Alexandre Franke @afranke@mamot.fr

Penny Arcade nailed it with their take on the Google omnipresence: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2020/10/21 #antitrust #GAFAM #chatons

Time to go back to school.

#Fractal, the #matrix client for #GNOME, will release version 4.4 next Friday. Now is a good time to test the nightly version and check if it doesn’t break anything with your homeserver compared to 4.2. #translations are also welcome.

That’s it for now. Sorry about the noise. I’ll follow up if there is any new development.

After I explained the problem, the person on the phone asked me to hold on for a second while they were running some tests on my line. A couple minutes later, they told me they indeed were able to see all the disconnections and that they would escalate the issue so someone would investigate. Issue #4: ever heard of monitoring? If they’re able to run something that shows the problem, they should be able to detect the problem automatically and take care of it preemptively.

So I resigned myself to call them. Went through the dial maze, and… waited 20 minutes until a human being picked up on their end. Issue #3: their phone support is unresponsive (which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place).

I was then given a choice between a video call with someone from their hotline (ugh, #nothankyou) and text chat. The latter sounded great so I chose it. The page never loaded. There was no other option like opening a support ticket, leaving a message in a text field or contacting them via email. Issue #2: their online support is broken.

I went to my account page and found the support link. They have a wizard that asks me what’s wrong. Sounds good. I choose the item that says my Internet is down. A page tells me to hold on while they test my line and a few seconds later they tell me that everything is fine, kthxbye. Issue #1: there was no “my Internet went down a lot this morning but right now I am actually able to access this page so bear with me and please have a look at what was going on earlier”.

For this case I would have preferred an asynchronous workflow, i.e. my favourite option is *not* to be stuck with a phone call, I’d rather write a thorough description of the issue and let them deal with it, then come back to me, asking for details if necessary.