Dear Willfully Incompetent SiteMeter Bastards,
I hope I didn’t come on too strong there, but as a paying customer for more than seven years now, I got a little upset when I couldn’t find your “Contact Us” link anywhere on your new site. So I’m forced to publish this little missive where everyone can see it. I’d apologize, except for that bit where I’m not sorry — but you people absolutely should be sorry. Only you show no sign of shame, you shameless sodding shiftless saps.
About your “new and improved” SiteMeter. Where to begin? Let’s take a page you seemed to have skipped, and try starting at the beginning.
Your migration process from old site to new is, as I’m sure you know by now, a mess. What should have required filling out two small fields and a few seconds of my time, became instead a ten-minute tedium of glitches and endless page-load waits.
Anonymous logons? Gone, it seems. My old user name and password disappeared, too. Once I got that all straightened out, things got worse. Users who click the “remember me” box will get an annoying popup reminding them not to do so on public computers. And they’ll get it every time they click that box, which will be often, because “remember me” doesn’t remember me or anyone else.
Oh, and my password doesn’t work. So you reset it for me. And when I logged on (again, taking minutes) with the new password, and tried to change it to something I could remember, that information didn’t get saved, either. I’m stuck with your crummy one, which I have to cut’n’paste in from my mail program every time I log on.
And I log on often. Why? Because I get kicked off every few minutes, for no good reason and without explanation.
Before we go on, let me tell you that I just spent 196 words describing the difficulties in logging on (and staying logged on) to SiteMeter. We haven’t even gotten to the joke that is the new SiteMeter, itself.
Instead of going straight to my statistics, the new SiteMeter brings me to a page where I can manage my account or change my credit card information — that sort of stuff. The kind of stuff I go years without changing. This is an improvement?
Where are my statistics? Well, after being forced to read the legend down hidden at the bottom of my browser window, I discovered that one of the little unidentifiable buttons was the one to click if I wanted my websites statistics page to show me a page of website statistics. OK, fine, I clicked.
And what did SiteMeter do? It spent the next six minutes loading up a Flash applet. Six minutes. After that, it spent the next forever loading up my stats. They never did load. And every time I clicked “Refresh Stats” to try again, I got booted out to the logon screen. Where I had to use the bad password and close the “Remember Me” warning box and not get remembered the next time I clicked “Refresh Stats” after not getting my stats to ever load. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know if the new statistics are any worse or any better than the old ones. Because I can’t see them. Not in Firefox, not in Safari, not in Opera which I installed for the sole purpose of seeing if there was just one web browser that would work with your site.
But word around the blogosphere is: The new stats suck. According to those precious few who can actually see theirs.
I can’t even weakly thank you for putting my payment and account information right up front — because my account setting changes don’t get saved no matter how many times I click “save,” and your credit card information on me is all blank. In other words, I have no idea whether I’ll get double-billed, should I choose to put in new card information. Is this how you intend to get new paying customers, by cheating the ones you already have?
I can tell you that the new design is a serious step backwards. The entire top third of my browser window is taken up by tabs and banners — instead of with the data I’m paying you to provide. Users used to be able to see their info without scrolling. Now they have to go through two complete scrolls (on a typical laptop screen) just to see less data than they used to be able to see at a glance. And that’s for users with any data to see. I’m not one of them.
And do you realize how many mobile users you’ve locked out, by making everything Flash-only?
I wasn’t consulted about these changes. I wasn’t even warned. One day I had a site that I paid for which worked, and the next day I didn’t. You never even offered me the choice of sticking with “SiteMeter Classic.”
You suck,
-Steve.
PS I’m asking people to Google Bomb this letter with the phrase “SiteMeter Sucks.” I’ll take it down as soon as I get my “Classic” back.
PPS This sums it all up in one word: “Shitemeter.”
PPPS Wow, you guys sure know when to fold’em.
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