Technical Support for a free service?

Sometimes running a blog site is almost not worth the effort. I can see why so many blog sites are moving to charging money to use them. The amount of technical support I'm starting to receive in email from users is becoming problematic.

What's worse, is that an increasing number of people are demanding technical support responses that are simply not realistic in something that we are providing for free.

Let me give you an example.  Someone named "Andrew" emailed me a couple of days ago:

I searched for my name (Name withheld) using Google and there were exactly 203 results (narrowed down to just JoeUser.com, 194 results). I would like to have my name removed from those pages immediately! This means that JoeUser has personal information about me (name) and I would like to have that deleted, or at the very least, not openly available to the public.
 

I couldn't figure out what exactly the issue was. How did we get personal information on him? Why would we be listing personal information on him? Remember, at this point he hasn't told me he has a blog. He's just some guy who emailed me telling me that we're giving away his personal information. Perhaps someone on the site was talking about him. So I started looking and eventually asked back "Do you have a blog here?"

To which I get:

Yes, I did create a blog on JoeUser because of a recommendation from a friend, and I have to admit I now regret that decision. What I did not expect was that my name would appear 194 times on JoeUser.com. When I requested to have my account terminated, I assumed the problem would be fixed, but I was wrong. I respectfully suggest you contact Google and find a solution to this mess.

So he created a blog here using his name. When he created the blog, his name got put into the index and other top user lists and that sort of thing (since he used his name for his blog and his user name). So every person's page here would have his name cached at some point even for a day or two. He terminated his blog so his blog is gone. But of course, Google and other search engines will keep that information around a long while. That is the nature of the Internet.

So I wrote him back explaining as much. I also pointed out that I didn't really appreciate his tone on this. We're providing a free site. We don't charge him a thing. He's not some sort of "Customer". We can try to help him within reason but there's no way we're going to get in touch with Google and demand that they somehow do something special to clean out a particular person's name. For crying out loud, we're talking about just his name. No contact information. No email address. Just his name.

So I got this back today:

The reason my name appears on JoeUser is because I created a blog with my name as part of the blog? Then my name should appear on the blog itself only, nowhere else. The blog has been deleted, but my name still remains on several JoeUser pages. Why do you think Google would return invalid search results or link to URLs that no longer exist? All I'm asking you to do is remove my name from every page on JoeUser.com and remove it from a search engine, nothing else. That is not "a considerable amount of work". If someone took your name, put it on the Web 194 times without your permission and refused to take it off when requested, would you be mad? Without compensation? I have a good reason to be angry with you and JoeUser, you don't need nor deserve compensation of any kind. Have you actually removed my name from your pages and just have Google to deal with or are you not doing anything about it? I respectfully suggest you find a solution to this mess.

Talk about incredible. It's as if someone just woke up, got out of their cave and jumped on the Internet one day without having even the most basic understanding of it and created a blog. His blog is gone. It's not on our pages. But he doesn't seem to understand how search engines work. They make a copy of everything that's on the net and search that. Once you're on the Internet in some way, your name is going to be somewhere.  If I write the words "Altarian Cream Boogers", sure enough, in a few days, Google will find this page if you type in Altarian Cream Boogers in quotes. And it'll likely be there for a long time, possibly forever, even if I remove the page.  Type in "Brad Wardell" into Google and you'll get pages and pages of websites that I'm mentioned on without having given them permission necessarily. That is the nature of the Internet.

But I don't mind explaining that to someone. What I do mind is the attitude. Look at what that guy wrote. He demands that I go and do a bunch of work for him at the same time saying how he has every right to be angry with me. For what? What did I do? Because I let stupid kooks on the site? We don't have a stupid kook filter unfortunately.

And how I don't need or deserve compensation? He's asking me to do him a favor. I'm not saying that he should have to pay for that, but that there's only so much free time I have available to help him. If he was a "Customer" (i.e. someone paying for a service) then he would have more of a point. But he doesn't. He's just some guy who came on to use our blog not understanding how the Internet works and now wants to be a royal pain.

I wrote him back saying that since he's going to be rude he can just go away. I've been through this over the years so many times that I know that the next email is going to have the legal threat. It'll go something like this: "If you don't do what I respectfully request I will have to get in touch with my attorney."  The legal threat. Which I promptly just forward on to the legal people. We have lots of lawyers. And we have insurance. So bring it on, buddy. Of course, he hasn't done that yet. But it's inevitable. People like this are pretty predictable.

But now you have a taste of why so many sites end up being pay sites. I'm thinking we may be able to prevent that by putting together a community support system where people who get stuck can write in a support forum and other people can help them out. We have something like that for Object Desktop and users helping users has helped keep what would otherwise be a $89.95 product (what we used to have to sell it for on OS/2) down to $49.95 instead.

In the meantime, people need to realize that this site is something we're basically doing for fun. It doesn't make money. The little google ad on the right pays something like $6 per day. That doesn't even pay for the bandwidth let alone the other stuff.  We can do it indefinitely as long as it doesn't become a financial burden. But when people start demanding unreasonable things, it sucks the fun out and creates a great deal of overhead.