Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role • Hacker News Board

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#31

Post by TallGuyShort » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 2:43 PM UTC

Svip wrote: post #19

DanBC wrote: post #9

See also the English comedian Tony Hawks and the US skateboarder Tony Hawk. ( http://www.tony-hawks.com/skateboarding.php ) ( http://tonyhawk.com/ )

The strangest thing is that the only email, specifically accusing Tony Hawks of abusing his name's similarity to Tony Hawk is in Dutch. Likely, however, Mr Hawks has received numerous complaints about it in English and chose to ignore those, but kept the one in Dutch as he did not understand it (or did not care what it said).

It's not the he didn't understand or didn't care what he said. It's that he had a funny response. It's his own name, for Heaven's sake. And the people writing to him are clearly not doing their own due diligence either.

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#32

Post by speeder » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 3:16 PM UTC

codesuela wrote: post #20

speeder wrote: post #3

Troll.programmer? Placeholder forgotten there? How.the guy email.ended there in first place? EDIT: whooo! I write a question, downvote-fest!!! For context, I was the first comment, and I was genuinely curious. But thanks for the downvotes and no reply.

random punctuation along with missing words (probably caused by autocorrect) makes your post extremely unreadable hence the downvotes

Too bad I cannot edit it again now that I am on a computer :( (I typed it on a phone)

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#33

Post by brazzy » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 3:19 PM UTC

sam_pointer wrote: post #28

willvarfar wrote: post #4

So Zynga was originally going to call the game "Themepark" but Eric already had that domain, and so they changed it to "Coasterville"?

From experience, it is quite common to have internal code-names for Facebook games for the purposes of preventing leaks from development canvas apps and the like. These are usually related to the general gist of the game. To coin a made-up example, 'SimAir' might be called 'flying' internally.

My experience has been that the main reason is that development usually starts before marketing has even decided on the final name. You need to call your dev servers, code repository and bug tracker project something and it's often hard to change retroactively.

It's not even unusual to see multiple different working titles float around.

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#34

Post by jon_black » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 3:23 PM UTC

What's a random stranger anyway? I'd imagine that all strangers are random, right? By definition, you have no acquaintance with them, so you can't predict them.

Anyway, I thought it was an oxymoron. Maybe I'm just being random ;)

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#35

Post by paranoiacblack » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 3:37 PM UTC

jon_black wrote: post #34

What's a random stranger anyway? I'd imagine that all strangers are random, right? By definition, you have no acquaintance with them, so you can't predict them. Anyway, I thought it was an oxymoron. Maybe I'm just being random ;)

Not really? If I know someone that you don't and introduce them to you, at that moment they are a stranger to you, but definitely not random.

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#36

Post by mattkevan » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 4:57 PM UTC

A friend of mine's surname is the same as a large US private bank. He bought the .com address for his own company years before the bank got online and so regularly receives emails from the bank's customers containing sensitive information, including financial data, account numbers, SSNs and more.

He's told the bank many times that their customers are sending stuff that really shouldn't be in an email to the wrong address, offered to set up redirects or even sell them the domain, but do they care?

Not one bit.

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#37

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 5:20 PM UTC

Sadly my favorite story about a person dealing with a motel with nearly the same number turned out to be false. It was still funny though. I like this guy's sense of humor but he could include in the end of his response the real address (or set the reply-to on his responses to be the actual address)

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#38

Post by otoburb » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 5:52 PM UTC

PakG1 wrote: post #30

See also http://www.salon.com/2002/06/03/nissan/ edit: better article: http://www.yalelawtech.org/ip-in-the-digital-age/why-nissan-...

The money Nissan spent on legal fees may have been better spent buying his business outright.

It may still have legs if they can put a value not having control over nissan.com.

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#39

Post by rhizome » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

eterm wrote: post #10

What an asshole. I mean, really, people contact him asking for help and instead of setting up an email rule of "Sorry, this isn't Zynga" he knowingly messes people around. It'd be one thing to mess with Zynga but people who've just emailed for help? That breaks "Dont' be a dick". I was expecting an awesome story about how he looked into the game and took on their role and actually helped people but instead we have so…

You may be interested (or incensed) about Matt Besser's "May I Help You, Dumbass?" project, where he got sick of people calling his phone number, which was previously an AOL support line:

http://www.amazon.com/May-Help-You-Dumbass-Explicit/dp/B003V...

Re: Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

#40

Post by shabble » Thu, Jul 04, 2013, 6:23 PM UTC

goatforce5 wrote: post #21

I've owned a domain for 10+ years that's spelled correctly and is kinda neat and i'll do something with it some day. A few years back a start up got some funding, tried to buy my domain several times, and ended up going with a variation of the domain, but minus a vowel. eg, if i owned flicker.com, they ended up with flickr.com (it's neither of those domains, BTW). I semi-regularly get support emails for them. If i'm…

I wonder if you could train a spam classifier to identify & autorespond (or to randomly just drop/bounce/"help"[1] if you want to automate your current workflow :) ) these messages?

Maybe even a simple regex for .tld would work.

Probably want to have it after a whitelist-known-contacts step to avoid upside-down-ternetting[2] your friends though.

[1] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl

[2] http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html