hall of shame

FairSearch.org tries to persuade EU decision-makers to crack down on Google

There's been a fair amount of talk about FairSearch.org in US, and how ill-though their campaigning is.

One of my clients is now rolling out ads for FairSearchEurope.eu. Just as its US counterpart, FairSearchEurope.eu is very shy of itself. It's website is registered to a law firm, its founding is unclear, it banners are the most obvious examples of FUD tactics I have seen in the past years. Come on, dudes! There are so many reasons to attack Google, don't whine about the only thing that works, their search engine.

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hall of shame
microsoft

Не вращайте айтишников

Есть у моего клиента сайт на Wordpress. Проект, которому пророчили большое будущее. Будущее не пришло, денег проект не приносит, посещаемость мизерная, поддерживается по остаточному принципу. Cегодня с утра заглянул я по привычке в LinkedIn, а там как раз рекламировалась статья Bare Minimum SEO: 3 Things You Must Do. А первым пунктом в статье шло… «check your indexing status in Google Webmaster Tools». Ну я и пошёл проверить.

Какого же было моё удивление, когда оказалось, что на проекте не проиндексировано ни одной страницы, а в /robots.txt сайта написано User-agent: *\nDisallow: /\n. Wordpress создаёт /robots.txt программным способом, поэтому проблему было сложно заметить. Теперь сижу и гадаю, было ли это подлянкой одного из бывших айтишников, либо просто разгильдяйством. Как обычно, правда наверно где-то посередине.

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hall of shame
royal fuck-up

The continuation of the HTC saga

I bought an HTC Desire S smartphone in June. Since then, I sent it three times for repair to Dynafix, which is apparently the HTC Repair Center for Belgium.

For the 3rd time, Dynafix replaced the mainboard for my phone, which fixed the original problem. However, I quickly noticed a new and easy to reproduce problem that I communicated to the HTC call center.

I was told over the phone that I will get a replacement unit. However, after returning the original unit to th repair center, the only thing I got was a discrepancy report saying that I returned a phone with a different IMEI number than the original.

Of course it was different, Dynafix replaced the mainboard, so it had to be different! I am waiting for weeks now to get the promised replacement.

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hall of shame
htc

Sorry state of HTC hardware and warranty support

I bought a Desire S smartphone a little more than 2 months ago, but did not have a chance to really use it, yet. It came with an elusive and odd bug. The touch screen stopped responding once in a while. This could occur any time, but seemed to happen less frequently after 5-10 minutes of active use.

The first time I sent the phone to repair, it came back with flashed ROM, but the problem stayed.

The second time I sent the phone for repair, it came back with a new touch screen, but the problem stayed.

The third time, the repair shop replaced the motherboard. The initial problem disappeared, but the phone gained a new one. Part of the screen was not reacting to touch. Or rather, every time you touched a certain area on screen to select an item, items around it were selected or nothing happened.

I filed a 4th support request today.

Overall, I took no less than an hour talking to the call center, wrote several emails and paper notes to HTC and to the repair shop, recorded a video to demonstrate the bug and uploaded it to HTC, filed two complaints online and took a good hour each time it returned from the repair shop to setting it up and find ways to reproduce the problem.

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hall of shame

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