[SpamCop-List] Re: Attention Argyle -- BCC functionality

[Eönwë]

On Sun, 11 Feb 2001 13:37:55 -0800, "Jules" <yulek> wrote:

>careful Mr.Maxx.  there appears to be a spamcop religion that believes
>we should never criticize Julian.  i've gotten so many idiotic responses
>to my valid complaints that i doubt if julian will even see the initial
>complaints!!!

>i have an idea, why don't you "spamcop users, not-admins" please just
>stop answering these bug reports unless you actually know how to fix or
>work around the bug.  i am sofa king tired of hearing what a great
>service this is, what a great man julian is, i know these things, that's
>why i use spamcop.net.  but if there are bugs, LET US REPORT THEM.  if
>the service becomes unstable LET US COMPLAIN ABOUT IT.  stop breaking
>down the process with this fanatical julian-can-do-no-wrong crap.  it's
>completely anti-productive.

Y'know, one thing I've seen is that the complaints - bug reports, if
you like - that have been answered by the not-admins with semi-flames
and/or defense of Julian and MaxPower have been those that come across
as accusatory.  Yes, there were things that could have been handled
better about this, but you need to remember that, as far as
programming is concerned, SpamCop is essentially a one-man operation,
and one that's provided out of altruism, at that - my impression is
that Julian is _not_ in this primarily for the money; otherwise, he
wouldn't be offering most of the service's functionality to free
users.

I posted my own bug report, describing what I experienced, but I
didn't accuse Julian of anything - I noted there were problems, and
gave what information I could that might have helped him find them.
_I_ haven't gotten flamed in return, either by Julian or by his
defenders, and a day later, I tried again, and found that most of the
bugs were fixed - and again, I provided information that might help
him target the bug that I continued to encounter.

Yes, I was nonplussed by the outage, with no explanation and no
advance notice.  Yes, I was bit hard by the bugs, and was somewhat
distressed about them - or, more accurately, about my inability to
issue summonses because of them.  Yes, I can see that the whole
upgrade could probably have been handled better; I'm in an environment
where our system has to be considered 'permanently live', and I can't
always test as thoroughly as I'd like.  You do what you can, and you
learn from your errors.  But believe you me, there is _nothing_ as
off-putting as getting ripped because of the imperfections that you
couldn't seriously test for because you knew you'd get ripped for
taking down the service longer than 'absolutely necessary'.

I'd rather focus on the important thing - identifying and stomping on
the bugs.  After that's out of the way, I think Julian _might_ be
willing to listen to _calm_, _reasoned_ comments (i.e., not flames)
about the timing and process of the actual upgrade.  But his priority
undoubtedly is (and yours should be) solving the problems with SpamCop
itself.
-- 
Eönwë
(SpamCop subscriber, not staff/admin)