Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

calculatedriskblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 119 posts

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#91

Post by julianz »

cabbeer wrote: post #43

Just curious, how is Microsoft's support in this department? Has anyone dealt with customer support for hotmail/outlook, skydrive, etc ?

I have twice tried, and failed, to use support for Xbox live. Some idiot I don't know registered an Xbox account a while ago using my Gmail address by mistake. I ignored all the emails and figured they'd stop when a deadline ran out for confirming the email address or somesuch, but apparently not. Now his credit card has expired, so I tried to contact Microsoft to cancel the account and make the emails stop. According to their live help people there's no account registered to my Gmail address, and yet every month there's a new email that arrives from verified Microsoft servers. Impasse. And for extra bonus points, every single support link in the credit card emails is broken because they have re-worked the site for the new Xbox.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#92

Post by erik »

patio11 wrote: post #86
chris_mahan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google _does_ do customer support. You are not their customers. Advertisers are.

Feel free to ask an AdWords advertiser about their experiences before parroting this bit about Internet wisdom. I'm told by contacts inside the Borg that things have gotten better in the last few years -- for example, now you can find a phone number to reach a call center that will /dev/null your ticket for you rather than having to /dev/null it yourself -- but the last few times I needed it having a $X0,000 a year a…

As a small aside, I think this is the first time I have seen Google referred to as the Borg. That was always Microsoft's title in the slashdot days.

Times have changed.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#93

Post by tedivm »

chris_mahan wrote: post #15
raverbashing wrote: post #12

Another example of how Google does not do customer support. I would get the domain and move it somewhere else.

Google _does_ do customer support. You are not their customers. Advertisers are.

Even that's not true though. When I was consulting, and even now at my current company, I dealt with multiple people who were needed support for a number of reasons (ads not displaying being the biggest). They'd get absolutely nothing back, and then maybe a couple of months later things would just start working again.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#94

Post by hrrsn »

patio11 wrote: post #86
chris_mahan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google _does_ do customer support. You are not their customers. Advertisers are.

Feel free to ask an AdWords advertiser about their experiences before parroting this bit about Internet wisdom. I'm told by contacts inside the Borg that things have gotten better in the last few years -- for example, now you can find a phone number to reach a call center that will /dev/null your ticket for you rather than having to /dev/null it yourself -- but the last few times I needed it having a $X0,000 a year a…

Anecdotal, but I've had great experience with Google Apps paid support as well as support for our Adwords campaigns (we spend about $40k a year with them on Adwords).

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#95

Post by bearbin »

andrewfong wrote: post #70
prawn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picasa is now overrun with Chinese spammers using the "send to a friend"-type feature. I mark every incoming Picasa share message as spam and Gmail still lets them all through...

Create a filter to send Picasa mail to a folder you then proceed to ignore.

I think you can even just send it straight to the bin with filters, although my memory may be faulty.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#96

Post by oxplot »

GuiA wrote: post #29
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #11

Heavily relying on Google product? ✓ Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓ Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓ Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓ Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket…

I've been backing up my Gmail with getmail [0], as I'm afraid that a day will come when I'll be locked out of my gmail account and will have no way to restore it. My long term solution is to migrate completely off of gmail, but for now this does the trick pretty nicely. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Gmail_with_getma...

Not that you're complaining of bad service from Google. But anyone's long term solution should be to treat important things in life as important. In case of gmail, paying $60 a year ($50 for email account and $10 for domain) gets you a permanent address (so if you were to migrate, at least your email address stays the same), an SLA that gives you two weeks to move house should Google decide it doesn't like you (in contrast to immediate termination of gmail free accounts) and phone support from Google. The poorest of us can afford that—no excuses.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#97

Post by alandarev »

dredmorbius wrote: post #44
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #11

Heavily relying on Google product? ✓ Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓ Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓ Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓ Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket…

I am ... less than pleased with Google as a company and its policies of late (I came home a couple of weekends back to find the top 3 HN slots addressing issues with Google and the YT/Google+ integration, two of which were either links to or based on my posts there). That said: I've found Google personnel highly responsive (though not always immediately so) to issues I've raised. Most recently with the Data Liberatio…

Their response is directly proportional to the customer's Klout score.

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#98

Post by mikro2nd »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #11

Heavily relying on Google product? ✓ Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓ Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓ Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓ Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket…

> right of passage

rite of passage

Re: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?

#99

Post by mikro2nd »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
GuiA wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been backing up my Gmail with getmail [0], as I'm afraid that a day will come when I'll be locked out of my gmail account and will have no way to restore it. My long term solution is to migrate completely off of gmail, but for now this does the trick pretty nicely. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Gmail_with_getma...

As a long time Gmail user heavily invested in it (with over 60GB of email), I'm waiting patiently for mailpile.is to get rolled out.

Take my advice - throw away every email older than 2 years. Not only will you never need them, but they're what the black hats will hang you by should they get the urge. You will feel a huge sense of relief - a weight lifted from your soul as you relinquish the crushing burden of carting about all those dead emails.

(Unless, of course, you work in an industry where longer retention times are mandated.)

Post reply on HN