Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

Very true, I do want to be able to fetch the most up to date version of these plugins though, and doing this manually is very annoying. And having to maintain a private version that I have to constantly update is almost as annoying.

I just wish WordPress companies would join 2015 already. So many of them are stuck in the late early 00s.

And to think that WP powers more than a fifth of the web.

I thought you sounded like a jackass, and started it with "TERRIBLE."

The other guy was pedantic and sort-of sounded like an ass near the end. He took things a bit personally, maybe having a bad day or something.

He seems a little baffled about why you're angry that you got a "straight no" when that's the answer to your question.

I wouldn't have submitted to having an argument with you, but I'm not surprised he did. I don't think it's particularly awful in any sense. He was just too lengthy--he should have just said (in his 2nd email) something like "Sorry, but our setup does not include permanent URLs. It's part of the security policy our company has decided on. Let me know if I can help in some other way."

I don't get the impression you'd have been satisfied with that, either.

An honest feedback.

SUPPORT: There is no supported capability to do that with any "COMPANY_NAME" product, thanks.

CUSTOMER: FYI, in 2015, that’s absolutely TERRIBLE. None of the other premium providers game me a STRAIGHT NO.

1. Sometimes, when support made the wrong initial contact, all future correspondence will turn sour. Make the first impression count.

2. Having 'thanks' at the end of sentences seems casual/unprofessional to me, if not rude. Maybe something like "thank you for your message" as an opening line on that email might be better.

3. At least you should have offered alternatives, rather than leaving the customer empty-handed. If there are none, at least you could have said that "we are looking at/thinking about/working on/still gathering feedback from more customers/ to implement this feature in the near future. as soon as it's ready, we'll let you know."

4. I think most of your replies are too long. On the other hand, your initial reply almost looked like canned response.

5. Never vent out to your customers as support. You will never win. You have the final say on what features you will put to your products, but your customer has every right to express how they feel about your product/service. You have none. Don't take it personally.

disclaimer: I am writing based on experience

From a customer service and customer standpoint, I happen to think you were both out of line and it degraded quickly. I am glad to see you not publicly shame the company though.

However, I would like to speak to the original premise that a company should have a wget/curlable url for a Wordpress plugin as a basic need for the DevOps world we live in. This is patently false.

From a company providing a plugin standpoint this makes no sense at all. If they would like to make a package which works with one of the myriad package management systems, that is one thing. If they would like to create chef and puppet scripts which install their plugin and the associated licensing needs for their clients who use these environments, then fantastic. This could be a market differentiator. But giving just a static URL system may not make business sense for even some of the mid and large size Wordpress plugin companies. It could effect the companies security, revenue model, and even the security of their customers. A DevOps ready plugin system would be a nice feature but it would also require thought and preparation.

When I hear that you would like to be able to wget/curl the plugin so you have the "most up to date version of the plugin" without the work of doing this "manually" which is "very annoy", I get concerned. If a consultant I was using for my Wordpress needs were to want to automatically update third part plugins, even if only on initial install, without thoroughly testing and version locking them first, I would be mortified! With RubyGems, npm, and the like, there is a reason we version lock! Particularly in an automated deployment DevOps based environment.

With this particular scenario the customer service agent had the right idea, though I admit it took the agent a while to get to the answer and the whole conversation could have been better. If it were me I would download the latest version of the plugin when I was ready to test it. I would test it in my test environments to make sure the most up to date version of the plugin worked as I expected it to, then I would load it into a private repository for deployment. I would then write a simple chef recipe to retrieve the latest version of the plugin on system install, or upgrade the plugin on all of my existing systems. Any future updates to a plugin would just require a single download of the updated plugin when I was ready to test, a test run through the test environment, and then a deployment to where my chef recipe could see the update. Simple, safe, automated, and effective.

Hey, thank you for the feedback, I'm the author of this thread but I'm actually the customer, not the support rep.

I get behind every single point of your list. I felt like he just didn't care, and when I proceeded to point out I was disappointed and thought it was terrible of them to just slam the door in my face like that, I received an endless series of condescending remarks which made even angrier and caused my reactions.

I'm somewhat surprised by some of the answers in the thread but I did want other people's opinions in order to figure out where the real balance is.

I guess I still feel like I'm the one who's right, especially being the paying customer, but from everyone's feedback I should have kept the tone down.

I admit I really don't work well with condescension.