January 8, 2003

• WHAT YOU’VE BEEN TELLING US

  
  

  I’m wiped out: I’ve been replying to about sixty emails a day in the evenings.  We have someone answering most of the questions, but sometimes the questions are kinda tricky (especially after our code change on Friday night), so he forwards those emails onto me.

  
  

  If you ever want a developer to fix bugs on the site, put them in charge of customer service emails for a few days!

  
  

  There are a few emails that seem to come up a lot.  Some of these are bugs, and some of them are usability issues:

  
  

  
  
  • AOL 8.0:
    
    
    
    • There’s something funky going on with AOL 8.0 (maybe 7.0 too?), where it’s hard to post using xTools.
      
    • We’re looking into this, but having trouble reproducing the behaviour.  Hopefully we’ll know more soon!
      
      
    
    
  • XTOOLS DOESN’T WORK ON SOME BROWSERS
    
    
    
    • We’re working on adding one-click access to the text-only version of xTools
      
    • We’re also considering adding a setting that lets you set your comment fields to text, by default.
      
      
    
    
  • ARCHIVES AREN’T ALWAYS CURRENT
    
    
    
    • Archives are generated all at once, once a month or so.  As the number of Premium users has grown (including free trials), the Archiving process started taking longer and longer.  This increases the odds that it will crash and none of the archives will make it to your Archive files page!
      
    • We’re working right now on a process that generates your Archives on demand.  So rather than generating all the archives at once, it only runs one at a time (or so).
      
    • This should come out in the next week or so… stay tuned!
      
      
    
    
  • SAFE MODE
    
    
    
    • It isn’t clear to a lot of people that “Safe Mode” lets you fix your Look and Feel (or HTML in posts) when your site gets messed up with bad HTML
      
    • Working on fixes to make this more clear
      
      
    
    
  • BACKGROUNDS AND MUSIC
    
    
    
    • There’s a lot of confusion over how to upload Backgrounds and Music.  This is probably our most Frequently Asked Question.
      
    • We’ll address this when we clean up the Look and Feel page next month.
      
    • For the record, we can’t host MP3 files on our site because the bandwidth costs would bankrupt us!
      
      
    
    
  • UPLOADING PROFILE PICS
    
    
    
    • Browser caching makes it hard for people to see the new pic when they reupload their Profile Pics
      
    • We’re working on a fix… it’s a bit trickier than it seems to fix this one.
      
      
    
    
  • CHATTERBOXES
    
    
    
    • People have lots of problems installing ChatterBoxes.
      
    • And when the code mucks up their sites, they’re not sure what to do (see Safe Mode above)
      
      
    
    
  • SUBSCRIPTON EMAILS
    
    
    
    • Something’s definitely going on with our subscription emails.  Even weirder: some people get the feedback emails and not our subscription emails – what’s up with that?!
      
    • We’re a bit stumped here.  Maybe we’ll change the email that subscriptions comes from, and that will clear it up?
      
      
    
    
  • IM PROFILES
    
    
    
    • More people than you’d think want to link their Xanga blog to their IM profiles… and vice versa.
      
      
    
    
  • ACCOUNT HACKING
    
    
    
    • There’s a thin line between love and hate, it seems.  When friendships fall apart, the first thing they often do is sign onto their ex-friend’s Xanga account and deface it.
      
    • We’re working on a feature that will let hacked users “reclaim accounts”, even after the account email and password have been compromised.
      
      
    
    
  • THE EXCHANGE RATE IN CANADA AND AUSTRALIA
    
    
    
    • Many people write us to tell us that the exchange rates in Canada and Australia make paying for Xanga Premium prohibitively expensive.
      
    • I feel bad!  I’m not sure what we can do about this… maybe if we all exchange currency at the same time on the same day, we could devalue the dollar for a few hours?
      
      
    
    
  • XANGAZON ON ALTERNATIVE BROWSERS
    
    
    
    • By “Alternative Browsers”, I mean Mozilla, Netscape, and all Mac Browsers
      
    • If we’d known that offering Xangazon only on Internet Explorer would generate so much email, we’d never have launched the feature!
      
    • We’re working on a fix.  It’s not as high priority as I’d like it to be, since some of these other issues are more urgent for us.
      
    • This is more of a principle thing actually: we really like to be as standards-compliant as possible, so it bothers me that this code doesn’t work.
      
    • Also, hell hath no fury like that of a Mac user who thinks that a site doesn’t support Macs.   I try not to take it personally… perhaps it’s displaced aggression that Mac lost out to the PC?  I know how you feel - it bums me out too.

  
  

  While I’m at it, some of the features that are frequently requested:

  
  

  
  
  • TIMEZONES
    
    
    
    • I guess you can only say “Coming Soon!” for a few years before people get suspicious.
      
      
    
    
  • BACKDATING POSTS
    
    
    
    • We’re seeing more users move from other systems into Xanga, so this is becoming more of an issue
      
      
    
    
  • ANONYMOUS COMMENTS 
    
    
    
    • In other words, commenting without a Xanga account (especially asked in regard to Guestbooks.  Comments and Subscriptions without a Xanga account are a distant second and third here)
      
    • This is a tough one for us, because anonymous comments tend to generate so many abuse complaints (even just off of Chatterboxes).  We’re working on a solution though.
      
      
    
    
  • CHANGING USERNAME
    
    
    
    • We’re working on a feature that will let you do this now.  We want to discourage it a bit though, because it generates a lot of customer service email from confused users.
      
      
    
    
  • MULITPLE ACCOUNTS ON SAME EMAIL
    
    
    
    • This one comes up a lot.  We had a good reason we forbid this…  I just don’t remember what it was.
      
    • We’ll probably allow this soon, unless someone remembers our Very Good Reason in time.
      
      
    
    
  • DELETING ACCOUNTS
    
    
    
    • This comes up a lot too.
      
      
      
    • It’s another one of those “trickier than it seems” features.  What do we do with the old comments left under that username?  What if the user wants to undelete the account later… and how do we verify that the person who wants to delete the account is the right user?
      
    • These are all solvable problems though, and we’re working on them.

  
  

  A final word: we love you whether you’re Classic or Premium.  It’s nice if you upgrade, but we understand that a lot of you can’t afford it.  So we try to keep most of our services available for free, and we don’t distinguish between classic and premium users when it comes to answering our help@xanga email.

  
  

  The only reason I won’t answer your email is if you threaten to kill me – I think that’s a bit over the top?  In general, emailing me at my personal address probably increases the amount of time it takes to answer your email (I have to forward it by hand to the appropriate email inbox, and it’s taken care of the next day).  Leaving comments on my blog asking for help is hard for me to track… in general, it’s best if you email us using our help page.

  
  

  But if something is up with the site (Xanga seems slow, you can’t access the site, your left modules are suddenly no longer transparent), definitely email me.  I read all of my email – often the first time I hear about an issues is when someone emails me, and it’s always appreciated!

  • 5:33 am
  • 29 Comments