brentashley

Seth Dillingham wonders what’s up with weblogs.com, which seems to be ignoring pings from at least a number of blogs hosted at Conversant.

My friend Terry Frazier, very much alive, laments the implications of the ignored pings.

I was talking to Technorati‘s Derek Powazek this week at the Ajax Summit and he was telling us how their service uses these pings (and other external services from furl and del.icio.us) to do their magic.

If we can’t be reasonably confident of service levels from these resources, how can we be confident in the other services upon which they rely? What recourse have we to demand that problems are fixed or to expect that emails will receive responses?

There’s a bit of a hooplah going on about modifying or deleting a blog entry or comment after it has been posted.

Scoble weighs in with his personal policy on the matter.

I often delete comments due to spam content, but never due to a difference of opinion. I suppose the main reason I might *want* to delete or modify something on my blog is because I’ve said something that I regret, and yet, I make it a policy not to.

For instance, I was somewhat snippy with a commenter recently. I dropped the f-bomb as I am sometimes wont to do, and I rather wish I hadn’t, however it was said and I don’t think it’s fair for me to a) unsay it, or b) change its tone after the fact.

If I really felt it necessary to mitigate every f-bomb on my blog, I’d go back and connect each one of them to their contributing factors – I’m pretty sure this particular one had some vintage inspiration.

I had an email conversation with a blogger recently who had disagreed with me (conversation via email because comments were broken). I pointed out how I believed he had misread me and his response was to remove his original post. I hope that once his comments are working again he reinstates it with my comment and his response to that.

Blogging can keep a history of discussions and not only their outcome but the mistakes we make along the way to finding the truth. It’s of benefit to those who follow to see the whole path, not just the end point.

Scott Rosenberg sums up all my thoughts about the Terry Schiavo case. If Dubya manages to step in despite years of due process, he might as well declare himself American Monarch and Defender of the Faith while he’s at it.

I finally did get an email from Groove on Feb 8th, a week after my last email sent to them. It was from the support center manager, who was able to push the right buttons in their organization to get me fixed up to my satisfaction on the 10th. No excuses, just solution, and not one that imposed a lot of effort on me.

From what I understand there is quite a large backlog. That backlog gave me two weeks and a lot of motive to evaluate other solutions. I’ve not yet determined my long-term outcome, but I’m glad to say I’m not as critically worried right now.

Again I’m waiting days with no response from Groove’s support folks.

Sorry, can’t do business like this. I’m not expecting them to jump through hoops for me, responding to my emails even to tell me to go away is better than no contact at all.

I’m not looking forward to moving all my data out of Groove to something else, but I can’t see another solution under the circumstances.

If you have ever used Groove, you will know that it regularly pops up a notification that there is some new version of a widget or installation helper. You click ok and it grabs it and installs it into your Groove client.

I got one of those notifications last Monday (a week ago today). As is normal, I clicked ok on it, however this time it downloaded a much larger package than usual. It wasn’t until the package finished and required a reboot that it finally came up and told me that I had upgraded from my paid version 2.5 (paid at 2.1 but upgraded to 2.5) to version 3.0, and that I had to either enter a valid 3.0 key or accept that I would now be limited to 3 spaces (I have 5 active spaces) and that various essential features would start to disappear over the next month (file replication for instance) unless I converted my new “Trial” software to a full license.

No problem, thought I, I’ll just contact Groove and have them right this for me, tell me how to downgrade and still use my data.

I consulted their site to get support. I have a login, but I could not find any indication how to actually get support. See if you can tell how to get support for a problem like mine (without paying) from this page: http://www.groove.net/index.cfm/pagename/SupportOptions/

Finally, I used the problem reporting link that I managed to get to from Groove’s help menu and submitted my query from an online form.

After 24 hours with no reply, I sent an email to support@groove.net.

After 24 further hours with no reply, I sent an email to sales@groove.net.

On each of the emails I stressed that I had yet to even receive an acknowledgement of my contact with them.

It has now been a week and I have still yet to hear from them. Not a sausage.

Here is a quote from their support page:

Outstanding customer care is yet another way that we seek to gain your trust in us as a company that can meet your needs. Our support team excels at resolving your issues quickly. Every inquiry is tracked and managed so we can resolve your issues effectively.

I see no evidence of any of the above assertions.

Groove has been a great tool for me, but I’m now looking for alternatives. I can’t consider it a critical tool in my business with service like this. Could you?

What’s up, Ray? I’ve never had any reason to be disappointed till now.

Update
90 minutes after my blog entry, a support message arrived (does someone have an rss search feed that takes higher priority than their email?) detailing how I can uninstall version 3.0, reinstall 2.5 and then restore from an archive.

Being that my last Groove backup is part of a drive image backup, this would entail at minimum a day’s work that could have been avoided had I been presented with a dialog box that clearly said “You are about to upgrade to version 3.0 – Are You Sure?”

I really had consciously decided not to upgrade to version 3.0 until I was ready to and would have declined the offer had it been clear to me.

Clearly, the simplest way out would be for me to pay the $25 or $50 to upgrade (oops – just looked it up. It’ll be $150 to upgrade to the professional edition. not sure what the filesharing edition does but I’d likely lose functionality from 2.5 Standard). I might well have done that a month from now, but I can’t imagine myself doing so with my back against the wall. I suppose that’s stubborn of me but I think I have a point.

I don’t normally just blog an odd link but this takes the cake.

This story is a perfect example of what leads me to tell people that because I married an English girl, I live in a bilingual world.

Test Entry to try nofollow.