Posts tagged “technical problem”

Is BusinessWeek Online broken?

I’m trying to comment on a couple of blog entries on BusinessWeek online. Hitting “post” just times out. So I searched the site for a means to contact them. First I found the Masthead for the online edition. But nothing there. Turns out I want “customer service” (even though I’m not a customer, I’m a user, yes?).

BusinessWeek Online: Customer Service says

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. Please provide as much information as possible to help us resolve the problem. We will respond if you include a valid BusinessWeek user name and email address below.
Name
Email Address
Address
Address 2
City
State/Province
Zip/Postal Code
Country

Of course, I have no idea what a BusinessWeek user name is. Nor do I see a place to enter that information! I put in my name and email and describe the problem. Nope. I need to provide an address. A City. A state or province, and a zip or postal code. To submit a problem report with their website. What?

Okay, I give them 1 nowhere st. Nowheresville, etc. etc. And submit it.

And it reloads the exact same page, with the fields still populated with what I typed.

There’s no acknowledgement that they’ve received my feedback, nor any indication that I need to do something else to get the info to them. I have no idea what has happened. Have they now received several copies of the same bug report (including the one I tried in IE in case this was a Firefox problem?) or have they received none?

Meanwhile, I have two composed but not-accepted blog comments.

Obviously something is broken, but how much is broken and how much is bad design? I expected better!

Series

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