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Disgusting

I was browsing my stats and noticed an incoming link to my theme. Always curious as to what kind of sites used my theme I checked it out. I won’t provide the link here because the site I found was disgusting. The site is supposed to be an alternative “news” site but really was nothing more than a racist and bigoted site that talks about “niggers”, “kikes”, “evil Methodists”, and “fags.” Reading the titles of these posts made me want to throw up, and the actual posts and comments were worse. I guess the drawback to releasing a theme is you have no say in what kind of site decides to use it. I, for one, am disgusted by it’s use on this hate speech site.

EDIT: Just an update, I contacted the site’s host, DreamHost and they said they support free speech. This is understandable. I, however, doubt it has anything to do with free speech and more to do with them making money from a client. That’s just how DH operates. Even if the hate speech can incite hate crimes (which, if you look at the wikipedia entry posted in the comments by Mike, actually has happened). This lead me to post some terms in which I explain I have no affiliation with the content on sites using my theme. Kind of an obvious thing, but I just want to cover my bases.

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My Feed List

I was bored so I thought I’d share with you the websites that are in my feed reader (which is Google Reader). They are:

Anna’s Blog
Caleb Was Here
Give Away of the Day (hat tip Mark)
Homeland Stupidity
All in the Cards
Photomatt
Qn5 Blog
Ryan.Connect
Simply Complex
Sporadic Nonsense
What Makes You Happy?
StL Today Cardinals
Yahoo Sports- Cardinals

I also have on my Google Homepage Wired Top Stories, Slashdot, BBC, and New York Times. All good reads. What’s in your feed reader?

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New Colors and Other Site Updates

I changed the colors of the site a bit. They were red/orange and I changed them to blue. Blue is my favorite color, so I thought I’d try this out. I hope the header image isn’t too bright. I’m still not decided on that. Any thoughts?

akismet

Also, since I last reinstalled Akismet I’ve been saved from 1000 spam comments with not one false positive. Good job Askismet people!

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Site5 Has Become a Joke

Because of the increasing number of complaints about inadequate service, suggestions for improvements, and general unhappiness of Site5 customers, Site5 decided to remove the service forums from their message board. The other forums are still there, but if you were posting because your server was down, not responding, adding domains, and other service related questions, you no longer have a place to go. Of course, their official reasoning was because it was creating a problem for support.

Today, in their open discussion forum, a post was made asking what others thought about them closing these forums. Many people responded during the post’s short lifespan, including Site5 staff itself. Obviously, once management (I’m talking about you, Mr. Lightner) found this out, it was deleted. Luckily, another forum member posted a pdf on his site of what was said. You can read it here. Now, call me crazy, but having support forums where the community can support seems like it should reduce trouble tickets for support. I can probably come up with 5 occasions off the top of my head in which I didn’t have to open a ticket because I found the information in the forums. If anything, this new policy will only increase support’s already busy workload. Don’t be fooled by the response times on Site5’s homepage. At one time (when I signed up) they were this low, but they neglect their customers in order to oversell their hosting and try new products to entice people, none of which are actually implemented (think RapifReflex, Webmail 2.0, Flashback). They say they respond in an average of 25 minutes, let’s take a look at some of mine:

Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 211.5 minutes
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 354.6 minutes
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 84.5 minutes

And most of the time, they don’t even answer your question, so you have to wait another 100+ minutes for another response.

The thread also stated that management will respond to each and every one of the emails that people send regarding this issue. I find this to be a joke as well. I put in a management review ticket months ago with no response. I emailed Matt Lightner and never got a response. I even had a thread put into the Management Review hidden forum and got no response. And like another customer said, site5 webhosting…the only way to deal with bad pr is to delete it. (by the way, this site is hosted on A Small Orange now.)

EDIT: It seems they have added some forums for “customer-to-customer” support. My faith has still not been restored though. Unless they start listening to their customers, stop overselling, and quit with software promises that never get implamented, they are a sinking ship.

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Host Update; Waiting for Site5

The host search continues. I’ve literally signed up with a few hosts and quickly aborted. I’m not going to say their names because I’m sure they are great hosts. Their back-end just wasn’t for me. I’ve got to hand it to Site5 for their design and ability to make an intuitive back-end. Since Site5 has yet to do something catastrophic, like lose my entire site or rip me off in some way, like I’ve heard other hosting companies have done, I will continue hosting with them for the time being. That’s not to say I’ve given up the hunt for a great host. I’m waiting for one that suites me in terms of cost and resources. Hopefully, before I leave Site5, I will get some sort of response from their management. It’s not like I’m looking for a free year of hosting, though that would be nice. I’m looking for acknowledgement of their mistakes and an apology. That is all. Is it really that hard?