Brandon White's Blog

More Bizarre Feedback from “John Doe”

Brandon — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:46:59 +0000

Here we go, the latest from Mr. John Doe. Apparently he is talking with me in an “unofficial” capacity representing himself….wow! This has to be someone messing with me, at least I thought it was, but it sounds so real I actually think this person thinks he/she has a point. If you want to see the original exchanged click here

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From: John Doe
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:10:13 +0800
To: Brandon White <BrandonW@TidalFish.com>
Subject: Re: Account removed at Fishing Message Boards, Saltwater Fishing Reports, Freshwater Fishing Reports!

Firstly, TidalFish.com isn’t my bank, it’s not my ebay account, it’s not 401k administrator. I’m sorry if you believe otherwise but it’s a web forum. One of millions. With identity theft as rampant as it is, I’m surprised you wouldn’t understand my desire to put as few personal details out there as possible. I don’t know you or anything about your operations so I’m not going to give you personal information. And before you jump to conclusions, I’m not implying that you would intentionally distribute this info.

I’m sorry if you’re confused about “official capacity” but let me set it straight for you. You’re speaking to me in an official capacity as the owner of a business. I’m speaking to you in an unofficial capacity as an end user. If I was speaking to you about contract info as CIO then I would be speaking with you in an official capacity. See the difference?

And lastly, I find this whole situation a bit condescending to the me, the user. Yes I’ve been somewhat short with you, but have only done so in reaction to your ridiculous self important rules and your attempt to excuse them. I’m sorry but I will not continue this communication.

Sincerely,
John

Answering Customer Feedback – Bizarre exchanges

Brandon — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:11:11 +0000

As someone people know who know me I run a social networking website called TidalFish.com. As of tonight the site has 56,386 registered fishermen and fisher-women. I have help from some people who help moderate the message boards, approve accounts and in some cases answer customer support emails. Most of the problems can easily be answered in our FAQ message board where we post answers to questions that get asked about how to use the board, change account options etc… It works well and makes customer service a self serve deal. Sometimes I do get some bizarre emails. Tonight I could not do anything but laugh when it came from a “John Doe” who claimed to be an IT professional. The feedback was good and helped us improve our service, but having been running social networking sites and message boards since the early 90’s I can normally sniff out “gamers”, I think we have a winner on this one, but I think my response caught him/her so off guard that he/she is not sure what to do. I share it with you since apparently it is anonymous and simply make me laugh when I wrote back. Below is a stringed email, so you will need to read from the bottom up.

———

We do not consider registrations on TidalFish.com as a “random web account” and we do require personal details. We do that for a reason, we want accountability with users who interact in our online community.

As a side note, it is a bit condescending to be talking with an owner of a business who took the time to write you back and suggest that this email correspondence/exchange is not in an “official capacity”.

I would also point out that you again did not sign your name to your email, which is not only rude given my response to you, but also bad net etiquette. It’s actually disappointing to me that an IT person who is acquainted with the net and represents professionals like myself would interact in this way.

Brandon

From: John Doe
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:15:59 +0800
To: Brandon
Subject: Re: Account removed at Fishing Message Boards

Wow, I have to say I didn’t expect to get such a nice and professional email back. Acctually I didn’t expect any email back. Thank you for addressing all my concerns.

And about my email address, it’s anonymous for a reason. Since this would be a random web account I feel the need to use a few personal details as possible. And honestly, I never expected to communicate with people through this address. It’s just your “rejection” email came to this address and it was convenient when I went to reply. Had this email been in an official capacity, it would have been different. This is the first time this email has ever been scrutinized as there is usually never a live person on the other end.

Thanks again!

—– Original Message —–
From: “Brandon White”
To: “John Doe”
Subject: Re: Account removed at Fishing Message Boards
Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:46:59 -0400

Hi

Thanks for the feedback, we always appreciate help improving our service on TidalFish.com.
Let me address your concerns and let you know how we have improved things:

The text about free email accounts was in caps, however your suggestion about it being in bold is an excellent one. We made the text bold and it is above the fold in the screen describing our rules which appear on the first page of the sign up.

We apologize that you feel offended by the email that you received saying you were notified twice. We are going to change that email as to sound less offending.

The ‘Optional” word you refer to I looked into and I can understand why you might have been confused. The text read “Additional Required Information (option)” The fact that it said “Additional Required Information” I would take to mean it is required. However, I understand how the “option” could confuse some people. The option referred to a back end option. The word option has been removed to eliminate any confusion.

As an I/T manager who deals with spam you would understand that I received your email with a lot of caution.

Your user name in your email is John Doe which sets off all sorts of red flags

Your email is coming from a free email account which sets off red flags

You did not sign your email with your name which sets off red flags

I have been running websites on the internet since 1992 and have seen about all there is to see in the way of the evolution electronic communication. Your feedback was excellent an we appreciate it, it helped make our service better. My suggestion to you if that if you are going to communicate on the internet and be considered legitimate is to use a paid/company/professional email address and sign your name to your email so the recipient knows who he/she is talking to.

Thank you again for the feedback!

Brandon

_________________________________________________________
Brandon C. White | Chief Angler
TidalFish.com | All fishing, all the time!

From: John Doe
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:42:19 +0800
To: Brandon
Subject: Re: Account removed at Fishing Message Boards

Brandon,

First off I’m not angry that you have added this hurdle to obtaining an account at TidalFish. As I know all to well how much spam you have to deal with when running a website or domain for a company. What I am perturbed about is that I don’t feel I was adequately notified of this requirement when I registered. I’m a I/T manager and know the value of keeping your users informed. I am sure that you had some kind of note to this effect on the first screen as you said, but if you have filled out as many forum, web, email, etc, registration forms as I have, you’d know that most people just plow through them. If you’re going to setup something special that requires an extra step on the part of the user, you need to use BOLD type and Large Font, maybe a blinking red sign (overkill I know but you get my point). Furthermore I feel offended that you say in your first paragraph, “it was explained to you” twice, as if you’re chastising the user. Very bad form.

Also, on another note, what I do remember of your registration page, you had two drop downs that were described as “Optional” dealing with Shirt and Pant sizes. Leaving them blank gets you an error that you haven’t filled out the form completely. Don’t know if you want to rectify that but it’s kind of confusing when you call it optional.

Well I’ll keep this brief.

Thanks

> —– Original Message —–
> From: “Fishing Message Boards
> To: John Doe
> Subject: Account removed at Fishing Message Boards
> Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:29:39 -0400
>
>
> Dear Orkinman,
>
> Unfortunately your registration at Fishing Message Boards,
> Saltwater Fishing Reports, Freshwater Fishing Reports did not meet
> our requirements for registration. If you registered with a free
> email account such as a YAHOO, GMAIL, HOTMAIL OR OTHER FREE EMAIL
> ACCOUNT it was explained on the first screen during registration
> that we require you to send an email to register at TidalFish.com
> with: 1) YOUR REAL NAME , 2) MAILING ADDRESS, and 3) EMAIL ADDRESS
> YOU REGISTERED. The information requested would have only be used
> to verify your account. It was also explained that if we did not
> receive the above information in 24 hours from the time you
> registered your account, your registration would be treated as spam
> and be deleted, which your account has been.
>
> We apologize for the inconvenience. This procedure has become
> necessary because of the amount of spam accounts we have been
> receiving from free email accounts which has been polluting The
> TidalFish.com forums/message boards with spam messages which we
> then have to go in, find, and then delete. This whole process
> disrupts the fishing conversations and fishing reports that take
> place on the message boards. If you just missed seeing this
> procedure and still wish to be a part of TidalFish.com please feel
> free to re-register. We welcome other anglers and understand that
> it is at times necessary to use free email accounts so you do not
> have to use your work or home email. Should you choose to use your
> work or home email, rest assured that we do not sell, lend or
> distribute your information nor does any spammer have access to
> it,in fact all emails are hidden and people must use a form if they
> want to email another member, which you can even opt out of that
> feature should you choo
> se. At most you will receive two newsletters a month, usually
> one, from us letting you know about what is happening on
> TidalFish.com. You may even opt out of receiving these newsletters.
>
> Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and hope you understand
> our desire to keep our site spam free. We hope that you will
> re-register and become a part of TidalFish.com, we are sure as a
> fellow angler you will enjoy it.
>
> Brandon
> Chief Angler
> TidalFish.com

Thoughts on Search

Brandon — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:51:38 +0000

I have always kept up with search technology and sites on the internet, it’s what I have always thought of as the backbone to the internet. When I was working as a venture capitalist I dove deep into search. It was our firms idea that search was a hot space that was only going to expand. I think I saw and talked with almost every search company out there in 2004-2005 and nothing ever really blew my socks off except for one company in the Netherlands which we got to a term sheet with, but could never close due to what I would call cultural differences in investment philosophy, style and expectations. Everyone is buzzing about the Microsoft – Yahoo search deal, I say, great, means some guaranteed revenue for Yahoo and Microsoft gets more market share. Frankly I think it was a dumb move by Yahoo; done more by CEO who had to show she was going to do something. I call it investor management. In the end Yahoo will pay and Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank and market share. Yahoo gave up its roots, it basically invented search, it was not even called that, it was termed in the early years a internet phone book. Search really is the backbone to the internet, no two ways about it, you either own that backbone or rent a solution. If you rent it you’re not that strong if that is what your business relies on. I am not saying Yahoo will fail, at the end of they day I think they are now more a media company then search, but being a media company has some problems if you do not have the traffic or audience in the first place. What’s their fate? Well, I worked at AOL, everyone said we were a media company and we liked that, it was cool. Truth is we were a connectivity service, i.e. dial up acess provider. That is where we made our money, honestly, we printed money from the dial up service. Why? Simple, we owned the backbone. Once we tried to get into the broadband busienss we were dead. Why? Because we had to rent the backbone. While we had a media business which had nice margins that was only faciliated because we had the dial up service and the customers used our “net gateway”, ie our browser, where we provided media and sold those ads. Where is AOL now that it’s dial up business is all but dead; they are a “media company”. Nice margins, but you still need traffic and their traffic left with the death of their backbone. Many of us saw it coming, some of us left early, some people rode out the harvest while it lasted. Will they survive, sure, but it will be a much smaller business. So where is this rant going, well, think of what happened to AOL when you think what might happen to Yahoo. If they lose search will people still go there or use their “media”?

Now back to search. I still find it amazing that while Google and now Bing are decent at finding information on internet sites, they still stink at finding the best sites for different categories. The technology driving search today has become complex and while it has improved our ability to find a board selection of sites and information when you know specifically what you are looking for, it has also become in many ways very complex, returning too many irrelevant unusable results and not allowing us to distinguish which sites are truly relevant for what we are looking.

Search results are also corrupted by the hundreds of online marketing agencies out there or tricky programmers who help companies trick the spiders that crawl websites by tweaking their site code and creating dummy sites with page links into thinking a site is the best or the most relevant when, in fact, it might be neither. This is helpful to the companies who want you to find them just to get traffic, but not helpful if what they offer is not what you are looking. Tricking you just wastes time and causes frustration.

Now let’s look at review sites that make recommendations that leverage a huge audience to make the recommendations. The main problem with all these types of sites, whether it’s reading a review of a book or other product on Amazon, a review of a stereo on eOpinions, reading a message board on a recommendation of a site to check out or any such site with recommendations, is that you generally have no idea what the person’s background giving the review is or the relationship to the product, company or site that is being reviewed. This leaves users guessing if the review is real or not which makes the whole review itself unusable.

Now not all search engines are evil and search engines like Yahoo and Google are great if you actually know you are looking for, such as Dominos Pizza(s) in Baltimore, MD. But, let’s say you are looking for the “best” auction sites on the internet for used cars. If you type in the term “auction” into Google you get (at the time of this writing) 222,000,000 results. How in the world are you going to know which are the best auction sites? The point here is that search engines do not always recommend the “best” sites, they recommend the ones that are optimized the best to come up in search engines.

I find it fascinating that to this day I find the “best” most “useful” sites coming not from search engines, but from a recommendation of a friend or colleague who has become an expert on some subject or I read an article from an expert on a given subject. That usually means that person is either passionate about a subject and dove deep into it and truly knows what the best most useful sites are or might have recently had an experience where they needed to find a good site for a subject and did the research and found that site(s).

So where does this leave us. Well I have a whole list of bookmarks in my Firebox Browser, mostly disorganzied. I will set out to catagorize them in my blog and write a brief sentence or two on why the site is good and what it offers. It will be a good organization exercise for me and maybe useful to you.

Fishing Podcasts

Brandon — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:03:21 +0000

Over the years I have been doing fishing podcasts. I have interviewed fishing guides about where and how to fish different areas, scientists about fisheries conservation, well known anglers who own fishing companies and many other anglers in the fishing world. Most recently I have been maintaining all the fishing podcasts on the Lateral Line’s blog (the technical year-round fishing clothing company that I run with my brother). You can find all the old and new podcasts here.

A quick list to give you an idea of some of the podcasts:

Check outthe above and the rest of my fishing podcasts here