11 replies to this topic

[mrdee]

I will just add a few things together here, so that I do not have to keep adding replies to different previous post all the time, but so i can vent a combination of a few things here in a frsh topic.

Also, like I said in my subtitle, I do not want to sound negative, but I think I have cause and good reason to say what I want to say.

First of all, in an earlier topic about the MyCents system, I was told about people getting an email when the credits update, which was the first i ever heard about it, as I never got such an email in my life.

I was then asked by velma whether I wss still using the same email address I used to sign up to Xisto/Knowledgesutra (or Trap 17 as it was then called), which is the case.
Velma then asked me to PM the email address in question to her to give her a chance to look into things, and that was the last I heard of it, and up to today, I still never received any emails with reference to my credits.

Then, another thing about "slacking" customer service:

I was told to keep things separate, and either post about certain things here, or raise a ticket with the support team, but, if you get no joy in one place, you sort of are forced to take your griefs to a different place.

Anyway, here we go:
I raised a ticket on 17-08-2011 about a persistent error I kept getting (I will not repeat the details here, as I raised it with the support team, I just want to voice my dissatisfaction about the way things are handled there).

I got a reply on 18-08, asking me to provide my login details if I was still facing the issue, the issue was still there, so I gave them what they asked for.
A day later I got a reply that the server admin was looking into the error and that I would be updated shortly.

I then updated the support theme a day later to inform them that there was a slight change in the behaviour of my page in question, but that the error itself was still there, to get a reply a day later (20-08-2011) that the server admins are still working on the issue.

I checked every day, but the error had not gone away, so I amended the ticket again on 01-09-2011 to ask if they were still looking into it and to tell them nothing had changed and I still got the error, only to be greeted with deadly silence.
Not a single reply, nor a solution to the problem since.

Is that what Knowledgesutra call customer service?

[anwiii]

this is something i have been hard with xisto about. it seems velma has stated over and over again that she has come in to take care of support tickets and get them noticed and make sure problems get handled more effeciently over there. although there was no official announcement of this, there are still problems going on like this.

what i suggest and what i have always suggested to people having problems is PM VELMA either here or facebook and let her handle the issue and make sure the problem is fixed without being ignored.

this isn't how regular customer service shoudl work, but it's the way xisto does things. not too many people know to pm velma though so unfortunately their tickets will just get lost in the disorganization over there until they get a clue. shame on them not knowing to pm velma! SHAME ON THEM!

[mrdee]

Fair enough, anwiii,
however, as it said in my post (regarding the issue with the emails when credits change), I PM'ed velma on that one as well (at her own request), and after we mentioned it once or twice afterwards, that was the last I heard of it, and nothing got changed, let alone resolved.

Without any disrespect to velma, but after this I am not so sure that PM'ing her regarding my support ticket will solve anything.

[anwiii]

sometimes what we feel through frustration and what is correct are two different things. sometimes however or feelings are true and correct. i can tell you this though. if pming velma does no good, then xisto is now officially a lost cause because she was the only person holding this place together.

if customers can't get support, they should move elsewhere until they are ready to at least acknowledge the customers problems.

[sheepdog]

Quote

if pming velma does no good, then xisto is now officially a lost cause because she was the only person holding this place together.

Well, I hope that is not true! What has happened to the other moderators, they used to be around all the time and really stayed on top of things? I seldom ever had to wait much time at all to get answers if an issue came up. I kinda miss the good old days when Trap 17 was really hopping and there were lots of posts and stuff going on, it was easy to keep up conversations and keep hosting credits up with not nearly the effort it takes now. Seems like I spend more time looking for new posts than I do writing them.

[mrdee]

Well, yes, sheepdog, looking for posts rather than writing them seems to be more rule than exception here.

However, the main thing is, if even the customer support is going down the pan, what are we supposed to do then?
I can only reply to a ticket and either repeat my question, or ask for an update on the evolution of things, but, if you are met with complete silence when doing that, when do you go from here, that is what I would like to know.

[anwiii]

one thing you can do is try to talk to opaque directly. you can do that through pm's here, open a support ticket, or find him on sites like facebook where sometimes he likes to hang out more than here. why try to talk to him directly? to ask him the questions you and other people are wondering, and then you can post the answers here.

other than that, there is little one can do except to move their hosting elsewhere. it's really a sad state. i was predicting the demise of this place a little before the name change, and then about 6 months after we changed our name, it got even worse and i was threatening to leave. in fact, i haven't been posting much after that. after a while, i was never here for the credits, but the community. i complained and complained. the complaining, i thought would spark a little motivation to get things done. after i realized that didn't work, i stopped complaining for a while until i had problem with my websites not loading, servers going down, being lied to in support and even not getting any support at all, and them mosving my hosting to another server without telling me which cost me money and time when there was a proplem with the new servers php configuration or something. after that, i didn't want anyone else getting screwed over by xisto and started complaining again but not for the same reasons as before. this time it was to inform people so they can make a wise decision with their hosting.

after i did that, it seems like velma didn't like that too much and started taking it personal when she herself decided to enter and work for this company with a bad reputation already which in fact would in inevitably give herself a bad reputation in the end if she's not carefull if she wants to get annoyed at people getting annoyed for legitimate reasons rather than acknowledge those reasons and not get annoyed at people who are venting legitimately.

i see the situation as this. i am a long time member and supporter of trap 17/knowledge sutra. at one time, there was nothing i wouldn't do to try to help this place and it showed through my dedication of posts when i don't even like to write in the first place. right now however, i can not say i am a huge supporter anymore. i will still hope for the best, but until they fix the problems that members are having with this place, i cannot for the life of me support the activities and m.o. of xisto. opaque has said repeatedly that this forum is his baby. well, his baby just died.

now this is why i tried to start my own community somewhere else. it's a learning experience and the more i experience it first hand, the more i respect opaque with what he had accomplished for this forum at one time. the difference between him and me though is that i could never let my own baby die. if i didn't have time for it, i would find someone who did.

now what i can do for this place in this post is offer a nice honest suggestion to help the forum get back on it's feet. if opaque wants to revive his baby, he has to either stop coding, and be more active in his forum AND in his chat room, or hire someone to do it for him and spend more time in his forum and in his chat room. he needs to do a lot of pr now to revive his so-called baby. if he fails to do that, he fails his baby and the only good the forum is to anyone is to his selfish needs in how much the forum makes from ad revenue through guest posting because no members in their right mind will want to stay here when everyone else they knew left for something that seemed better at the time.

that's my suggestion for the day and i hope he takes this suggestion and does something with it. i know it would help his forum drastically. he has now lost the loyalty from his old time members and users. something i never thought i would ever see. when you lose the loyalty of your memebers, i feel it reflects on the person who brought the memebers in. through out the 2 year mess this forum has been in turmoil, i haven't heard one appology from ANYONE about the forum or about the xisto support. i haven't heard anyone say that it will get better and see them do something about the problems(except when velma has tried in her own efforts). sorry, but even when i say i still have hope for this forum, that hope is slowly diminishing every day. trap 17/knowledge sutra will always hold a place in my heart though, no matter what happens. i guess that's why i am so disappointed in xisto right now.

[mrdee]

Well, yes, anwiii, maybe I could try to talk to Opaque directly, however, why should I have to do this?

OK, granted, I could tell him about the ongoing problems and all that, but, I have in the past submitted a ticket and added "FA of Opaque" to it, and hat did not make a lot of difference.

I guess he is (or, at least, should be) aware of all the problems that are going on, after all, you and me cannot be the only ones who complain here, surely to God.

So, IF (which I assume is the case) he is aware of what is going on, is it not up to him to put things straight?
After all, it is HIS company, is it not?

So, what I wondering is: "why should we keep chasing him around???", I know, people would go through any length when problems arise and continue, and when things are not working as they should and nobody seems to give a damn when they cry for help, but I think there comes a point when people say "enough is enough now!!".

We should not really be chasing Opaque all the time, or keep repeating our problems to velma, it should suffice to send a ticket to support to get our problems solved.
I should think the ball is in Opaque's court now, and after all the tribulations, I think it is high time he pulled his finger out, or this place s gong to be left in ruins completely (and they are not far off it as it is).

Make no mistake, I have been a member here myself for more than four years, and i have had lots of good times here, being happy with the service, rarely needing to raise a ticket, and when I did, getting a quick, satisfactory and friendly answer.

Also, for the forum itself, it used to be a pleasure posting and reading here, there used to be a lot of knowledgeable people on here, and when you posted about a problem, you usually had a reply (or, rather, a number of replies) in a very short time, most of the time leading to the solution of your problem. I can't tell the number of problems i managed to solve by reading posts here or posting to report a problem myslef.

These days, however, more often than not, you do not get any answer to your posts for a long time, or not at all (I have quite few posts on here that never received a reply).

And, apart from a few people on here who know a thing or to about cetain things (web design, PHP, CSS and the likes), and who still reply to your posts to share their knowledge in order to help you, most of the Whiz kids of yonder are nowhere to be found these days.

So, anwiii, let's see what good our complaining will do, alas, I am always sure it will not make a lot of difference.
We can only live in hope.

Then again, having said all that, we always think "the grass is always greener on the other side", however, after the trouble and tribulation I had here, I signed up with a new "high quality post to host" company, and what happened?
After signing up and adjusting the nameservers and MX, A and CNAME records, my email did not work properly anymore, it was all someone else's fault (according to the powers that be at that company), however, after simply changing the nameservers back to computinghost, my email worked perfectly again within a short time.

There were also times when I was told my site was not loading (and not in a very polite manner), or bits of it were not visible, it appeared they were seeing different things than the things I was seeing, and when you mentioned there was nothing wrong your end, you got a real earful and got accused of posting false (wrong) links on their forum, posts which you made in good faith, since you did not see a problem at your end.

Well, having said that, I would rather come back here and stay here, where support is not always optimal, but, as I mentioned before, where support is not needed that often because most of the things run reasonably reliable here.

And, of course, I DO stick to my guns by saying lots of changes will be needed here, but at least, when I got in touch with Xisto support, I have never been bullied by someone who claimed I had to learn to code a site and who constantly claimed any fault had to be at my end.

Well, that about sums it up then.
So, once again, I appeal to Opaque and whoever else is in charge, PLEASE, bring back the old forum and hosting as we used to know it, so we can have the happy times we used to have back again.

Edited by mrdee, 11 September 2011 - 11:16 AM.

[velma]

Wow, xisto a lost cause just because I am missing...? Please, just because a few kinks are being sorted out does not mean we are going down hill. I can totally understand the negativity when the mods/admins were awol but now that some life is creeping back into this forum, we need all the moral support we get.

Now moving onto the issue at hand. You had reported on the wordpress memory issue, every thing was fine until the status of your ticket was changed to in progress when it was forwarded to the server admin. As members are aware we integrated our billing system and support system into one interface for better convenience, due to permission restrictions your ticket was never visible to the senior tech in charge of your ticket.

For that I apologize deeply since you were obviously caused a delay for a really long time. As for my disappearance, I am currently leading a superbly nomadic life which doesn't let me access work unless I can manage it all on a 2 inch screen >_<

It would have been nice if you had updated the thread about your account where basically after we rediscovered your ticket :-

• Originally assumed to be a basic memory issue, the admin increased the limits every where, didn't work
  
• Had your account checked to see if there was something wrong with your account causing the issue, everything turned out to be fine.
  
• We even checked out the server memory configuration to confirm that nothing was wrong there and as expected, nothing was wrong with the server
  
• So finally we had the wordpress installation reinstalled keeping only the database untouched
  
• Reason being that there is a slight chance that one of your plugins, themes, files got corrupt causing the error

Let's all hope that this won't repeat itself and I want you all to know that the team at xisto and me are working real hard to bring back the good ole times

[mrdee]

Fair enough, velma.
Thank you for the explanation.

Now, as you can see, the problem was obviously not my fault.
As for the issue itself, I obviously do not know whether it was a plugin, theme or file that got corrupt, but, obviously, as millions of people use Wordpress, and servers have been configured to run Wordpress too, you would at least trust it to be reliable.

One thing I remember I did have an issue with (could that have been the reason for the problem, or part of it, I don't know?) is that I tried a number of times (because I got a notification there was a newer version available) to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, but it kept failing.
Unfortunately I do not remember which error message was generated.

When I installed Wordpress on a different server, also using CPanel, I got the same message (about a newer Wordpress version being available), I clicked on the link and within seconds, Wordpress was updated to the latest version.

Now that I think of it, it is coming back to me slowly now, I installed and/or activated the theme and plugins after the upgrade, while, on the Computinghost server, I only installed the theme, I did not add any plugins which caused me any problems as far as I can remember.

It is of course possible that some plugins might cause problems in the overall running of Wordpress as most of the plugins are created by third parties, rather than by the Wordpress team themselves.

Anyway, the problem seems to be solved now, and I will not be playing around with Wordpress on my own server anymore anyway, but I think it might be a good idea if the people involved had a look at the issue of Wordpress causing errors when a user tries to update it (since it seemed to work flawlessly on a different server).

Anyway, thank you for the explanation, and hopefully it doesn't happen again that tickets go flying in the air and keep hanging there for some time.

Edited by mrdee, 19 September 2011 - 11:55 PM.