One more rant and then I’ll take a pill

I was wondering why the whole “Jane” thing bothered me so much, and I realized it was just the Internet rudeness that broke my sensitive back.  We’re trying to sell one of our more profitable domain names, and when I got up this morning I was greeted by the “Jane” email, but also by email from a potential domain buyer accusing me of lying about the site’s traffic, ad revenue, etc.  The domain we’re selling has been in the top 3 in Google for its category for the past couple of years, but oh no, this guy who wrote to me knew I was inflating all the stats I’ve put together about the site, and offered me less than a third of our asking price because he was “doing me a favour”.  Also, I was initially woken up this morning by two, count ‘em, two unsolicited visitors to my front door, so the day was destined to be a snarlfest. 

As I’ve already been whining a river here today, I want to relate two of my own horror stories about dealing with strangers on the Internet.  I mentioned in today’s earlier entry that we run the site at retrostats.com, and we’ve been doing that for two+ years.  It was a great idea and very popular, but the software we bought was poorly written, and we ended up inactivating the site.  We still allow existing accounts to function, but we aren’t allowing new accounts.  The software put an incredible drain on the server, but more than that, the customers of our free service put an incredible strain on me.  I’d spend a couple of hours every day answering email questions from them, and while some people were quite polite and appreciative, others managed to write the most angry, offensive, and paranoid emails I could ever imagine (most from people who didn’t understand that our service stored statistics, but didn’t display a visible count on their website).  As I save everything, I’m going to treat you to two very special emails which still bug me to this day.

The first email is from a man who signed up for an account, received his “Welcome” email, and then responded to it with this:

Your codes that I got from signing up on the site had the counter, but did not create the numbers in the code. It started the counter from ZERO.  I need it to start at 12680, the code has this number, but won’t beging there. HELP !!!  The code you sent me here is just the line under the counter, I already have that

To that, I responded, “There’s no way during signup to specify what number you want the counter to start at—it can only start at zero.  If you want it reset to a different number, you can write and tell me and I’ll make a manual change in the database.  It will only change the number of visitors, however—your stats will still reflect zero hits and other information until they’re actually populated properly. So, if you want your counter reset to 12680 (or some other number), just write back and confirm that for me.”

That seemed reasonable, right?  Here’s what he wrote back a few minutes later:

Sorry to ruin your day but it DID ask me where I wanted to start. And I DID ask for help to reset the numbers. It (the number I chose) WAS in the CODE.  You need to look at your own program. I get nothing but problems from people that think they have the best product on the market. Wouldn’t it be best to not tell people there is NO WAY until you test it yourself ??!!  Lighten up

I wrote back to the guy and sent him the link to our signup page and asked him where on the page he thought he could specify a starting number.  He never wrote back.  Maybe that’s because there was no space to specify a starting number?!  And when he told me I should “test my product”, I’d already been using the service on my own sites for months, so I was very familiar with it.  I’d even rewritten a lot of the code for it.  I just love it when people tell me I don’t know what I’m doing, and then also tell me to “lighten up”.

I’ve got one more.  One woman wrote to me many times asking for help in interpreting her stats, and she always wanted assurances that I wouldn’t delete her site for fraud, because she visited her own site many times in a day.  If a person sets up a hitbot to automatically visit their own site thousands of times in a single day, that’s fraud, and a huge drain on the server.  I tried to reassure this woman over and over again that she could visit her own site dozens of times in a day and I’d never notice.  Well, one morning we were having server problems, and our sql server had died.  While I waited for a tech to fix the problem, people who tried to check their Retrostats accounts would get a generic “account not found” error, because the program couldn’t find the database.  During this problem (which lasted about an hour or so), I received this email from my paranoid friend:

You lied and said you wouldn’t delete my account but you did, even though I wasn’t cheating.  I know what you want… you want me to sign up for a new account and pay to upgrade it and I won’t do that!  I’m on to you and I wasn’t born yesterday!

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the woman’s Retrostats account—it was just a server error blocking all accounts.  I wrote a nice email and explained the situation and said her account was working fine, but I never heard from her again.

So, those are just a couple of my horror stories… the abuse I get from users of the message board at IyariLimon.com is often worse, but more forgiveable because the perpetrators are “just kids” and are insane with hormones or lack of education or something.  The nonsense I deal with from adults, though—adults with absolutely no logic or common sense—is inexcusable.  And that’s why we’re working on our dye sub business, so I can leave the Internet crazies behind, and just deal with them in small doses!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 04/04 at 08:40 PM

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  1. You know, before the advent of the internet, the village idiot stayed in his own village!  :o)

    Sorry that you have had to deal with so many weirdos.  You would think that they would eventually buy a clue and realize that treating people with respect and courtesy gets them a lot further than making insulting accusations!

    Posted by Expat  on  04/06  at  03:01 PM

  2. That’s very true… every oddball recluse (me included!) now has a voice, and in some cases it was better when they didn’t.

    Posted by Mudpuppy  on  04/06  at  03:17 PM
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