Just a short time ago I read an blog post here on AR that mentioned a company called http://www.4info.net/. The post was about a neat feature that they have that allows you to create html to post onto your website which creates a small text message generator so that clients can contact you directly.
I thought this was a novel idea! So, I visited the site and signed up and began to make my text generator and place it on my site.
Once on the site I tested it. I got the text message almost immediately! This is amazing I thought.
About a week after I had placed this html on my site (www.mynewnchome.com) I used my Yahoo Sitebuilder to make some changes to my webpage. I was trying to post a picture on the left side of the page. As I would click the preview I noticed it was actually placing the picture Wayyyyy to the right side causing a user to actually have to scroll to see it...and we all know that scrolling on a website is a no-no as far as a consumer is concerned.
I contacted Yahoo, there must be something wrong with Sitebuilder I thought. They emailed me back and said that my Sitebuilder had gotten corrupted and I needed to delete it and then re-download the program and everything would be fine.
After several attempts at this I was still having problems.
Next option, call Yahoo. On Wednesday of this week I spent over a half hour on the phone with a nice gentleman named Charlie. Charlie once again had me remove the program from my computer and remove Java and then re-install all of it.
He then opened the program on his computer and downloaded my site so that he could see what was going on. Yep, you guessed it, still having the problem.
Charlie then began to do some reasearch throughout my site to see if he could determine what was causing this problem as they had never encountered it before.
Removing items one by one, Charlie was able to isolate the problem to the html that was created for the text generator program. He removed it and everything went back to normal. So the problem was solved, or so I thought.
I removed the html from the program on my computer and the program began to work fine. So I visited http://www.4info.net/ again to regenerate the code and repaste it into my site.
A few minutes later...you guessed it, same problem back again.
So now it is just completely removed from my site.
Now, http://www.4info.net/ is a fine program. It is very fast and they do what they say they will do.
The problem was me. I did as most of us probably do and just checked the little box that says "I agree to the terms of service" and never took the time to read them.
So I went back today to try and figure out what was the problem and here is what I found:
Personal Use Only
The 4INFO Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the 4INFO Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your business for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales. You may not take the results from a 4INFO search and reformat and display them, or mirror the 4INFO home page or results pages on your Web site. If you want to make commercial use of the 4INFO Services, you must enter into an agreement with 4INFO to do so in advance. Please contact us for more information.
My only guess is that they track where their html is being used and if it is commercial they corrupt the code so that it will not function correctly, which is completely their right to do so. After all it was spelled out plain as day in the terms of service, which I failed to read.
Now they do have a place where you can contact them for information on using it commercially which I am considering as the service was exceptional.
Remember, read the terms of service and never, ever just check the box. We are in a business of guiding our clients through legal contracts and we would not want our customer to just sign without reading, so why do we do it?
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