Dealing with the freetards?

[Rarst]

User perspective here.

It is often unobvious on what terms developer does or does not offer support. Unless it is in your face with huge red letters - it is an effort to figure it out, meaning most people won't do that.

So it is wrong to assume that people asking for free support are automatically freetards. More like it is a mix of freetards and people who have no understanding of how things work.

So I suggest three steps:

1. Templated response that explains clearly and in detail terms on which you provide support.
2. If they start to beg - second response with this video
3. If they are still at it - add them to ignore list.

PS Justin does seem like a cold person ;) but he does excellent job at making clear how things work with Hybrid and support. It may seem unfriendly but I will take him as cold as it gets if that makes him money and in turn gets me free Hybrid downloads

[MiroslavGlavic]

User perspective here.

It is often unobvious on what terms developer does or does not offer support. Unless it is in your face with huge red letters - it is an effort to figure it out, meaning most people won't do that.

So it is wrong to assume that people asking for free support are automatically freetards. More like it is a mix of freetards and people who have no understanding of how things work.

So I suggest three steps:

1. Templated response that explains clearly and in detail terms on which you provide support.
2. If they start to beg - second response with this video
3. If they are still at it - add them to ignore list.

PS Justin does seem like a cold person ;) but he does excellent job at making clear how things work with Hybrid and support. It may seem unfriendly but I will take him as cold as it gets if that makes him money and in turn gets me free Hybrid downloads

What about adding an FAQ? many of my customers ask the same questions.
It will save a lot of time.

[Rarst]

What about adding an FAQ? many of my customers ask the same questions.

Well, point 1 can be a link to FAQ or whatever. :) Form doesn't matter, what matters is splitting adequate people who need to be informed that support is paid from people who don't give a damn about anything and assume developer is obliged to provide support for free.

Martin made a very good point above:

A lot of people seem to think everything is free because it's WP related.

And even more - free is de facto enforced (ehm, possibly bad word... boldly hinted at?) from the top.

If anything is going to make situation clear to users it is as much as possible information how things work in reality as opposed to freedom-freedom-freedom chant. :)

[matt]

I really dislike the term "freetard," probably because Fake Steve Jobs uses it to refer to people who believe in Open Source.

As for the how nice/mean to be question, you guys can imagine the amount of support email I get. I've found, generally, that a lot of good karma comes back from trying to help as many people as possible. As I go through old stuff like I do at the end of every year it's been funny to find the first email I have from someone I now work with every day, often it was a comment on my blog I responded to, or something in the contact form asking how something worked, or something else entirely but there was often contact years before we ever worked together. So one reason to be nice to everybody is you don't know who you'll connect with down the road.

For the massive amount of incoming email I get it generally falls into three buckets: incoherent and/or crazy, where it's obvious that any engagement is going to be a disaster, which I just delete; real people requests, where it's obvious it's just a normal person who maybe just needs a little bit of guidance or a pointer in the right direction, I try to respond to as many of these as possible but try to stay firmly at 1-2 emails max, if they need more than that I'll point them to a more appropriate resource like the forums or more frequently lately wphelpcenter.com; people I know, funnily I'm sometimes worse with this than people I don't know because of the way I sort my email, but with an extremely small number of people I'll get hands-on if they need support because I find it can be a very educational experience for me or identify part of the product that needs polish or could be made more apparent with just a tiny tweak.

I miss the days when I would be able to respond to every single query on the forums (1500+ posts) because I learned so much and connected with so many people. Nowadays I try to approximate it on a smaller scale.

It's definitely an area you have to be careful what incentives you set up with your business model. One of the reasons WP took off in the beginning was our install process, which Mike and I kept iterating and improving because we saw where people got stuck in the forums. On the other side 6A was charging for MT installation service and it was their main source of income at the time, so they really didn't have much of an incentive to make the install much easier for the general public, in fact it could have hit them in the pocketbooks. This created a huge strategic opportunity for WordPress and its "famous 5-minute install."

[Ryan]

Matt, I'm surprised you even bother posting your email address anywhere online at all. You must get totally swamped with emails!

I already find my own email load can get a little high at times and I am not even close to as high profile as you are, so I have no idea how you manage to stay on top of it.

I try to be as nice as possible to people, but it gets hard some times when some people are just downright rude. I try my best to ignore such people or to post a mildly appeasing response if I can be bothered though.

[andrea_r]

I find if I can't be nice - even if trying to turn someone down - I don't answer right then. Sometimes it takes a while. :D

Also, even with FAQ's tutorials, videos, tons of links, there are still some people who need hand holding and will never ever see or read any of those links. Some of them don't mind paying for one-on-one help. Some of them don't even think that people charge for it and need a gentle reminder. And sometimes someone needs a firm reminder that there are people who do this as their main source of income. ;)

I used to have a 15 minute limit, but in the new year, it will be 5 or less. Meaning, if I can hunt down what they need in less than 5 minutes, it's free.

[Ryan]

I used to have a 15 minute limit, but in the new year, it will be 5 or less. Meaning, if I can hunt down what they need in less than 5 minutes, it's free.

Yikes! Five minutes per question would take me about four hours per day to answer all the free support questions I receive on a daily basis. I try to keep mine to an average of 60 seconds. I guess my maximum time can spike to a lot more than five minutes though which is what you were referring to there.

[Ryan]

I've received a few amusing emails since my last post. In particular I've been receiving requests for a quote for "developing a dozen new e-Commerce sites". They want a full formal quote, but the only specifications they've given are "I need 12 new e-commerce sites. Please provide a formal quote. Thanks". I keep replying to them and politely asking for more information and even listing various jobs which they may or may not require completed, but they seem to answering the first option as "yes" or "no" but never answering the rest of them ... totally infuriating! I'm onto the 12th email reply right now ... might be the last, as this is getting ridiculous ... and time consuming!

[MiroslavGlavic]

Ryan:

Client vs. Designer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfprIxNfCjk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCjcwBGQtiw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyTpzgAW5NA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2h2pESo6HM



Watch them in THAT order. There are way more.
Someone tweeted the first one, I forgot who .

[Ryan]

LOL. Yeah, that feels familiar :)

The funniest ones I get are actually from fellow web developers who sent me suggestions that we go into business and share revenues as they can handle some of the complex HTML/CSS/PHP while I handle the business side of things ... which sounds great, except I ask them for some sort of portfolio .... ROTFLMAO they tend to look something like this ... http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/.