Another "They Won't Read" Thread

[Pedersen]

After reading http://www.customerssuck.com/board/s...ad.php?t=42133 I got reminded of one that happened a few years ago.

Short version: The city of Tuttle, OK, got their website hosed and blamed the software producer for hacking their site. No, I'm not kidding. The whole story is here:

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/a...hp?storyid=127

[draggar]

Wow, just wow.

I wonder if I could pull the same BS with Bill Gates?

[One-Fang]

Hehehe, oh that was brilliant. He totally *should* have submitted it to the media! I mean, it's online now anyway, they could find it anyway, all he'd need to do is bring it to their attention.

[Samaliel]

The sad thing is that the story was reported in the Tuttle Times, complete with a link to the whole e-mail exchange, but who ever wrote the news report seemed to have a very strong bias in favor of the idiotic city manager, making the developer look like the bad guy...

This nitwit is supposed to have 22 years worth of computer experience and can't even read what's written on a webpage, can't seem to grasp what an OS is (neither can the news writer, as it seems).

Personnally, if I can not figure out myself what's going with my website, the first thing I do is contacting the hosting service provider. I am a web developer, so I know the basic troubleshooting steps if anything goes wrong on any website that I would manage. But I am no Sys. Admin. so if I can't figure out what's wrong, I'll ask the person most likely to know.

[PepperElf]

Please, for the love of God, either let me help you or talk to a
computer administrator who can help you with your problem.

O man, this man is awesome!

[One-Fang]

I don't think the article makes the developer look bad. I think it's very strongly trying NOT to make the city manager look bad (or hey, it wouldn't get printed), but it does seem to lean towards the side of "Idiot over-reacts, complete innocent gets threatened then goes above and beyond to help out".

What I want to know is - does the city of Tuttle not have an IT department? "City Manager" is not a person who should be trying to solve this problem. He should have phoned his local support helpdesk, who should have escalated it to the web department, and it could have been resolved in minutes, by the people actually responsible for it.

Surely an entire CITY must have an IT department? I've worked in some very small places (in IT), but city management is not generally a low-staffing area.

[Dips]

Right now I'm dealing with a customer at a school who can't post to our user listserv. I had her forward the bounce message with expanded headers. The bounce message came from her organization's mail server, not us.

So I suggested contact them as indicated in the bounce message.

She did and they told her it was on our end and refused to help her.

So I sent the email to our network admin to see if he could enlighten me further about it. It turns out they've set up all their outgoing mail to appear as if it is coming from a spoofed address. Spoofed addresses and the spam filters at the list host (which isn't us) don't play well together.

So long story short, we know WHY but we can't do anything about it. We can't make the list hosts change their spam filters, nor can we make the customer's network admin change his setup so it doesn't clash with the spam filters.

It hasn't gotten sucky so far, but this story tells me it could.