One of the reasons people HATE to call product support people on the phone, is that many of them are incented to "get rid" of the product support incident as quickly as possible rather than "help" the user or address the underlying problem.
Last week, I reported a bug on the meetup.com web site. I provided a detailed explanation that was formatted as a very clear bug report. And I gave a reproduceable series of steps showing how to re-create the bug. Instead of a "thanks - we'll look right into this" response that I was hoping for I got this message:
I understand your concern, but it's very rare that users encounter this
issue. If you clear your cookies, you should be all set!
...
If you still have trouble, try signing
in under a different browser as well.
Cheers,
Kathryn Fink
Community Support Specialist
Meetup HQ
The problem I reported has NOTHING to do with my cookie state (a quick experiment showed that the bug was still reproducible even with cookies cleared). This lazy support "specialst" is trying to either (a) get the customer to "go away" or (b) get their USER's to do all the work of diagnosing and tracking down their bugs.
To make matters worse, this is a SUBSCRIPTION web site. I'm PAYING THEM MONEY to use their sofware. And they still treat their users like this. From my point of view, they should be GRATEFUL that I took the time to send them a detailed, actionable bug report. Most users would just say "this site is crap", cancel their subscription and leave.
You can be certain that I won't be a user of meetup.com for long. I'll be actively looking for a more economical solution and one that doesn't "blame their users" for the bugs in their product.
UPDATE:
I just got this email from a contrite, Kathryn Fink, when I replied to her that I thought she was mis-understanding my bug report:
Thank you for taking the time to get back to me, and I'm truly sorry for
my confusion.
I had not replicated the error on my end, and incorrectly assumed the
page you were redirected to was a bad cached page in your browser. This
was my mistake and for that I apologize.
The Tech Team replicated the error and logged a bug for it. We're just
waiting for the fix to go live, which should happen shortly. We truly
appreciate your bringing this to our attention. It was a sitewide bug
and issue that would have effected other members too.
Many thanks again!
Best regards,
Kathryn Fink
Community Support Specialist
Meetup HQ
Meetup.com redeemed!