PEBCAK

I’ve been back a little less than a week (it’s been wonderful), and I’ve been working on computers every day. It must just be coincidence, but I’ve been hit with so much PEBCAK lately that it just makes me want to hit my head on the desk. Consider the following:

“PHP? That must be another name for HTML!”

I was contacted regarding IdioPoll by a user who “just couldn’t get it to work”. They had copied the files into the right place and put the caller function at the right point in their page, but it just wouldn’t install! All it would send was a bunch of text when they went to the install file. This is obviously a problem with IdioPoll. An intrinsic flaw, even. You see, IdioPoll is written in PHP, and as such, has the intrinsic flaw of requiring a webserver with PHP. No kids, your free 10MB Geocities webhosting doesn’t qualify, sorry. Hint: see the file extension, .php? That doesn’t mean .htm. Oopsie!

“I see the readme. But what do I do?”

For any product, you must assume that your user has the requisite level of expertise necessary to get to the point where they NEED the product. For example, Hotmail is a first-tier product, accessible to all users with a minimum of work and knowledge. Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird are second-tier products; the user must not only be comfortable with downloading and installing software, but also understand the concept of mailservers (and indeed, have a mailserver in the first place). An example of a third-tier product might be an extension for Thunderbird or a plugin for Outlook. Third-tier products are generally where the fewest questions and problems arise, since a user needs to be fairly proficient to get this far along the path.
The Nomicons pack is an example of a third-tier product. Not only must a user install a new, scary, application— Trillian— but they must perform some (albeit very little) low-level editing of files. This was made as simple as possible in the readme: there is a folder inside the ZIP file. Extract it to the same place the folder with the same name is (<path here>) and overwrite the files. Restart Trillian. So a user contacts me: “How do I get it to work? Do I add them all manually?” No, you read the readme. “Well I extracted it there and it didn’t work.” Well, maybe you should go see where it extracted it to. You didn’t get any overwrite messages did you? “Well I just have one folder, the nomiconsv2.zip folder.” No, that’s a ZIP file. You have to extraaaaaact it. “Well there is no folder plugins to extract it to!” Where did you install Trillian? “Oh, to my own custom directory.”
:’(!!!

I’m trying to use professional software but I can’t code two lines of HTML!

Hosting customer wants CMS, because a CMS is obviously the most effective way to manage one’s website when one knows close to zero HTML. Obviously. Well no, guess what? CMS’s are meant for sites with hundreds or thousands of pages, not three pages and a blog! The word “overkill” comes to mind, briefly. But no, a CMS is what he wants. Well, if you’re going to be managing a CMS, obviously you should understand the basic concepts of editing config files, Linux user home dir paths, and maybe even (the horror!) CHMOD?!? No, of course not! Because if a script doesn’t work for you, that means it’s “broken” or “not user-friendly”, right? Of course!

I need help but I don’t want to look for myself, I want to be spoon-fed the answer!

This is pretty much an InvisionFree-wide problem. Either they

  • Don’t want / have time to read the FAQ
  • Don’t know what the FAQ is
  • Decide that my AIM is the best way to get fast support (hint to all you noobs that may possibly do this: I ignore you blatantly :))
  • Think that if the forum doesn’t work, it’s our fault
  • Any permutation of the above

The worst are the people that say “Don’t tell me to go look in the FAQ, I don’t have time.” Well guess what. If EVERYONE who posted read the FAQ first, do you know by what percentage questions would drop? Try forty. FORTY PERCENT fewer tickets and support topics. Do you know how much the quality of support would rise? Rolleyes. One benefit: I get a lot of multimod points :P

Working at InvisionFree has opened my eyes a lot to how technologically illiterate this new generation of computer users is. The problem is, as their illiteracy grows, they also want to do more. This is a mutually exclusive dichotomy… it’s not happening anytime soon, folks. You’re placing the burden on the programmers to make simpler and simpler applications, while not sacrificing any of the features you demand. And you’re stretching our resources to the limit.

Dewdles by Sam