why LJ sucks

[baratron]

I am so angry at the livejournal business entity. Today is Tuesday 29th November. My lj Scrapbook has been broken since Sunday 20th November. Is there any indication of when it will be fixed? Hell, no. status.livejournal.com claims it's fixed already.

The LJ admin said if there were any more issues outstanding that we should submit a Support request - I did that 21 hours ago and have heard nothing. I know I have a Permanent account so I'm not actually paying LJ currently, but I was going to buy more Scrapbook space. Right now, there is NO WAY I will give LJ any more money, if this is the way they treat their paying customers.

I don't mind that things get broken during a move - yes, I understand that will happen. I do mind the complete information blackout, where they don't bother to tell us how long it'll take to get it fixed or what we need to do (hang on? delete the missing photos and re-upload them? wipe everything & start over?). I mean, I could have re-uploaded the photos days and days ago, but I was reluctant to do that in case LJ restored from an old version of the database and that made things even worse. Really not happy at all.

Comments

[jenett]

From lots of conversations with people who do support - the stuff that isn't answered promptly is usually a result of there being something they're trying to figure out (and/or someone with specific privileges to test something/verify something needs to be available.) They also, quite reasonably, prioritise time to stuff that clearly affects lots of users.

Bear in mind, too, that most of LJ's support is still volunteer, and that we just finished the end of a major holiday (and travel, for many people) weekend in the US, which probably hasn't helped response times.

I know it's frustrating - but if there is something weird going on, it's probably going to take them more than 21 hours to track down what's up if it's quirky. That'd be true at pretty much *any* tech company.

Yes, they should send a note saying "Gee, that's a weird problem: we're working on it." but for some reasons having to do with the LJ volunteer setup, that's somewhat tricky to do from the support-answer side of the equation. Normally they don't do that until something's been without comment for longer than a day or two.

If you want to try reuploading, would you lose anything if they tried fixing it? (i.e. is everything backed up somewhere else, too?) If so, why not try posting a comment in your report saying you're going to try reuploading, and then a comment on whether that solves the problem?

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I haven't been waiting 21 hours, though. That's how long since I submitted the Support request. I've actually been waiting since Sunday 20th.

I've tried to be patient. I haven't hassled Support before because I believed it was being worked on. But when LJ Admin post to say "everything fixed" and it isn't, then I get angry. The lack of information makes me anxious. It would take ~20s to post to let me know it's a tricky problem or that only certain ppl can help.

[jenett]

See, but Support has only known that this is an issue that wasn't resolved by the server stuff for 21 hours (or whatever it is now.) It's unfair to blame them for a problem they didn't know about.

On the rest of it - yes, logically, it seems like it should only take 20 seconds. But because of the way the support system is set up, only a limited number of people can approve answers or comments (i.e. the stuff in response that gets sent back to you.)

Therefore, they tend to try and see what's up and have some time to work on it before sending back anything more than the auto-reply ("Hi, you've opened a question: we'll be working on it now, here's the link.") That way, too, they can ask questions of specific stuff.

This is a sort of weird quirk of the support database software and system, but there's really no good other way to manage lots of volunteers (some of whom, when learning, give really horrible answers) and have any kind of quality control. They've tried others, in the past.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

I can wait longer than 21 hours for an answer from an organisation being paid a hell of a lot more than LJ is, and that's one of the better computer providers out there. Some problems are difficult.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

But it's been 8 days + 21 hours!

And why are they posting to say "At this point, all of the major, previously-reported issues left over from our datacenter switch have been cleared up. (http://status.livejournal.com/)" when:
1) Some people's userpics are still being replaced with other pictures, some of them much bigger than 100x100. (Some users have had to stop using userpics altogether as enormous images were appearing and breaking friends' pages).
2) LJ Scrapbook is still broken for multiple users.
3) Comment emails are still going AWOL for multiple users (http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_maintenance/109246.html)?

Those are the major, previously-reported issues!