The award for the worst support for a company with multi-million dollars funding goes to: Openads. They got 5 million USD in June for becoming more professional. Worked out in part, they have a CEO now and a dozen of marketing people (bleh!). But I think they forget the support team. On the forum there are several open threads for one and the same problem: If you’ve updated from an older version to any new version (2.3 branch) you have a very special and important file missing: adclick.php in the /www/delivery/ folder. For what this file is used? Well it is used to trace clicks and forward the user to the target website. Pretty important, right? But all the open posts are unanswered, new posts are opened almost daily and nobody from OpenAds seems to care. Why not offer a workaround, like just copy the ck.php file and rename it to adclick.php. Or even better, fix that stuff! But no, the OpenAds team prefers to hire some more marketing apes.
Maybe the investors don’t care about us, the users. They can’t wait to sell OpenAds to a major player in the online-advertisement business.
Update 08/26/2007 11:04 am
For the past few days I have been in an email exchange with the people at Openads. They are very nice and really cared about the problem. They even allowed me to share some information with you and ask for your opinion and feedback on how to simplify support for users or to fill out the support team.
The good news: They are now fixing the bug (see trac entry) and want to release the new beta in a few days.
As with a lot open source projects, the community is mostly user driven. They help each other out, share tips and hints and support you in your problems. Every member of the forum is very important to the community and should do his/her best to help Openads (or any other project) become more popular, better and user-friendly. At Openads the team is now working through the past months of forum posts to find any (unsolved) problems and spent a lot of time and resources in those:
In the past the core team have all shared the forum support work with
the community moderators but some threads have gone unanswered. We
know that’s not good enough and so 4 weeks we dedicated resources to
the forum with goal that no thread go unanswered.
Finally I want to ask a question: Are forums good enough for support? Are there better (view of developers) or more user-friendly (less technical) alternatives? Are there solutions that are wiki based? Or how about some sort of Digg-like system, where users vote and prioritize bugs/features?
http://blog.openads.org/08/hello-slashdot-readers/
> “Ask us a question about Openads… we’ll make sure to respond.”
lol…
MyBlogLog sagt die haben meinen Blog besucht, deinen dann vermutlich auch…
First of all, OpenAds is not (yet) a doubleclick alternativ! Trust me, I know it! 😉 (But it might work well for not-so-big-systems, when you don’t need all doubleclick features.)
Forums are not bad. Acctually when you have a lot of active user (which is a good thing), they write a lot of dumb questions and the not-so-dumb-questions get lost between it (the not so good thing). But the same happens on nearly ever technology (mailinglist(zend) and even bugtracking(eclipse)). In the end you allways are in charge to find a core dev (or an other smart guy) and send them direct a nice mail.
The vote system might be probably a system to prevent this, but is also not fault prove. Think about this: There is a very cool new feature (like integrate openads in yet an other blog software) and this get a vote from nearly every user. On the other hand somewhere in this magic-not-yet-existing-system a very smart guy write about a very critical security bug. And nobody vote for it because the dumb users didn’t understand what the smart guy mean and your back on the forum problem…