Continued from above because posting limits are in place.
don't want to delete or edit any posts, this forum so far has been providing invaluable feedback for us,
I am glad to be a part of your survey. But let me tell you, I make money based upon how much time I can devote to selling and getting my clients comfortable with me and my capabilities to serve them. When I spend most of that time just dealing with a program such as Plesk with its many inherent programming problems I end up spending less time making money for me and mine and more money is then spent paying you to end up helping me do my job or get back to doing my job which is taking care of my customers.
This is of course not a good thing when every dollar these days is measured in productivity.
If you are not productive you lose business, lose clients, lose money and all because you spent so much time and effort and money on just getting a basic hosting package to work.
While we, the people who develops and maintains Plesk, browse these forums when we have the spare time, they are not meant as an official support channel
And the reason is clear behind this decsion, it is a business model. It says look we know we have a program that is out of the box a difficult one for people to understand, but we are not the only company that has this problem, matter of fact just look at Microsoft, they have more problems than we do. So next time you think this is a bad deal just look at all the other companies that do this to you daily and give us a break.
Ok, I can live with that, but at least offer me and others a forum to vent our frustrations out and get answers to our questions by reliable people that know the program in and out. Force those tech support people to come here and answer those questions first because all that will do is lead to more sales for you in the future.
A productive forum is one that shows that while the program might be buggy it is sure going to get solved if you come onto the forum. If it becomes to complex to solve and no one on the forum can solve it then ask that person to fill out a support ticket then and goto a paying model for his warm fuzzy feeling that he needs.
That way the forum grows by the knowledge shared and so will your business.
It will also show that you have the staff to handle problems and will show you care about each and every post. Why else would you be here at midnight solving problems by answering this post and the many others I have posted in?
Sure your a mod and sure you wish to delete or ban but then when you start doing that you end up killing your business and eventually people that know what is up will go elsewhere as word spreads that you will ban paying customers who want answers to their questions.
Eventually your company will be up for sale and easily bought out by some competitor that you were working to best for pennies on the dollar.
Bitching about it in public forum is just a waste of time.
This thought process shows you to be clueless in customer support. Bitching in a public forum is NEVER a waste of time. It is however a waste of time to post a question and then be practically ignored when it comes time to answer that question. I also consider the two weeks I spent on the program to be wasted.
I learned Plesk and still need to continue to learn it. But I learned it at my own expense and not yours. Your company made money off of me and I lost money having to learn your programs finicky ways.
However I am now up and running and satisfied with the program. I want to see Plesk and this forum get its act together and I would like to see the program and the company grow, but only if that company understands that the customer is always right, no matter what they say or do. That even though we may be wrong we are right because we took money out of our wallets to support you and help you pay your bills and feed your family.
That is what America is all about and that is trust, trust in our economy and trust in our leaders and trust in the system we have which allows companies like yours to get paid from people like me.
If you say that I am wasting time by bitching then you do not come from a customer service background where bitching is a right that a customer buys when he or she pays a company for a product.
It is that bitching that ends up setting corporate policy and it ends up paying for executives to read our comments and take the lead to try and solve our problems, demands or requests.
That so called bitching is how a company derives policy and future sales. If you take that right away you will certainly be buried along with all the other companies that have come and gone with bad business models and bad executives who didn't care about what the customers were saying about them or the products they sold.
All that mattered was the bottom line and the bean counters on Wall Street and their fat wallets.
To me every customer deserves a fair and even break and if you fail in that regard you have failed not only yourself but your company and in the end your country.
Clean removal of Plesk is a complcated technical problem
Why?
Answer that question.
Because once I figured out it was the registry key I removed it and the program. Why not just give everyone registry removal instructions? I think that the user base is pretty technically oriented and would probably be able to remove a registry key.
So why keep that a secret?
Why build a utility to remove a program that your company programmers designed to keep people from doing?
MONEY baby.....
That's why.
It forces people to beg for help and in so doing provides the company with a seperate revenue chain.
especially if the version originally installed was Beta software,
I do not think ours was because we downloaded it off your companies site two weeks ago. It wasn't a beta to the best of our knowledge.
We also have created the utility I mentioned for cleaning of unsuccessfull uninstallations, but we wanted to test it first under our control, so it was given only to support, when we are sure that it is safe to use, we will publish it for download.
That situation seems a bit much when all you would have to do is just tell people how to remove a registry key. Why go through all this talk of when the utility is safe we will give it to the user base?
I mean its a registry key, come on thats like an easy delete if you have the instructions on how to do it. But Plesk doesn't want to allow us to have control over that key which is why it is set to not allow you to have any access over it when you try and delete it.
That is not complex at all, its simple basic economics.
Just post the instructions and that's all you need to do. No muss, no fuss, no special tech team determining saftey and getting out the hard hats and trying to beta test the program before allowing the public to use it. I mean you already said to that other customer to contact support for the program so it must work right? I mean your already telling people to call to get it, why not just post it for download now?
Could it be that while you have this guy on the phone you or someone in your capacity will try and sell an expensive support contract in the interim? Surely this customer has more than one question to ask thus getting him to admit that he needs help not only on the above problem but for other tech related stuff he needs to know. Which will mandate a sale for a contract for support.
Just post the removal instructions of that key and people can get rid of it at will when they need to remove and reinstall the program.
The installer is constantly improving though, and with the release of the service pack 1 in the nearest future we hope to minimize the number of problems you might see.
Sounds great to me, however I would ask that you design and implement a really good manual for troubleshooting the installation and configuring of the system. Telling everyone just how to make the program work and a step by step instruction manual on how to install, operate and manage the program.
Making sure each area shows what to do in each step and then why you would want to do that step and what the application would be in general for that particular step. Then make sure you step by step show what could happen if you make a mistake and then show them how to correct that mistake they may have made on that step.
This way even clueless n00bs like myself would understand such a complex system such as Plesk.
Maxx.