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The fuck off contact page

nicchan.me

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Re: The fuck off contact page

#111

Post by wink »

permo-w wrote: post #39

I'm not sure I've ever seen a contact page that wasn't like this. I always felt it was basically reasonable. if you can direct someone to an answer without having to waste money/time/compute on providing custom service, then that seems basically reasonable to me. yes it's annoying, but it's not a pattern I've ever felt was particularly dark. I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call t…

One of our products had a proper contact page (just a select box box to decide on something, then one outcome was a contact form) and now it's a fuck off contact page.

Sometimes (like here) there are even some good reasons (e.g. we host this product and the first point of contact is in fact another business entity, so they get to decide) and apparently their MO is "you will use this ticket system no matter what you want, so only if you are a certain customer with a login it will work" whereas before you could at least write a "hello, here's a technical problem" that would reach us and not them. Ah well.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#113

Post by NiloCK »

blenderob wrote: post #110
egorfine wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is truly an excellent design. Thus I am so grateful for the "Reader mode" in Safari that allowed me to actually read the article.

No kidding! Half way down I began to get a headache. Took me a moment to understand that it was the difficult-to-read font that was inducing headache. Switched to "Reader mode" and instant relief! Excellent design. But not for me. Thank you Reader mode!

Note that the settings in lower-right allows for an eye-friendlier font.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#114

Post by stavros »

savolai wrote: post #56

Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.

I hated it. It looks really pretty, but was terrible for reading. Half my phone screen was taken up by icons, and there was no scrollbar so I had no idea how long the article was. I really needed reader mode for it.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#115

Post by blenderob »

NiloCK wrote: post #113
blenderob wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No kidding! Half way down I began to get a headache. Took me a moment to understand that it was the difficult-to-read font that was inducing headache. Switched to "Reader mode" and instant relief! Excellent design. But not for me. Thank you Reader mode!

Note that the settings in lower-right allows for an eye-friendlier font.

Thank you! 1000 times better after selecting antialiased font.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#116

Post by internet2000 »

stavros wrote: post #114
savolai wrote: post #56

Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.

I hated it. It looks really pretty, but was terrible for reading. Half my phone screen was taken up by icons, and there was no scrollbar so I had no idea how long the article was. I really needed reader mode for it.

In the industry, we call this the "fuck off article design" (I gave up reading midway through the post.)

Re: The fuck off contact page

#117

Post by dicethrowaway1 »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #112

A lot of comments recommend just putting an email on the contact page, which I agree is nice. Related question: do good, privacy-preserving, cookie-less alternatives to reCAPTCHA exist?

For email, I've had some luck just modifying the page with JS that's either indirect or obfuscated enough that the address can't be pulled directly from it - e.g. "var email" is the address encrypted with a fixed key, the JS decrypts it and then alters the HTML.

It can obviously be bypassed by using a JS runner, but it seems to be enough of a hurdle that few spammers bother. "You don't have to outrun the bear", as it were.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#118

Post by tuetuopay »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #91
pjmlp wrote: post #38

As someone that works on this space, with the kind of products that want this kind of contact pages, they forgot to mention that even behind login walls, in some products you only get to create a support ticket if there are enough developers with the right level of certifications and partnership.

One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner. Hetzner team if you are reading this, although I love email platform, is there any way that your support stops being AI (which annoyed me) but rather you can have an d…

> One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card

> That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.

In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer.

You still get the occasional Pakistani bank that allows the emission of unlimited credit cards for fraudsters or the stolen cards (stripe goes a long way for this), but it simply makes the business bearable.

So yeah, we were not thrilled to enforce CC for signup. Believe it or not, even marketing or sales hated it, because it introduces friction in the signup tunnel.

As to re: logged in to open tickets, it is a necessity to avoid customer getting their account stolen. As a customer you receive fake "change your password now!" emails, as a company you receive fake "i've lost my password!" emails. That's the sad way the world is right now. Account theft for hosting providers is a real thing, because the stakes can be very very high.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#119

Post by esseph »

stavros wrote: post #114
savolai wrote: post #56

Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.

I hated it. It looks really pretty, but was terrible for reading. Half my phone screen was taken up by icons, and there was no scrollbar so I had no idea how long the article was. I really needed reader mode for it.

Click the Maximize Window button on the top right.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#120

Post by dmd »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #53
dotancohen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to laugh, but this is why I stick with AWS. They've twice helped me with billing issues on my personal account - as in an actual human helping me. They have no idea I manage large (not huge) AWS deployments at my day job. They just demonstrate great customer service to me as a small client. So they have me as a loyal customer. And advocate, it seems.

>They have no idea I manage large (not huge) AWS deployments I wonder if that is true? Like, how tenacious are they with knowing customers? If the same IP address was used to login to manage two deployments would customer service see a potential link in their interface? I'm never quite sure in our supposed data-driven economy how clever companies get with this stuff.

As a very small (like, two digit spend a month) AWS user, I still have gotten a human to help me when I've needed one.

Amazon is amazing to be a customer of. Just not an employee of (not one, know many).

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