So now I’ve officially had it with TypePad. Over at Association, Inc. Anil Dash has taken to blaming the customers for problems with TypePad’s service. Here’s his response to a post complaining about the service – original post first:
Sue Pelletier thinks TypePad’s attempts to make amends by letting people choose their compensation — select 15 free days of their service if you were only a little inconvenienced, 45 free days if you were very inconvenienced — is cool. Theoretically, she’s right, it’s an interesting approach.
But practically speaking? You could offer me 365 free days of their service and it wouldn’t mean a damn thing, because who wants 365 free days of service from a system that doesn’t work?
And that, my friends, is what people need to come to grips with. As of 2:15pm today, I can’t access a single one of the blogs hosted on TypePad from my blogroll. More importantly, I can’t log into TypePad to work on my organization’s blog. The system is down, because the system doesn’t work.
No more apologies, no more bizarre attempts to make amends. Let’s just face facts: TypePad doesn’t work.
by Kevin Holland
Anil says:
Kevin, given that we haven’t heard reports of this problem from anyone else, is it possible that the issue with accessing TypePad sites might be a problem on your end? We’ve got millions of visitors successfully accessing the sites today, as we did yesterday when you posted this.
In addition, given that TypePad has a host of unique features like built-in support for podcasting and videoblogging, drag-and-drop content reordering, checkbox-simple text ads and tip jars, simple screens for managing earnings on your blog, built-in lists for things like books and music, and powerful features like mobogging and photo albums, that anyone interested in any of those features would simply say “Anything *other* than TypePad doesn’t work.”?
Here is the funny part: Doug Bryan, the guy in charge of TypePad customer service was supposed to call me today to talk about my service issues. I felt compelled to leave this comment on Association Inc.’s blog:
Anil,
As I said on my blog, you are great at PR. You pitched your free service offer around to "A-List" bloggers and got them to write about it. Congratulations but there are still problems with TypePad (as outlined here) that have not been fixed.
The free service buys you some goodwill. This will evaporate if you don't get the service right. I am still having problems with my TypePad blog - even after getting your free service offer. The TrackBack feature works intermittently and people still can’t leave trackbacks on my blog. Today the stats were showing aggregated page views for the past three days. Then at about 11AM they zeroed out. I receive some free service and I still have problems - go figure.
By the way, Doug Bryan (the guy in charge of SixApart's customer service) missed the call he scheduled with me today. He left me a voice mail an hour after the original call time. Apparently he had trouble calculating the time difference between NY and SF. This is typical of your customer service incompetence. If the guy in charge of customer service seeks out a customer and schedules a call with him he needs to actually make the call when it is scheduled.
Here’s the interesting thing – after being blown off for the call this morning I was just going to discontinue my service and go away quietly. However, after seeing your arrogant and condescending responses in this blog I think I’m going to make it my mission to convert other bloggers to services other than TypePad.
Here are my two suggestions for improving your service:
- Stop posting comments on blogs and get back in the garage and fix the problems with your product.
- Get Doug Bryan a watch.
You know where to find me: http//dlorenzo.blogs.com
Dave
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