If web 2.0 is the “social” web, I sure hope web 3.0 will be the “lets have a fucking purpose and actually contribute to improving mankind” web.

Sponsored By: Secure Delivery Automatic Digital Product Delivery

Writing about my personal life and side business (which is doing super awesome, btw) is really no fun when I know my boss knows my blog url.

Sponsored By: Secure Delivery Automatic Digital Product Delivery

Their customer support, however, leaves much to be desired.

Kayako offers a few options for their products- monthly hosted, monthly and yearly leased, owned. We opted for the monthly leased option as we didn’t want to plunk down the hefty $499 price for the owned license. Our major problem with all versions of the Kayako software was that it required either the Zend or Ioncube decoders to be installed on our server in order to run their software- all versions have “encoded” files that require the decoder running to use, including the owned license.

The decoders were causing a performance hit that we didn’t like. We looked around, found another support suite that did not have encoded code, and installed it. It worked. The owned version of it cost 1/4 the price of Kayako. It didn’t require any performance robbing decoders. We decided to go with it and drop Kayako.

This is where the pain began. First, there is no cancel button on their website. The only way to cancel is to contact their support email:

A few days ago, my first email:

I want to cancel this account. Please cancel all renewals of this license immediately.

Their reply:

Can you please let us know the reason for the cancellation of your eSupport License? If you have any issues regarding the product, we will be more than glad to assist you in that.

Waiting for your response.

Ok, you want to know why. I understand that- cool.

My second email:

We have decided to go with a solution that has 100% access to the source code unencoded. We have already made this decision and migrated to the new solution.

Please cancel the account immediately.

The key phrases in this email being “we have already migrated to a new solution” and “cancel the account immediately”.

Their second response:

In case of the Owned license, you will get 99% of open source code. You can modify the source code to customize the software as per your requirement. The 1% source code which is not provided includes the license management files and they are not provided to stop the piracy of the software. Please let me know if you are interested in buying the Owned license as we have some special offers for the day or you want us to cancel your eSupport Monthly Leased license.

Awaiting your response.

I’ll be the first to admit I snapped a little bit after this one. I already told them twice to cancel the account, I already told them we migrated to another solution. I know that in a couple days I am going to be re-billed for the leased license if they do not cancel my account. Now it just smells like they are trying to draw this out and get another payment from me when I have already removed their software from my server, installed another solution, and just want to move on with my life.

My third email:

I can not believe you badger your customers like this. I don’t want to talk about it or see special offers.

CANCEL THE MONTHLY LEASED LICENSE NOW.

If I receive another charge from your company I will file a fraud claim with my bank and perform a charge back. You have guaranteed that I will never be a customer of Kayako in the future, and I will go out of my way to share this experience with others.

Today I was billed again after repeatedly asking them to cancel the account. Kayko has not replied to my previous email or canceled my account.

My final email before I perform a chargeback with my bank:

I was just billed again for this license after I have asked you repeatedly to cancel.

You have 24 hours to refund my payment before I file fraud with Worldpay and my credit card company.

I am waiting for your response.

Screw you Kayako. Take it from someone else who runs a service that does monthly billing- This is not how you treat customers.

You have effectively taken a customer that was pleased with your software but couldn’t use it due to a compatibility issue and turned him into someone who is going to badmouth you to everyone he comes in contact with everywhere he goes online. I’ll get my money back anyway, and all you will have to show for it is bad press. Keep up the good work jerks.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Today on my jccommerce.com email address I have recieved 237 spam emails trying to get me to buy “enlargement” products. Yeah, I actually counted. And its only 3:00.

With the internet as my witness, just as soon as I make eleventy-billion dollars on Secure Delivery my very first order of business will be to track down the makers of “MegaDik”, pay soldiers of fortune to castrate them with a rusty spoon, and have their privates run through this guy’s blender.

Spamming bastards.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

When you run a big online service (code-wise in this example) there are always a number of bugs. Most of these bugs are minor issues that don’t affect the functionality of the service- for example, on the Secure Delivery forums I know there is a slight table misalignment in the forum navigation bar that makes it 10px too far to the left. These kinds of bugs impact no one adversely, and to be honest I don’t think most would even notice.

Every now and then one of our users will uncover what we call a “show stopper”, or critical bug that immediately stops them from being able to use the service. These are the most severe sort of bug- they are the ones that lead to canceled accounts if you don’t work quickly and decisively to fix them ASAP.

Luckily, our number of show stopper bugs has been very few- I think we have had 3 or 4 total reported, and all were fixed within 24 hours. Typically when we encounter a confirmed show stopper bug that prevents a subscriber from using the service we refund their entire month of subscription fees as a way of apologizing for the inconvenience and thanking them for working with us to resolve their issue. This seems to work well, and our attrition rate on people that report errors is very low.

Unfortunately, every now and then you get a show stopper bug that you are unable to reproduce. “The Bug From Hell” (TBFH) was one of these bugs. It involved large product uploads not being saved to the product database even after giving the user the proper feedback and letting them complete the setup process.

In Secure Delivery each product has a little icon that shows its current readiness status to be sold- most products have a green check mark under the status column (or “green light”) and are 100% good to go. If there is a problem during product creation Secure Delivery flags products with problems with a yellow exclamation point icon, or what we call a “yellow light”. This shows the user that the product is not ready to be sold and usually results from bailing out of the product creation process before entering all the required information, loss of connectivity to the Internet during product setup, etc.

Well, TBFH was not saving the uploads and causing a “yellow light” to show up for that product’s status. Let me tell you, the most maddening thing a customer can ever see after uploading their big ass product for 30 minutes is a yellow light when they think they are done.

TBFH only affected the 0.3% of our users who uploaded big products, and it was completely random at that. Sometimes everything worked great (we have 700MB ISO files successfully stored in our database), and sometimes it would just grind the server to a halt. By big uploads I mean in excess of 90MB when our average product size is somewhere around 12MB. Unfortunately, that 0.3% were also paying customers, so it usually resulted in someone paying for Secure Delivery getting peeved (free accounts are limited to 50MB products, so they could never experience the error).

The worst thing about TBFH was that we knew it existed, but we were unable to reproduce (and fix) it until now. Long story short, last night we were able to successfully identify the cause of the bug and fix it after a subscriber reported the issue to us. After identifying the issue we were able to tweak a couple files and we have been busy testing the fix this morning. Shortly we will push the bug fix to production and update the customer on it’s status (we don’t typically push updates at night- we like to be awake if something breaks).

On the plus side, the tweak made to correct The Bug From Hell will improve overall performance for everyone. It’s not often that there is something wrong that we can’t fix with Secure Delivery, even if it affects only a small minority of our users. I’ve actually lost sleep over this one, so let me tell you- after testing the fix last night I slept like a baby :)

In an hour or so TBFH will be history and I feel great!

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Occasionally we get a request by a Secure Delivery user for “Multiple Product Downloads”. What the customer is asking for is that instead of the way SD works- their customer pays, gets to download their file- They want the customer to pay and be given a list of files to download.

What really bugs me about this is that Secure Delivery has no product size restrictions (for paid accounts) and no file type restrictions.

What stops people from zipping up their products and bonuses and delivering it as one file? Lets compare and contrast the benefits of zipping all your stuff in one file:

Pros to Zipping:

Customers get everything in one operation.
You only have to set up one file
ZIP works on every platform- Windows, Apple, Linux

Cons to Zipping:

…..?

Really people, why? Is there some perceived value to downloading 10 single files compared to one big honking archive of everything you need? Are you worried about making your customers download too much stuff? You do realize that making customers download 10x 1mb takes longer than 1x 10mb right?

Somebody explain this to me- what is the aversion to zip files for delivering multiple product parts?

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

My wife calls me old fashioned. I think that’s because I open doors for her, say “please” and “thank you” in normal conversation, and always address her father as “Sir”. My old fashioned views on the world continue into the world of blogging too- I hate what I like to call “non-traditional blogging”.

First, you are probably asking what Traditional Blogging is. Being the blogging purist that I am from way back in ‘99, I tend to think of blogs as a chronological series of textual posts that are also sometimes listed by category. These are awesome- they are unobtrusive, require no plug-ins or annoying media downloads / lag, and are eminently readable by just about everyone who speaks the language.

What is Non-Traditional Blogging then? That’s easy- Anything that is not text and pictures on a web page. No video blogs, pod casts, or any other rich media tripe. I know many people will say there is no such thing as “traditional blogging”, or that text and static picture only posts are boring and don’t engage the reader as much as YouTube videos or snazzy downloadable podcasts, but hear me out.

Why all the hate for rich media non-traditional blogging? Here are my main reasons:

Text Is Easy For Reference

Traditional (Text):
I can skim the post to see if its relevant to me and only after I have assessed its worth decide to read it or not. I can read a text post on a given subject, go use the information in the post, and come right back to the paragraph with the extra information I need to overcome a hitch I may be having.

Non-Traditional (Video or Audio):
With video or podcasts I have to wait for it to buffer, skip around for 5 minutes listening for the sentence that speaks out the information I am looking for, and listen again. I am forced to listen at the speakers pace while they stammer and wheeze through the information (which trust me is WAY slower and much more grating on my soul than just reading it).

Noise / Audio Requirement

Traditional:
I can read a text blog post or look at pictures with a variety of things going on around me- I can listen to my favorite music on my computer, pause to answer the phone without looking for a stop button on some random media player, or listen to and respond to my wife when she wants some attention.

Non-Traditional:
The main problem is I have to listen. I have to stop other audio. I have to turn on my headphones or speakers if I am working quietly. I have to effectively zone out the rest of the world (including my wife- she doesn’t like that) if I want to hear every bit of information in an audio or video post. This is a big problem. Why? I don’t like any blogger enough to let them monopolize my time like listening intently to audio does.

Portability

Traditional:
This almost goes without saying- I can print text posts out. This may come as a shock to some, but a guy that does contract work all day and then comes home to work on his own web service at night does not want to spend his meager “free” time sitting at a computer with his headphones on listening to you breathe into the microphone.

I want to print your post out, read it over lunch, on the john, or just sitting on my comfy living room couch… anything but that office chair at my desk that I am sure is molding its print into my ass. Furthermore when it comes to how-to posts or other instructional material I want to be able to print out a paper copy and take it to the workshop, server room, or just to keep for easy reference on my desk while I perform other computing tasks in other windows without keeping your blog open.

Non-Traditional:
I can’t print you out. I might be able to download your podcast and put it on my mp3 player, but sadly I just missed the generation where I walk around with a pair of white ear buds in my ear 24/7. Therefore I have to sit there and listen to you… Given the above reasons, I just don’t like you that much. Sorry.

The Bottom Line for Me:

Most of the blogs I read are related to a specific topic, specifically how to do something or someones experience at trying something their own way. I do read some opinion blogs every now and then, but the posts that really grab my interest are how-to posts, tutorials, “this is what I did and it worked great / worked horrible” type posts, whatever. I am willing to bet my left hand that post for post your well written how-to posts are your best performers on your site too, so I’m not alone.

How-to posts are nothing more than instructions how to do something, right? Now imagine this:

You buy a really cool widget that you have to put together. You can insert your favorite million piece item here- a kids toy, a new iPhone, or a new surround sound DVD doodad. Anyway, imagine you open the box and there are 300 pieces in one big bag.

Now imagine the instructions that came with it were not a printed manual with illustrations and text, but instead an audio tape or video you had to play. Could you imagine putting together a 300 piece widget with a recording you had to constantly rewind, fast forward, pause and start while you did each individual task?

That would suck. So does using your rich media blogs. The bottom line here is all about usability. If I can’t use your information in a method that easy for me, I won’t use it at all. After all, there are plenty more blogs out there I can read, print, reference, and share easily with the touch of a button- why do I need yours?

Of course this is only my opinion, and I might see it all the wrong way. What do you think about rich-media video and audio blogs? Do you like the better or worse than text? Why?