This was what Yahoo announced and advertised before they closed the Geocities on October 26:-
http://one.yahoo-email.com/w/webview/fzd23092bsglkw5/496510022
Quoted:- "What You Need to Do
Not much! After October 26, 2009, when GeoCities closes, your friends and family will still be able to view your web site as usual. When you sign in to your GeoCities Control Panel, we'll show you how to move your entire GeoCities account — including your files, images, and monthly bill — to Yahoo! Web Hosting with just a few clicks."
"During this process, we'll ask you to choose a domain name. A personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) can make your site look more professional — and you'll get one free as part of your new service. After you choose a domain, you can manage your site with your new Web Hosting tools. We'll also redirect visitors from your GeoCities web address to your domain."
I was so naive to believe what they said. On October 29, I was asked to choose a domain name. I followed exactly all the procedures as prompted, entered all the information and most importantly, paid immediately as required, for $20.85 for 3 months for the first payment! Then I was waiting for my new domain to be and my site to be online again. But since then, nothing happened, my domain has ever "Pending" and has NEVER been Active and my site has been all down! It has now been more than two weeks (but they promised three days)! And, all my files cannot be found and they are all gone! (When the files are all gone, "redirect" what??)
In addition to the never-active domain, I have tried to re-upload some of my old html pages to see if re-direction works (as there is a temporary page link before my domain works, if it could). Unfortunately, this re-direction doesn't work neither, all of my old Geocities links will only be forwarded to the temporary main page of my pending domain. See this example for my K-mount Technical Page (of which I have uploaded the html page for testing). Click the link and you will know! :-(
I send several emails to the Yahoo "Support", they seldom responded and each time I have to send a number of emails and waited for days before I could get a totally useless and irresponsible response. It seems that they don't care for anything. The ONLY thing that they have succeeded to do was to bill me immediately before anything happened. Since that and then, they have NOT provided me any service and nothing has worked. In fact, what they have done are Indifferent from Thieves and Robbers, if I had to describe what has been happening!
Anyway, now what I have to do is to cancel the Yahoo account and urge my money back. But I bet they would rob me without giving me back my money and ignore completely till the end of the days. YAHOO! is simply Robber!
Btw, for the days to come, I shall repair the death Blog pictures and images first and I shall give priorities to blog images and then the pictures and links contained in those more popular articles. I think it is just impossible for me to repair all the death links but I shall choose to recover those as far as possible, one by one, with priority.
Next, if time allows, I shall choose to re-publish (and maybe also update) some of the useful and key old articles of mine, like the K-mount Technical Page, Exposure Bases and Testing Page, Flash Technologies and P-TTL Page and so on..
Finally, I apologise once again hereby to my readers for all the inconvenience caused. It is just my fault to trust the Yahoo! despite that their past track records are really rather poor - my only hope was to keep my old links without any changes, but now surely it is in vain! I don't mind to pay more expensively, but even I paid, it didn't work! (and possibly it will never work!)
Update (11-23):
Yahoo finally admitted there were issues and they have just resolved all those a few days after their had acknowledged all the issues that I had reported and they apologised also.
I did accept their apologies. This story tells once again if problems persist and the service provider or the product manufacturer just ignores the problems but just only know playing around and try to fool the customers and users, the situations will only deteriorate and the customers will go away, with anger.
In fact, I have been finding a new hosting company recently and will surely go away and buy another service if Yahoo continued to ignore me in that way and didn't admit the issues (and haven't resolved those). I think they have done the right things just in time, before I "switched", although they have been unreasonably late - my site, control panel and tools have not been working for almost one month!
Now that my new domain is now active and all the found ridiculous system errors are gone. Re-direction works but only at root level for the homepage only but all hosted pictures within the Yahoo server will be re-directed automatically, if they are linked from the Yahoo pages (so that I do not need to edit my old Yahoo pages for all those picture links just because of the change of domain). As for my Blogger pages, I am trying to repair the links as far as possible when I see the death ones. Or at least I have repair most of the links under the tag "My Photos". (And, the full size samples in some of the articles will be re-uploaded / re-edited the links, when I have the time, at a later stage.)