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Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role
- bbguitar 13y agoLOL worth a read for a quick grin.
- speeder 13y agoTroll.programmer? Placeholder forgotten there? How.the guy email.ended there in first place? EDIT: whooo! I write a question, downvote-fest!!! For context, I was the first comment, and I was genuinely curious. But thanks for the downvotes and no reply.
- codesuela 13y agorandom punctuation along with missing words (probably caused by autocorrect) makes your post extremely unreadable hence the downvotes
- speeder 13y agoToo bad I cannot edit it again now that I am on a computer :( (I typed it on a phone)
- tokipin 13y agothis is not excuse. i write like an idiot that never graduated grade school regardless of whether i'm pecking on a phone or on a keyboard. much to learn you still have
- chancancode 13y agoI think he just answered his own question ;)
- recursive 13y agoCurious about what? Your "question" is non-sensical.
- smoyer 13y agoIf I'm decoding it correctly, I think a description of how his e-mail ended up in Zynga's game would in fact be an interesting story.
- willvarfar 13y agoSo Zynga was originally going to call the game "Themepark" but Eric already had that domain, and so they changed it to "Coasterville"?
- Jare 13y agoThe game seems hosted on a themepark.zynga.com subdomain, so yeah.
- panacea 13y agoThey obviously concluded that 'Themeparkville' just didn't have that certain zyng to it.
- ig1 13y agoI imagine the bigger issue is that it's a clone of the Electronic Arts game Theme Park.
- sam_pointer 13y agoFrom experience, it is quite common to have internal code-names for Facebook games for the purposes of preventing leaks from development canvas apps and the like. These are usually related to the general gist of the game. To coin a made-up example, 'SimAir' might be called 'flying' internally.
- brazzy 13y agoMy experience has been that the main reason is that development usually starts before marketing has even decided on the final name. You need to call your dev servers, code repository and bug tracker project something and it's often hard to change retroactively. It's not even unusual to see multiple different working titles float around.
- instakill 13y agoNot to be a party-pooper but I wonder where he stands legally with this.
- nicholassmith 13y agoI think I'd do the exact same thing in his situation, you can either be angry about it or have some fun with it.
- panacea 13y agoThey're semi-funny reply emails, but I don't really understand how he was having fun with them. Doing it for the lulz of punking individual users trying to get help? Seems a bit like being a bully on an individual kid. Possibly cathartic though if he's being swamped by misdirected support emails... maybe?
- josscrowcroft 13y agoWonderful - so much mischief potential... I love that the user was told to press "meh" repeatedly.
- DanBC 13y agoSee also the English comedian Tony Hawks and the US skateboarder Tony Hawk. (http://www.tony-hawks.com/skateboarding.php http://www.tony-hawks.com/skateboarding.php) (http://tonyhawk.com/ http://tonyhawk.com/)
- Svip 13y agoThe strangest thing is that the only email, specifically accusing Tony Hawks of abusing his name's similarity to Tony Hawk is in Dutch. Likely, however, Mr Hawks has received numerous complaints about it in English and chose to ignore those, but kept the one in Dutch as he did not understand it (or did not care what it said).
- TallGuyShort 13y agoIt's not the he didn't understand or didn't care what he said. It's that he had a funny response. It's his own name, for Heaven's sake. And the people writing to him are clearly not doing their own due diligence either.
- tokipin 13y agoyea but like, maybe he could just change his name to Tony Falcons? a mafia gangster would be proud to have that name
- tripzilch 13y ago> And the people writing to him are clearly not doing their own due diligence either. The people writing to him are eight years old. And he is making fun of their inability to spell.
- calebegg 13y agoAlso, Opera (the browser) and Oprah (the TV personality): http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/05/25/oprah-winfrey-we-will-miss-you http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/05/25/oprah-winfre...
- capulcu 13y ago
- eterm 13y agoWhat an asshole. I mean, really, people contact him asking for help and instead of setting up an email rule of "Sorry, this isn't Zynga" he knowingly messes people around. It'd be one thing to mess with Zynga but people who've just emailed for help? That breaks "Dont' be a dick". I was expecting an awesome story about how he looked into the game and took on their role and actually helped people but instead we have someone on the internet being a dick.
- bru 13y agoExcuse me? It is stated that he did the right thing first: > When Zynga didn't reply to his messages pointing out the error, he started doing their job for them. He then decided to play along, and that it his right. He did not say "delete system32" or such things. The asshole here is Zynga more than Eric I'd say.
- acoleman616 13y agoYes, I'm sure most of the people receiving these responses were really "messed around"... They have bigger problems if they were actually taking his "advice".
- photorized 13y agoThat was my reaction too. I am surprised many people here feel otherwise.
- srikrishnan 13y agoYou can look at it as punishment for playing those mindless Zynga games :P
- vanwilder77 13y agoI would expect Zynga kindly apologizing, for their screw up, to their customers. Eric did do the wrong thing, by making fun of the customers here. But isint it a huge mistake that you wont expect from some BIG BRAND like Zynga to do? They surely disappointed their users.
- scrabble 13y agoIf he actually took on the role of customer support, Zynga never would have updated the email address. They would have accepted the free customer support rep and it would have continued.
- cinbun8 13y agoMisleading those users was unnecessary. From the user's perspective they are stuck between Zynga and Eric who decided to have some fun with them. I wonder how much time he had on his hands to toy around with feedback emails everyday. Would an email filter with an automatic response not have sufficed ?
- goatforce5 13y agoI've owned a domain for 10+ years that's spelled correctly and is kinda neat and i'll do something with it some day. A few years back a start up got some funding, tried to buy my domain several times, and ended up going with a variation of the domain, but minus a vowel. eg, if i owned flicker.com, they ended up with flickr.com (it's neither of those domains, BTW). I semi-regularly get support emails for them. If i'm in a good mood and see the email as it comes in, i'll tell them the correct email to use (no one has ever thanked me for that, as it happens). Normally I just ignore them, or don't notice them for a few days. I find it mildly amusing when there's a series of emails from the same person with panic escalating over a few hours. "Where is my project?" "I need this for my report in the morning!" "I'M GOING TO SUE YOU!"
- shabble 13y agoI wonder if you could train a spam classifier to identify & autorespond (or to randomly just drop/bounce/"help"[1] if you want to automate your current workflow :) ) these messages? Maybe even a simple regex for <theirdomain>.tld would work. Probably want to have it after a whitelist-known-contacts step to avoid upside-down-ternetting[2] your friends though. [1] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl [2] http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html
- lostlogin 13y agoGawd. I used to have a phone with attached fax that was one digit off a popular fish and chip shop number. I would get advertising faxes at the rate of about 1 roll of fax paper per week from an advertising company. I rung, faxed emailed and tried multiple times to correct them. In the end I got one of their faxes, faxed it back to them, then tapped the bit that came out the fax to the bit still going in. A vicious fax loop. It ran all weekend. I got one grumpy as fax back on Monday about how I'd used up a massive roll of fax paper, and they had been unable to delete the queue for some reason, so it had used up the refills too. $$ Were demanded. The spam faxes stopped and I never heard from them again.
- kiisupai 13y agoZynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Chief Executive Officer Role
- ordinary 13y agoSeven Year Old Girl Wanders Into White House, Sworn In As President Of The United States
- PakG1 13y agoSee also http://www.salon.com/2002/06/03/nissan/ http://www.salon.com/2002/06/03/nissan/ edit: better article: http://www.yalelawtech.org/ip-in-the-digital-age/why-nissan-com-isn%E2%80%99t-a-car-website/ http://www.yalelawtech.org/ip-in-the-digital-age/why-nissan-...
- otoburb 13y agoThe money Nissan spent on legal fees may have been better spent buying his business outright. It may still have legs if they can put a value not having control over nissan.com.
- chiph 13y agoUzi Nissan used to be my ISP when I lived in Raleigh (he had one of the first ISDN modems in town -- 128kbps bonded channels, baby!) Cool guy. But I have to admit that he messed up when he started hosting ads on his site (Link Exchange, IIRC). Sure enough, the software started putting auto-related ads on there, and that's when he got in trouble with the lawyers.
- jon_black 13y agoWhat's a random stranger anyway? I'd imagine that all strangers are random, right? By definition, you have no acquaintance with them, so you can't predict them. Anyway, I thought it was an oxymoron. Maybe I'm just being random ;)
- paranoiacblack 13y agoNot really? If I know someone that you don't and introduce them to you, at that moment they are a stranger to you, but definitely not random.
- jon_black 13y agoGood point. My head started hurting while thinking about it. What is random anyway? Arrrrgh!
- acangiano 13y agoBy following your own logic, it wouldn't be an oxymoron. It would be a pleonasm.
- jon_black 13y agoPleonasm. That's a new word for me. Thanks.
- mattkevan 13y agoA friend of mine's surname is the same as a large US private bank. He bought the .com address for his own company years before the bank got online and so regularly receives emails from the bank's customers containing sensitive information, including financial data, account numbers, SSNs and more. He's told the bank many times that their customers are sending stuff that really shouldn't be in an email to the wrong address, offered to set up redirects or even sell them the domain, but do they care? Not one bit.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoSadly my favorite story about a person dealing with a motel with nearly the same number turned out to be false. It was still funny though. I like this guy's sense of humor but he could include in the end of his response the real address (or set the reply-to on his responses to be the actual address)
- Widdershin 13y agoI worked in a 24/7 technical support center, which one was number off my country's major airline. The amount of times I had to inform people, that just because they'd managed to call a software company in my country, didn't mean that I could change their flights. You would get people who would call up, launch into a rigmarole about their booking, I would listen for a few minutes before interrupting and saying 'You are aware that this is Company Name, right?', and they would still keep going. Fun stuff.
- ddunkin 13y agoTrying to actually reach intelligent humans at these large companies can be a real pain. I've had similar issues with large providers doing stupid things, my customers blame me, and I can't do anything about it because I'm the small guy.
- mpr3 13y agoI know it just isn't possible in many situations, but transparent support goes a long way in avoiding situations like this. Zendesk has tried this out with fully visible support chat, and it's worked well for them.
- CurtMonash 13y agoI get several emails per year that are meant for monash.edu. I simply write back pointing that out. I most definitely do NOT say "If you can't tell the difference between .com and .edu, you're unlikely to have much joy with the Monash University admissions office."