Nordic Online Store Boozt Blocks Thousands of ‘Serial Returners’

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Robin Edgar

Boozt AB, an online Nordic department store, has banned thousands of customers for returning an excessive number of purchased items.

The retailer has blocked about 60,000 of a total 3.5 million customers, in a bid to reduce the significant costs associated with “serial returners,” the company said in a statement. “Their behavior is too expensive for both the company and the environment,” it added.

Returns are costly for retailers both in lost revenue and in the cost of trying to turn around an item to be sold again. In some instances items returned aren’t fit to be sold again, leading to waste. In the UK alone, returns are expected to increase to more than £7 billion ($8.9 billion) by 2027, according to GlobalData. The biggest driver of returns is ill-fitting clothing and footwear.

Boozt’s savings by blocking customers amounts to “many millions,” the retailer said, without specifying an exact figure.

Source: Nordic Online Store Boozt Blocks Thousands of ‘Serial Returners’ – BNN Bloomberg

Makes sense to me

Slack Will Begin Deleting Older Content From Free Workspaces

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Robin Edgar

Slack announced a significant change to its platform, saying it will “begin deleting messages and files more than one year old from free workspaces on a rolling basis.”

Slack’s prior policy involved keeping messages and files for the lifetime of a free workspace, although accessing that full history required switching to a paid account. Under the new policy, Slack reserves the right to delete content from free workspaces after one year.

Slack will no longer keep messages and files for the lifetime of your free workspace. Starting August 26, 2024, Customer Data — such as messages and file history — older than one year may be deleted on a rolling basis from workspaces on the free plan, following the terms described in the Main Services Agreement and Trust and Compliance Documentation.

If you choose to remain on a free workspace, you’ll have full access to the past 90 days of message and file history, and the remaining 275 days will become available should you upgrade to a paid plan. If you decide to upgrade, we’ll store messages and files based on your chosen retention period, with an option to keep all history.

Users interested in keeping their full history of content should upgrade to a paid workspace before August 26, 2024. Once deletion occurs, messages and files cannot be recovered.

Source: Slack Will Begin Deleting Older Content From Free Workspaces

This is a problem with cloud services – you do not own or manage the data or the rules with which it is kept.

MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline – this is why we need online libraries

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Robin Edgar

More than two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews.com is no longer available after MTV appears to have fully pulled down the site and its related content. Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similiar fate.

In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.

The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.

Former MTV News staffers posted on social media about the website shutdown and the scrubbing of the archives. “So, mtvnews.com no longer exists. Eight years of my life are gone without a trace,” Patrick Hosken, former music editor for MTV News, wrote on X. “All because it didn’t fit some executives’ bottom lines. Infuriating is too small a word.”

“sickening (derogatory) to see the entire @mtvnews archive wiped from the internet,” Crystal Bell, culture editor at Mashable and one-time entertainment director of MTV News, posted on X. “decades of music history gone…including some very early k-pop stories.”

“This is disgraceful. They’ve completely wiped the MTV News archive,” longtime Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hiatt commented. “Decades of pop culture history research material gone, and why?”

Last week, Paramount Global’s CMT website similarly pulled its repository of country-music journalism dating back several decades.

Reps for MTV did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Some observers noted that MTV News articles may be available through internet archiving services like the Wayback Machine, but according to Hiatt older MTV News articles do not show up via Wayback Machine.

In May 2023, Paramount Global shut down MTV News — which had already been severely downsized by layoffs in recent years — coming amid a 25% reduction in workforce across the Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks groups in the U.S. The group is headed by president-CEO Chris McCarthy, who in late April was named one of the three co-CEOs running Paramount Global’s “Office of the CEO.”

MTV News began in the late ’80s with “The Week in Rock,” a show hosted by Kurt Loder, who became the first MTV News anchor.