. i felt i wanted to do more with the blog and searched for another platform. Finally having researched carefully, i decided on WordPress. They seemed to have a wonderfully import process – or so i thought at that time.

So in December 2011, i did the import and all was fine – the images were all there and it all looked great! i didn’t even think to check the links for the images because it was not mentioned in the import instructions from WordPress. So i was happy until a few days ago.

Here are the import instructions given by WordPress:

Importing Content from Another Platform or WordPress Blog

We make it easy for you to import your blog content from a variety of other blogging platforms, including Blogger, Tumblr, Israblog, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Typepad, Posterous, Splinder, and Yahoo! 360. Simply log into your WordPress.com blog dashboard, then go to Tools -> Import, choose your previous platform and follow the instructions.

You can also easily import content here from another WordPress.com or WordPress.org blog or web site (choose the WordPress option).

Don’t See a Specific Importer for Your Blog’s Service?

If we do not have an importing tool for your particular platform, you will need to try and convert it into one of the accepted formats so that you can use the proper importer. This means you first convert your blog to one of the services mentioned above (such as Blogger), and then import your blog from Blogger to WordPress.com.

Importing Media (Photos, Videos)

If you are importing content from another WordPress-powered blog, your media files will be downloaded from your old host and uploaded to WordPress.com automatically.

See? There were no specific instructions that if your images are linked to another blog or in the gallery of another blogging platform, that you should re-link or even highlight that images might be lost should your other platform expire, that you should re-upload your images.

That’s what happened to me – i had thought that all was well after a couple of months of using WordPress. So we let our Livejournal expire and now this happens! Almost 250 previous posts without photos now!! And most of those posts only make sense with photos!!!

What is even more tragic is that our harddisk had crushed middle of last year and we had lost a few years of photos. So the photos on our family blog were the only copies of those years. Now it’s all lost.

The only saving grace is that the volunteers who man the Support Forums and the staff (ironically called Happiness Engineers) did  respond very quickly. But they could not help. You can follow my exchange with them here.

Sob. Sob. Sob.

My last resort is to see if we can resort our expired LJ account. SIGH!

syc

PS: there is no image with this post because i’m crying over the lost of my images from almost 250 posts…