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Well, if it's something like YouTube you can kind of "forgive" their awful customer service in exchange for the free hosting and search features. It's a heck of

Well, if it's something like YouTube you can kind of "forgive" their awful customer service in exchange for the free hosting and search features. It's a heck of a lot less forgivable for a product you pay actual money to use. The support page telling you to use a widget that doesn't exist is really going above and beyond in the realm of user-hostility.

burgreblast 10y ago
FWIW, Dropbox also points you to buttons that don't exist. When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. There's a nice FAQ that explains to push a "review subscription" button and blah blah, but in reality that button doesn't exist. The button isn't there. Support will "fix"it for you one-off, but not change the button. Wonder if this dark pattern is worth 3-4% of revenue.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  > When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. Maybe they expect you to cancel the card upon deleting an account. It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight. Not many look at their credit card statement anyways.
  - Xorlev 10y ago
    > It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight. It can be, especially when you're using something like Stripe. It only takes one failed call without retries (or a period of time where networking isn't working quite right) for an account to be orphaned. Arguably, those sorts of calls should be durably queued and retried until success, but it often doesn't happen. PM decides it's cheaper to have support field the one-off requests than to spend a few days making those changes. Later on, another developer accidentally disables the call and there isn't sufficient test coverage for disabling billing on account removal. It's a story that'll be repeated over and over.
- x0x0 10y ago
  The easiest way to fix it is to click the fraud button on your cc account =P
  - burgreblast 10y ago
    Nice if it were that easy. But for business accounts you want to delete one (or more) licenses. Look at the form 2/3 of the way down and ask if this makes sense. https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201886305-Deleting-licenses https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201886...
jwatte 10y ago
There should be integration tests for documentation. Maybe some machine learning could be applied to that? Maybe I should set that up on some cloud service. Let me check the documentation for how to do that...
- ben_jones 10y ago
  That's biting off way too much. You have to realize the scope of the actual problem "making humans understand something they previously do not understand". If you can do that you might as well apply it to fixing education instead.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  One of the things sandstorm.io does which makes a lot of sense, is that they regularly commit changes to their docs within the PRs that change the actual software. It's not integration tested, mind you, but the general practice means they do a pretty good job keeping their docs updated.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  Maybe Google needs to have fewer robots involved and more human beings?

burgreblast 10y ago

FWIW, Dropbox also points you to buttons that don't exist. When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. There's a nice FAQ that explains to push a "review subscription" button and blah blah, but in reality that button doesn't exist. The button isn't there. Support will "fix"it for you one-off, but not change the button. Wonder if this dark pattern is worth 3-4% of revenue.

0xmohit 10y ago
> When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. Maybe they expect you to cancel the card upon deleting an account. It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight. Not many look at their credit card statement anyways.
- Xorlev 10y ago
  > It can be said with certainty that this cannot be an oversight. It can be, especially when you're using something like Stripe. It only takes one failed call without retries (or a period of time where networking isn't working quite right) for an account to be orphaned. Arguably, those sorts of calls should be durably queued and retried until success, but it often doesn't happen. PM decides it's cheaper to have support field the one-off requests than to spend a few days making those changes. Later on, another developer accidentally disables the call and there isn't sufficient test coverage for disabling billing on account removal. It's a story that'll be repeated over and over.
x0x0 10y ago
The easiest way to fix it is to click the fraud button on your cc account =P
- burgreblast 10y ago
  Nice if it were that easy. But for business accounts you want to delete one (or more) licenses. Look at the form 2/3 of the way down and ask if this makes sense. https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201886305-Deleting-licenses https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201886...

jwatte 10y ago

There should be integration tests for documentation. Maybe some machine learning could be applied to that? Maybe I should set that up on some cloud service. Let me check the documentation for how to do that...

ben_jones 10y ago
That's biting off way too much. You have to realize the scope of the actual problem "making humans understand something they previously do not understand". If you can do that you might as well apply it to fixing education instead.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
One of the things sandstorm.io does which makes a lot of sense, is that they regularly commit changes to their docs within the PRs that change the actual software. It's not integration tested, mind you, but the general practice means they do a pretty good job keeping their docs updated.
blakeyrat 10y ago
Maybe Google needs to have fewer robots involved and more human beings?