Pfu, if Yahoo! customer care is really that useless as at appears to be in this story on shorty114.net, then I guess it’s really just a matter of time before great projects like del.icio.us will lose a bunch of community support.
The feature that you are describing is not available at this time in Yahoo! del.icio.us. Imported bookmarks currently have to be edited individually to make them public.
Yahoo! support mail as quoted on shorty114.net
Why not simply ask the user if he/she has something like Python or Perl or another scripting language installed and if so write a small script doing just that? Most MacOSX users have Perl, Python and Ruby installed thanks to Apple, most Linux users too, and for Windows users installing Python (just an example, no flamewar please ;) ) isn’t rocket science as well.
But this way, customer care just appeared to be totally uninterested in actually solving the problem for the user (hey, they could just check their logs or ask the user which bookmarks were involved in the update and run the required db updates manually).
And trying to explain yourself by saying users wanted it this way is just lame when it comes to something like being forced to import all bookmarks as private items.
I don’t know the original support request, but according to the post the user was even willing to write a small script, so if the support team over there at Yahoo! knew about his/her attitude, they might have even suggested that there is a way to replace a bookmark with a new one by just using the same URL but different settings (cumbersome, but anyway) just as Joshua Schachter mentioned in a comment.
Again, I don’t know if the support request also mentioned that the user was willing to write a script, but just a small hint or perhaps even a script doing just that would save me in the same situation as your customer ;-)
Now if Ma.gnolia’s UI could just lose some weight…
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