In response to an “All Customer Bulletin” that I sent out last week about the downtime we experienced last week, I got an email from a customer indicating that he was ashamed of our behavior and would tell everyone he knew not to do business with us.
“Strange,” I thought.
See, when I send out bulletins like I did last week, I set my personal address as the reply-to so that a) I get all the bounce-backs because its good to know what the real delivery rate looks like, b) I get all the spam verification messages because its good to know what services people are using to protect their inboxes and c) I get to see all of the ensuing questions and comments from customers first hand.
Overwhelmingly, Domain Direct’s subscribers were incredibly supportive of how we handled the situation. Out of the tens of thousands of messages sent, I only got two “I don’t care what caused the downtime, I want my money back” messages. And I got exactly one, “I’m ashamed of you, I’m moving my business somewhere else.”
The customer mentioned that he had read about what had “really” happened on Slashdot, so of course, I had to visit and find out what people where saying about us. I haven’t used Slashdot in at least a couple of years, probably more – it used to be an excellent place to get the “internet scoop”, but now I get all that (and more) from RSS services like Tucows Start, Feedcache, Pubsub and Technorati.
In visiting Slashdot, one thing became real clear, real quick.
Uninformed goofballs have taken over the place.
I could scarcely believe the amount of misinformation that had been spread. One poster alleged that Tucows had sold its registrar business a few years back and only had a smattering of customers left-over (most definitely not true – we certainly didn’t sell, and we’re serving millions of customers). Others were alleging that we turfed specific customers in order to solve the issues related to the downtime. Also not true. No one got turfed, no one had their contracts with us cancelled. In fact, during the downtime, we bent over backwards to take care of our customer’s interests.
Whatever happened to the millions of eyeballs that the Open Source community is so proud of? All I saw were a bunch of trolls leading the discussion, and very little fact-based discussion of consequence. I’m actually kind of disappointed with Slashdot in a way. I used to have warm spot in my heart for Slashdot, but it really seems to have deteriorated to the point where it does nothing but provide a comfortable home for those that don’t know any better and aren’t afraid to prove it.
I admit that I didn’t bother reading the entire thread – it ran 3 pages long, in the hundreds of posts. After page two, I kind of gave up. To everyone that posted well-intentioned, fact-based messages on page three, you have my apologies.
