Sunday, August 03, 2003

The Continuing Saga of the Hijacked Comments System

SquawkBox, instead of communicating by email, has a forum where support questions can be posted. I started a thread over there pointing out that I was a bit nonplussed to find my comments suddenly being held for ransom. I explained that I normally get no more than five comments per day on my blog. Here's part of the response from the kid from Squawkbox:
Typically, 5 posts a day for a week is not sufficient to fall into the "heavy usage" category. It's the aggregate activity on the account since creation, plus various other criteria that determine usage.
In other words, "we make it up as we go along." He then adds:
I hope you can appreciate that by asking people who make sustained/heavy use of the service to upgrade, we can keep the service running for everyone.
Now, apart from the fact that I'm being "asked" to upgrade the way that Charles Lindbergh was "asked" to donate to the Hauptmann family scholarship fund, hadn't he just told me before that five posts a day would not fall into the "heavy usage" category? And what does fall into the "heavy usage" category? Would it be too much to ask that they pull that secret formula out of the vault and let their customers have a look-see at it? Am I paranoid to think that this is the very definition of "arbitrary?"

It's their product, they have a right to be totally arbitrary if they want. But it seems to me like that might not be the best way to build a product or develop a customer base.

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