Sometimes it’s easy to be critical of Linden Lab, sometimes they make it absurdly easy. The impression one gets at times is that Linden Lab remains a company where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. There are other times when you think “WTF are they thinking of“. This was my reaction when I saw a couple of posts on different forums regarding an automated reply people have received when submitting support tickets on Marketplace issues:
“Thank you for contacting Linden lab Support. I’m sorry, but as of March 21, 2012, Linden Lab no longer supports the Magic Box application.”
Now let’s get something straight here, this should never have happened. I’ve already said that I feel the migration deadline was a mistake, but deciding not to support a product that is still in use, hasn’t passed the migration date and will still have support concerns, is no way of about going things, even worse, this was never officially announced. Fortunately someone at Linden Lab seems to have spotted this mistake and it has been confirmed that magic boxes are still being supported.
CommerceTeam Linden, posting in reply to someone who raised the issue of no support for magic boxes, typed:
“We are so sorry for this response. We are reaching out to you directly to help you with this issue and are already working to make sure that everyone in support is aware that we will continue to support Magic Boxes until they are officially retired. Thank you for bringing this to our attention”.
Magic Boxes are therefore officially still being supported until their retirement, which is quite right and I’m not sure how the situation ever arose that someone felt it was suitable not to support them at this time. After the deadlines there is no reason to support them, therefore an automated reply stating that is a suitable response once the deadline has passed.
I’m sure support is busy right now with issues around the marketplace, there have been more problems than one would have hoped for, but bugs do happen, I can fully understand that, but Linden Lab still need to work on getting the basics right, if they get the basics right, people will have a lot more patience when bugs do arise.
The response from The Commerce Team was well received, the person who first raised the issue replied:
“Thank you for that response, CommerceTeam Linden. I am encouraged by this effort.”
So there’s an example to Linden Lab on how a situation can be addressed in a manner that makes the customer feel respected, that is the right way to go about things but Linden Lab should try to ensure they don’t put themselves in situations like this in the first place, of course sometimes things happen that make it difficult to be prepared for support issues, but in this case, that wasn’t the case.