Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Condescending Help Desk "Specialist" Plus WordPress Glitch Fix

Yesterday GeekyClown had a problem. I tried to update the Professor Frink post from half-a-year ago and all of a sudden *poof* all of my posts and all of my pages were gone. I went to the chat window at FatCow and was told that they would have to kick it over to the "technical specialists". Fine, I figured it was a database issue seeing as the content was no longer there.

Response from "technical specialist"...

It appears that you have not properly added the reference link to the navigation bar in the WordPress website. Hence, please log into the WordPress Admin page http://geekyclown.com and correct it. In general, we do not provide support for custom code or custom scripts. The tools we provide are meant only for advanced users and for users who are knowledgeable enough to manage their scripts using those tools.

If you have limited experience or knowledge about server-side scripting and troubleshooting custom code, we strongly recommend that you look into hiring a web developer to assist you.

If you have any further questions, please update the Support Console.


Wait...what? I was trying to update a post, I didn't code anything. And, being a Web developer for the last decade, I had to wonder where would be a good place I could find one to hire. Since the "technical specialist" had written this off as a coding issue, I figured I would have to look into it myself. Since my first thought was that it was a database issue - I went into the myPHP and repaired the database and *poof* everything was back.

I have worked help desk before and realize that there will be a lot of stupid questions that they deal with. Most inquiries will be by those who are less than tech-savvy. I suppose, I should have tried to repair the database before contacting help desk but, with the history I have found with FatCow, it very well could have been an outage. Either way, the condescending tone and incorrect information is what angered me.

If you are going to accuse someone of breaking their own site, at least be sure that is what is wrong. After I did a repair on the database, I did a Google search and saw that having your posts and pages disappear when doing an update is a common WordPress glitch and the fix is...wait for it...gasp...repair the database. Oh well, live and learn I suppose. This post had very little to do with gaming, IT, the Web, or really anything else of merit. I suppose if anyone has the same issue, this post will come up in Google and they will know to repair the database if they mysteriously lose all of their content when updating. I think the whole reason for this is that I am pissed at their "technical specialist" and felt a need to vent. Which I did...now I feel better - thanks for listening.

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