Here is a quick little tutorial to help show you how to navigate to our archives and categories. We utilize an Ajax sliding menu so that our website will not be cluttered up with administrative drivel, but the information is all still here. The magic of Ajax just keeps it tidily away in a drawer.

Yahoo! announced this summer that they will moth ball their Online Bill Payment Service (nuts and bolts run by CheckFree).  The service has suffered from lack of attention and development by Yahoo over the years.  I have been using the service myself almost since it was launched.

Yahoo! Terminating Bill Pay Announcement

The Yahoo! Bill Pay service is being discontinued. If you are a registered user as of July 2, 2007, you may continue to use the service as you have in the past until September 14, 2007. Any payments scheduled to occur after September 14 will not be processed.
September 14, 2007: This is the last date on which a previously scheduled payment will be processed through Yahoo! Bill Pay. Any payments, one-time or recurring, scheduled to occur after September 14, 2007 will not be processed. In addition, if you have activated any e-bills through Yahoo! Bill Pay, they will be canceled and you will begin to receive paper bills again.
September 15, 2007 – October 31, 2007: If you have used Yahoo! Bill Pay to make a payment at any time between January 2007 and September 2007, you will have “read-only” access to your Bill Pay account until October 31, solely to review past transactions or download your transaction history.
After October 31, 2007: The Yahoo! Bill Pay site is no longer available for any purpose, and only limited customer support will be available via email.

But despite that announcement it seems that Yahoo! may be pulling the plug early.  There is shutting down in three months and then there is ’shutting down in three months’ aka pull support and functionality now and shut down officially in three months.

As I try and schedule a payment today on 7/18/07 to be made on 7/24/07 almost 2 months before this service should end, the service is not working.  I get the continual error notes that the payment can not be processed.

Anyone that has used Bill Pay over the last couple years has seen this type of thing before.  You submit something for payment, go through 3-4 screens and it gets stuck so you submit it again 2-3 more times and eventually the system will accept it.

Well, the system apparently isn’t happy about being laid off and it appears to have left the building.  I tried 10 times to make the payment and it never went through.  I am definitely not singing “Yahooooo-hoooo”.  The sound I’m making is something more like Goofy screaming as he goes over a cliff tangled up in fishing line that has him strung up to the truck rack on the back of his work truck.

Yahoo! Will Take My Money

According to Yahoo! they will continue to take my money.

Monthly subscriber fees will continue to be processed until August 31, 2007 on all premium accounts.

At this point, my recommendation to any existing Yahoo Bill Pay users is to download your transaction information and terminate your account immediately. 

Then sit back and wait for the class action sign on letters to show up in the mail in a year or so…. when someone gets wise enough to sue Yahoo! for taking money for a service that they did not provide.