Their reasons range from a distaste for new social-networking features to allegedly slow performance due to the portal's heavy use of Flash.

"My Oracle Support, the page everybody is waiting for. Well, waiting for it to load I mean. Clearly it must be a joke to have people stare at a screen with the text 'faster problem resolution' for half a minute," user "Rene W." said in a post to an official Oracle last week. "I'm sorry I've really tried but just can't like anything about it. It's slow, it's messy. Hope it will go away."

My Oracle Support the original MetaLink portal with Oracle's Software Configuration Manager. Information about a customer's IT environment can be connected with Oracle's knowledge base of problem resolutions, thereby helping customers proactively fix system issues. My Oracle Support users get personalized dashboards, and the portal also has a layer of social software, such as RSS feeds, communities and a people-finder.

Upon pointing their browsers to metalink.oracle.com, users have been able to log in to either "Classic MetaLink" or My Oracle Support, which Oracle first unveiled last year.

But users should now prepare for the retirement of Classic MetaLink, according to a post from Chris Warticki, senior customer support manager. It is not clear exactly when that will take place; as of Monday afternoon, the site still offered a choice of logins.