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The fuck off contact page

nicchan.me

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Re: The fuck off contact page

#121

Post by Esophagus4 »

Neil44 wrote: post #40

I often find myself in the bizarre situation of backing out of a suppliers website to google their contact number. A bit like when you want pricing on something without falling into a sales funnel.

Expert level:

sign up for the enterprise plan, get an account manager assigned to your account, request support from them, they’ll say you need to upgrade your plan to have a solutions engineer assigned to the account, upgrade your plan, then BOOM… you get your support query answered in only 3-5 business days.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#122

Post by alex_suzuki »

dicethrowaway1 wrote: post #117
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…

Nice. It's a pretty low-traffic site, so something that doesn't require an external service but is still capable enough to defeat 90% of spammers sounds like a good compromise. I imagine drawing the email address to a canvas instead of a textual HTML element could be more effective, alas not accessible.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#123

Post by tuetuopay »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #97

As always, I was writing a comment to another comment and thought that it might be relevant to create a new (top?) comment itself too (sorry if its "plagiarism") But basically one other type of such contact pages are when a company has such a contact page + it only works for customers who have logged in and they can only login entirely if they give their credit/debit card info. I found it to be the case for hetzner,c…

WRT credit card see my reply to a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191957

Funny you mention OVH, their direct competitor Scaleway have a public Community slack open to anyone too. Even the engineers directly making the products can be pinged there, so it's great. But re: my comment, AFAIK they receive quite a bit of fake "I lost my account" inquiries.

I've seen the behind the scenes, and in the case of hosting companies, it is self-defense rather than malice. Even some high-stakes SaaS it might be justified too. Though I agree that such restrictions are just user hostile in most cases.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#124

Post by donatj »

I thought this this was just going to be about over complicated forms that scare people away.

Back when I was doing client work for a small agency we would get requests for these contact forms that would have 30+ fields, often many of them required. The forms made strong assumptions about why you were contacting them, and if you did not fit that mold the form was particularly painful.

No one wants to take the time to fill this out, you are losing business.

I would always try to talk them into simplifying. All anyone really needed was Name + Email + Text Area but many were insistent and many of these nightmare forms got built. I genuinely wish I had stats on how many people landed on the forms vs actually filled it out.

The worst part was that the vast majority of these just converted into emails to the owner of the small company with no backing database, because we charged extra for that. You'd spend all that time filling out all those fields and they would get concatenated back into a single string (with new lines and field titles).

I'm reminded of this when I try to submit an issue on some of these GitHub repos with wildly overdone templates. I just want to let you know you have a broken link in your documentation but you're forcing me to fill in my OS and build version and last time I went to the dentist and sign a CLA... and I've just not bothered more than a few times. Enjoy your broken link.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#125

Post by iamsaitam »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #13

This whole post is coming of a bit naive to me... I highly doubt this client is just an inspirational design meeting away from changing their offering and make a massive investment in customer support. I also don't get why a web-development consultant would feel so responsible for a pretty typical business decision.

They explained it. It goes against the client's goals. Massive investment in customer support? It's about generating leads. I think you're seen it as a SaaS offering which the writer has mentioned multiple times, isn't the case for the client.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#128

Post by tuetuopay »

froh42 wrote: post #5

That with its pixel art is styled so beautifully and so hard to read at the same time. Couldn't read it at all. (It's not an eye vision problem, reading pixel fonts just is quite taxing on the brain).

It's pixel-art styled but not pixel-art arted (is that even a word?). The font does not cleanly align on pixel boundaries on non-HiDPI screens thus it appears blurry. In fact, the whole website appears blurry.

Folks, when making pixel-art styled stuff, ensure they are actually sharp on bix-pixels screen. It's not pixel-art if it's sharp only on your macbook.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#129

Post by stavros »

esseph wrote: post #119
stavros wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, thanks for the tip. I didn't expect to need a manual to read a blog post.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#130

Post by Hetzner_OL »

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…

Hi there, First, we are currently in the process of unifying our user interfaces, so it is helpful to get feedback like this. We do have an AI chatbot on our website because that tends to work well for most basic sales questions. Depending on the questions it gets, it will also steer users to other ways of reaching out to us. We have a contact form for Custom Solutions, and real humans answer those. https://www.hetzner.com/custom-solutions/ The same is true for general sales tickets that go here: https://www.hetzner.com/support-form/ You do not need to already be a customer, or give us your credit card info, to use those two forms. The reasons we steer our people who are already customers to use their account: 1) We can protect their data better there. 2) We can send the question to the right queue/team more easily. 3) We can quickly ask follow-up questions. The credit card information on new accounts is a step to prevent abuse and fraud. Depending on a user's location, once they create an account, they will likely have other billing options and they may change depending on their location. There are certain aspects of other platforms that make it a bit easier for companies to respond to customers/readers. We actually try really hard not to fish here on HN, and therefore only really respond if someone mentions us directly or if I see incorrect/misleading information. I imagine it is the same with other providers. --Katie
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