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Users who drive me to drink.

Discussion in 'The Dive' started by Bookangel, 15 Jul 2017.

  1. Bookangel

    Bookangel Administrator Staff Member

    So far this week we've had:
    • Someone deliberately submit a book they knew wasn't going free for a promotion to try and get a review.
    • Someone submit the same offsite review 16 times. It was already live when they did the last four.
    • An Italian purveyor of mature video content attempt to sign up for the boards.
    • 40+ StopForumSpam blocked sign-ups.
    While dealing with all of this, more complaints that we don't have feature X or Y, one that their really-badly-formatted-is-this-author-literate? book got no sales so can they have a refund for their free listing (we told them we'd return what they paid for it: £0.), someone who took the time to say they could make the board better but they don't like it so they won't, and the usual flood of people who made listing mistakes or are having problems with their promotions. The last group I don't mind because they are polite, friendly, and the problems are easily fixed and understandable.

    We're doing all of this while improving the social share counts, improving the Kobo beta, working with yahoo to fix a major email problem affecting yahoo.com, and trying to get more active posters to the board.

    And we're volunteers.

    The only bright spot have been a few authors who are genuinely supportive and remind me of why we do this. I would have quit by now without them.

    Thanks.
     
  2. porridge

    porridge Member

    What a colossal twat.

    Block 'em.
     
  3. Tregaron

    Tregaron Member

    I quite agree. What a wonderful person they must be...

    Would you like me to take over the email handling for the present? I have a little less patience and am more prone to reporting trolls to their IP abuse authority.
     
  4. tirial

    tirial Member

    What made me laugh when I did it was people insisting we must be running at a cost of hundreds of pounds a month, and couldn't be telling the truth about £70 a month. Obviously we were using Sendgrid or Aweber which to be fair do cost that much. Trying to explain we configure and run our own mailserver went over their heads, because obviously that was impossible.
     
  5. CatInASuit

    CatInASuit Administrator Staff Member

    I've spent a large chunk of today reading up on how to make the mail server go faster and hopefully the extra tweaks will help. If it doesn't help, then I'll try something different. Next weekend, I'm sure I'll be tweaking another part of the site and adding something new again.

    Given some of the misery thrown our way, I sometimes wonder why we do it. They seem really displeased we are still around.

    Like the others - if it wasn't for some of the authors, who seem genuinely thrilled and supportive, it would be easy to walk away. But it's four years of a labour of love to help out people who like books as much as we do.
     
  6. Tregaron

    Tregaron Member

    Only four years? If you recall, the original iteration of the site was around 2009. Bookangel has been around for quite some time as websites go.
     
  7. Tregaron

    Tregaron Member

    I have just seen the message, and his charming response where he thinks that using a slur against the disabled in written conversation is appropriate. I have blocked him.
     
  8. CatInASuit

    CatInASuit Administrator Staff Member

    Today is one of those good days, when the tweaks you add work and the mail server cranks itself up to handle everything thrown at. :)
     
  9. Kindler

    Kindler Active Member

    Is that why the emails have started coming a lot earlier. Nice one.
     
  10. jessica

    jessica Active Member

    Wow! That was really fast:D:D. Great job CIAS:D!
     
  11. porridge

    porridge Member

    Just seen the one from the guy who tried the threaten the site this morning. The credits=bribing people to post thing so we should pay him money. Most authors, great, some complete twats.
     
  12. tirial

    tirial Member

    o_O Just that. o_O

    I did see the one a years or so back, from the person who paid $5, got two months free advertising, got us to create an animated ad free from his PDF that he used on other sites, got nearly 2,000 click-throughs a month and a hundred times that in views, and wanted us to pay him the $5 back because the people who clicked through to his site were not buying his book. When we checked his updated site...well, lets just say our ad wasn't the problem.

    That was when we switched to the current sidebar ads.
     

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