David O’Donnell's dashboard

A comment on the idea "Be more transparent about what you're doing to the service." in Plurk:

Taja, you might have better luck starting another thread, since this topic was originally intended to suggest to Plurk that their userbase might not be so hostile/frustrated/upset/caught by surprise if the staff engaged them proactively. – David O’Donnell, on December 09, 2009 20:45

David O’Donnell replied on December 08, 2009 23:50 to the idea "Be more transparent about what you're doing to the service." in Plurk:

Katharine, is there some institutional reason why the Plurk team is so resistant to updating its users about changes? You’ve personally been responsive in the past when I’ve had problems with the Plurk iPhone app (not Ryan’s—the other one), but in general we get nothing except for periods of instability followed by odd, inexplicable changes to Plurk... and people who come here to ask what’s going on seem to be equally ignored or treated to a brusque reply.

I can understand that operating a free service with limited staffing probably means most people there don’t have a lot of time to explain what’s coming or perform customer service, but there are times it really feels like Plurk staff have a combative relationship with their users. The extremely rare message from Plurkbuddy is easy to miss. Demanding that users follow a developer to potentially find out what’s going on seems pretty onerous (how likely is a new user to even know who he is?), and the “blog” is buried waaaaay down in the footer where no one realistically can be expected to look—and there’s never any indication that there’s a new post. How many (successful) companies force their users to go hunting for news about what’s going on?

I’m trying not to be snarky or unreasonable here; Plurk has mostly been stable and usable for a while, and I’m thankful both for that and for the fact that it exists. But this approach of springing changes on users without notice and then (in some cases) acting hostile and defensive when people are surprised or have problems just doesn’t make sense to me.

David O’Donnell replied on December 04, 2009 19:51 to the problem "aack! my apostrophes!" in Plurk:

Bumping this up in the hope that someone from Plurk will listen and address the problem. Not showing apostrophes and quotes in link text makes writers look illiterate.

David O’Donnell replied on August 16, 2009 13:21 to the question "Desperately seeking feature" in Plurk:

Either setting the default Plurk verb as a preference (ideal) or respecting the blank selection (passable) is preferable to the current situation.

David O’Donnell started following the question "Desperately seeking feature" in Plurk.

David O’Donnell replied on August 14, 2009 15:11 to the problem "aack! my apostrophes!" in Plurk:

You can (sort of) work around this by using typographer's quotes: “ ” ‘ ’ but it's a PITA—and I imagine harder for Linux and Windows users who don't have easy access to the characters. It frustrates me as well because it seems to perpetuate the sort of lazy writing becoming more common thanks to texting.

David O’Donnell started following the problem "aack! my apostrophes!" in Plurk.

David O’Donnell started following the problem "Phantom new responses" in Plurk.

David O’Donnell started following the problem "Phantom new responses" in Plurk.

David O’Donnell started following the problem "Phantom new responses" in Plurk.

David O’Donnell reported a problem in Plurk on August 14, 2009 14:54:

Plurk caps number of unread messages (again).

Plurk is once again capping new replies at anywhere between 40 and 60 (I typically start in the morning with closer to 200). Is there any ETA on when this will be fixed, or is this a new policy? There's nothing about it on the blog and Plurkbuddy has been silent for months.

David O’Donnell replied on August 11, 2009 14:40 to the idea "Be more transparent about what you're doing to the service." in Plurk:

Plurk's stability has taken a nosedive again in recent weeks, with (predictably) no commentary in the blog, or on the Plurkbuddy account. It feels like a lost cause raising this issue again, but frustration is again becoming palpable.

A comment on the problem "Response counts show 'new' when there are none" in Plurk:

The problem you describe (your replies appearing twice and obscuring another's reply) is a separate failure that's been going on for several weeks. – David O’Donnell, on June 10, 2009 19:57

David O’Donnell reported a problem in Plurk on June 10, 2009 15:54:

Plurk often duplicates replier's response in a thread.

Replies are frequently duplicated in a message thread. For example, if I write "me, too!" in reply to a thread, I'll often see two "me, too!" messages in the reply history. One of them is mine and the other is someone else's message that Plurk has obscured. The only way to recover from this problem is to reload Plurk completely, which makes it next to impossible to find the thread again (unless it's immediately recent in my timeline).

David O’Donnell replied on June 10, 2009 15:48 to the problem "Response counts show 'new' when there are none" in Plurk:

Chiming in—*every* message to which I reply is re-marked as unread after 10–15 seconds.

David O’Donnell started following the problem "Response counts show 'new' when there are none" in Plurk.

David O’Donnell replied on May 02, 2009 23:39 to the idea "Be more transparent about what you're doing to the service." in Plurk:

I'm bumping this back up because it continues to be relevant. In the past couple of weeks at least two new "features" have been stealthily added to Plurk (deleting responses and a "search" function) without any sort of notice. In both cases Plurk's reliability crashed after implementation (right now, on 2009-05-02 at 19:30 ET, Plurks with responses are only occasionally loading, for example).

I think it's great that Plurk-the-company wants its users to know about how the Chinese government is blocking the service, but WHY can't the employees even notify users of new functions through, e.g., the blog? Why is it that with every single new feature (I can recall), Plurk's reliability sinks into the toilet?

You guys actually started to improve a little after the disastrous months of the beginning of 2009 when the service was down almost as often as it was up... please don't let things return to the level of unpleasant snark from both sides: keep your users informed of what's going on!

David O’Donnell started following the problem "Plurks show new responses on some plurks when all existing responses have already been read." in Plurk.

David O’Donnell started following the question "Plurks not showing updates or new responses" in Plurk.

David O’Donnell replied on March 17, 2009 13:13 to the problem "Spammer ... http://www.plurk.com/EZMoney ... I've blocked him already." in Plurk:

I'm seeing others in my timeline getting spammed as well. I'm sharing this thread with them so the other new spammers can be identified and dealt with. We must take decisive early action or spammers will ruin this community as they've ruined our postal mail and e-mail.