Others echoed his sentiments.

"I don't like yahoo and I don't like my Yahoo account," Flickr user Joe Philipson said on the forum.

"I take pride in being an old skool member," he said.

Technical concerns

While many, like Mr Wales and Mr Philipson, are focusing on the loss of cachet that was associated with Old Skool status, others raised technical issues.

A common concern was over log-in persistence; under the old skool scheme, users could enter their details once and save them to a computer forever, however Yahoo services often require users to log-in more often.

But Flickr staff member Simon Batistoni, known by his Flickr name hitherto, wrote on the forum: "Once your account is merged, you just need to log into Flickr once. From then on, you will remain logged into Flickr."

'Flick off'

Flickr first started offering the option of using a Yahoo ID after they were purchased by the internet portal giant in March 2005.

At that time, a hard-core group of users created a group called Flick off to galvanise support for their anti-Yahoo log-in cause.

One member of the group, ScrewDriver, explained that "the dissension here in part is a resistance to change and a deep-rooted distrust of mega-corporations possessed with wallet assaulting tentacles".

Stewart Butterfield, a Flickr employee, said: "There's no secret agenda here.

"Over time, it just gets more expensive to maintain independent means of authentication and we could 'spend' those efforts on other things which make Flickr more useful, more fun, more versatile."

Are you an Old Skool Flickr user? Have you already merged your Flickr account with a Yahoo one? Will you? Send us your views.