VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

scottnilsen · Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 11:48 am Post subject:

Kafer, I'm shocked and appalled. To make up for it, you must make yourself available when I'm up there in July. I've been craving some Ivar's.
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Jeffrey Kafer · Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 11:53 am Post subject:

mmmm, chowda
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richvoice · Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 5:20 pm Post subject:

I'll have to agree with JeffreyKafer on this one.

I'm not a voices.com subscriber. I was at one point, but there weren't all that many projects that sounded worthwhile, and I booked none of the ones I auditioned for, so I decided not to renew. They were always nice to me, so I have no axe to grind.

But based on what I'm reading, this sounds like a VERY poorly planned roll-out, and it's reasonable that they should suffer the consequences (angry/irritated e-mails, loss of revenue, etc.). I work for a very small start-up: there are six of us, give or take some occasional part-time contracting. We have a website that has been up and running for over two years, and we continue to make changes/improvements on a regular basis. Before we put anything up on our production server, we put it up on our test server and try it out. When we put it up on the production server we try it out again, and if there are any problems, we roll-back. Quickly and cleanly.

Based on what I'm reading in this thread, voices.com should have rolled back to the pre-existing application code base after about five minutes. The fact that they didn't indicates that they're, a) unprepared to roll-back to a previous version of their application, which means that they have no business charging several hundred dollars a year for their services, or b) unwilling to admit that they should roll-back, which means that they don't understand their users' experiences and therefore have no business charging several hundred dollars a year for their services.

I agree with Jeff 100% in theory about the software development rule that says that coders should not test their own code. Unfortunately, in the real world in small organizations it's often a necessity for the coder to be responsible for the first round of testing, if not all of it. I don't know how big the development team at voices.com is; I suspect it's only a few people (if it's only one, heaven help him/her for the next few days). But regardless, they should have reverted almost immediately from the sound of it.

If I was still a subscriber, I'd probably bail at this point due to lack of confidence alone unless I was booking jobs regularly and making a substantial amount of money. And if I WAS booking jobs regularly, I'd be just as upset if not more so due to the fact that my potential revenue stream was disrupted by the people who were supposed to be keeping it stable for the fee I was paying them.

On the other hand, if you like them and only make money intermittently, they'll probably get things fixed within a couple of weeks, and you'll probably be fine. To each his/her own.

Cheers,
Rich

imaginator · Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 7:48 pm Post subject:

Jeffrey Kafer · Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 8:28 pm Post subject:

It isn't like they needed to hire a bunch of dedicated testers. But a focused beta test of a private site would have uncovered all of these issues. I know a few of us were asked to evaluate some screenshots from a usability perspective, but I don't think they had an actual beta period, at least I wasn't invited to it.

I'm sure the crew have learned an important lesson that won't go unheeded next time. Test, Test, Test.
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Bruce · Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2008 7:12 am Post subject:

Yeah, I got about 150 emails from them in just over an hour yesterday morning, these detailed only a handful of jobs, and they all had dozens of CC'd email addys other members.

They may have fixed it by afternoon. I got a few "normal" looking emails later in the day. Ugh.

B
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ronphi · Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 8:09 pm Post subject:

It's very odd but I haven't gotten anything from them for about 5 days. I have been unavailable to audition so I haven't checked the site until tonight. I am not seeing ANY open jobs. I just sent an email off asking them to check this out. Does/did anyone else have this problem?
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Jeffrey Kafer · Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 8:29 pm Post subject:

It's also interesting that nothing has been said publicly about the issues. No blog post, no emails to customers. Heck Stephanie usually comes here to defend Voices.com. But apparently they've gone dark.

Customers are usually fairly receptive to problems if they're at least acknowledged. A simple "yes, we know, we're working on it" would have been better than the dead air we've got now.
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LavaShark · Guest

I noticed the same thing, no leads since the re-launch. I'll give 'em a few more days to work out the kinks before I start looking for more of them.

Deirdre · Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 8:50 pm Post subject:

Jeffrey Kafer · Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 9:41 pm Post subject:

the usability test was a several months ago. I was not asked to be a real beta tester on the site, though that doesn't mean there wasn't one. Again, if voices.com would acknowledge the problems publicly, we might get some answers.
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Voice-overload Web comic: http://voice-overload.com

bobsouer · Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 10:10 pm Post subject:

Jeff,

I had submitted a bug report email that detailed some of the things I found on the first day they were live. Yesterday, I received a note from Laurynda detailing both what had been accomplished and what some of the key remaining issues were/are as well as a few work-arounds. At that point I was satisfied both that the Voices.com team is working to resolve the issues at hand and that they had taken my report seriously enough to respond in some detail.

In addition, Vox Daily did have this post from Stephanie up on November 24th. If you look through the comments, you'll see public acknowledgement of remaining unresolved issues.

I'm not an apologist for Voices.com and they can certainly pop by here and defend themselves if they wish. I am making note of the fact that the communication hasn't been quite the complete vacuum it might seem at first glance.
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