A Note on Tech Support and Responsiveness

Hey everyone, Kole here. I want to clarify something about tech support on the feeds. Customer service hinges on setting and maintaining expectations, and I want to set the expectation of what kinds of things we can respond to, and what the timeframe might be.

On questions answered in our How-To Documentation

First, it is not scalable for us to respond to every question that is answered elsewhere in the explanatory pages. There is a whole tag on our Patreon page called "How to Redeem Rewards" and the articles there should be where you go for answers about what posts where, and how to access that content. Newer articles are more accurate than older ones, and you should check the comments (using Ctrl-F if necessary) to see if anyone else has had, and solved, your problem.

If the question has been answered, we won't respond to it, because the answer would be "That has already been answered", along with a link, and that can come across as low-key shitty. We can't answer the same questions over and over because we just don't have the time. It's not we don't care that you're furstrated, it's just that we have a lot of other work to do and Tech Support and Customer Service necessarily fall behind making the content that people come here for to begin with. Being available 24/7 to a few thousand people is something that would be someone's job in other outfits, and if you take away co-hosts, we're a two man operation.

If a question comes up that is not addressed in the documentation on the How-To tag, we'll try to answer you within a day. Maybe someone from the community will see the question and answer it for you. If it's a unique problem we hadn't considered, we will update the relevant posts to help others who might come after you.

This feed isn't working for me, or things aren't showing up quickly

There's another category of question that has to do with what I call Computer Ghosts. I don't know where the computer ghosts come from, or why they do what they do, and I have no power to stop them from making problems. They often target DNS or anything related to authorization.

The first answer to Computer Ghost questions will always be "Unsubscribe and Resubscribe". Either from the RSS feed itself, or from Patreon. If you do this with your Patreon membership you will not be double charged. This solves about 95% of Computer Ghost problems.

If that doesn't work, then there's something happening with a cache somewhere, in some app, or in some server that we don't have any control over. The other way to solve these problems is to wait until the next day. I understand this is frustrating if you want to listen now. But if you write us about it, we will have nothing to say besides "unsub and resub" or "wait a day for things to refresh".

My app isn't playing nice

If the above measures don't work, there may be an issue with your podcast listening app. We don't have any control over how a podcast app interprets our feeds. We test stuff out on a variety of apps, but we can't test them all. Additionally, there are so many apps that we can't provide support for them all.

If it seems like there's a problem with your app, you can look at the app's support documentation on their website, contact the app maker to file a support ticket (or request a feature), or attempt to use another app. These are all annoying things to do, I know, but the answer we will provide will be one of those things above.

A conclusion, and tone

The person writing this post, and handling most of the tech support questions, is Kole. Gary is willing and able to answer some questions, but ultimately I'm the person who designs and maintains the back-end operations stuff, and he won't have answers that I have.

I want you to read this post in the intended tone. I'm not angry, I'm not intentionally being dismissive, and I'm very invested in you getting the content you paid for. I care, and that care manifests as me taking a lot of time and energy to make the How-To posts comprehensive and clear. I believe that good explanation is a difficult and important task.

I also feel myself reaching the edge of the amount of time and energy I can put into being responsive to everyone who asks a question. I just have too much work to balance and prioritize. And when you feel yourself being stretched thin, you renegotiate. This is my renegotiation, to make it clear what expectations can be placed on me, and what expectations I am placing on you as someone who is engaging with a technical product like podcast RSS feeds.

I'm so grateful for your support and I hope that the information I've provided, and the community that hangs around, can meet your needs. If it doesn't, we welcome questions. But please do your own due diligence first, because answering questions about accessing old content can come at the expense of the time and focus we need to make the new stuff.

Kole