Dealing with the freetards?

**Ryan** · 12-30-2009, 07:07 AM

Lol, I think I spoke to fast. The site appears to be broken!

Oops! An Error Occurred

The server returned a "500 Internal Server Error".

Something is broken
Please e-mail us at [email] and let us know what you were doing when this error occurred. We will fix it as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
What's next
Back to previous page
Go to Homepage

I'd try to email, but I suspect the address [email] would not work :p

**Ryan** · 12-30-2009, 08:57 AM

A follow up on this:

Originally Posted by 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".

They're still pestering me and providing basically no useful information whatsoever so I quoted them US$20,000 and listed everything they would get for that cost. Hopefully they'll then realise they don't require most of the stuff on the list and tell me what they actually require. Or I'll scare them off with the price, either way my problem will hopefully be solved.

**Ryan** · 12-30-2009, 09:26 AM

This topic got me thinking about ways to help reduce the number of "freetards" I need to deal with. So I wrote the following blog post which I'll try to link to wherever I think it might be helpful in my support forum:

http://pixopoint.com/free-support-menus/

I've tried not to be too rude, but also tried to point out EXACTLY what I need to know to actually help someone (many people simply don't provide enough detail to be able to do anything without spending 5 to 10 mins diving through their code trying to figure out what the heck they've done. Or even worse, they just describe the problem which usually gives me about 10 different ideas on what their problem can be rather than being able to narrow it down to two in about 30 seconds by skimming their source code.

Any opinions?

BTW, feel free to plagiarize it if you think it is useful to you.

**andrea_r** · 12-30-2009, 10:53 AM

Ryan, that's awesome - both the quote and the free support post. :)

I have no idea what's up with people - I've noticed on another (paid) support forum, it's like pulling teeth to get posters to just give you their URL.

And on the MU forums, the regulars have a special term for those posts; "Help, it's broke! Fix it!"

Because that's a summary of what they said, and one time, that was LITERALLY what someone posted.

**jakebarnes** · 12-31-2009, 12:16 AM

Originally Posted by Ryan

Lol, I think I spoke to fast. The site appears to be broken!
I'd try to email, but I suspect the address [email] would not work :p

Ryan, do you recall what page you were on when you got that error message?

**Ryan** · 12-31-2009, 12:19 AM

Originally Posted by jakebarnes

Ryan, do you recall what page you were on when you got that error message?

Everything but the home page.

**Ryan** · 12-31-2009, 12:20 AM

It's still doing it. Here's an example page: http://wpquestions.com/user/profile/id/30

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 
 
 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> 
<head> 
 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> 
<meta name="title" content="symfony project" /> 
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> 
<meta name="description" content="symfony project" /> 
<meta name="keywords" content="symfony, project" /> 
<meta name="language" content="en" /> 
<title>symfony project</title> 
 
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" /> 
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="/sf/sf_default/css/screen.css" /> 
<!--[if lt IE 7.]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="/sf/sf_default/css/ie.css" />
<![endif]--> 
 
</head> 
<body> 
<div class="sfTContainer"> 
  <a title="symfony website" href="http://www.symfony-project.org/"><img alt="symfony PHP Framework" class="sfTLogo" src="/sf/sf_default/images/sfTLogo.png" height="39" width="186" /></a> 
  <div class="sfTMessageContainer sfTAlert"> 
    <img alt="page not found" class="sfTMessageIcon" src="/sf/sf_default/gfx_v3BrownGold/icons/tools48.png" height="48" width="48" /> 
    <div class="sfTMessageWrap"> 
      <h1>Oops! An Error Occurred</h1> 
      <h5>The server returned a "500 Internal Server Error".</h5> 
    </div> 
  </div> 
 
  <dl class="sfTMessageInfo"> 
    <dt>Something is broken</dt> 
    <dd>Please e-mail us at [email] and let us know what you were doing when this error occurred. We will fix it as soon as possible.
    Sorry for any inconvenience caused.</dd> 
 
    <dt>What's next</dt> 
    <dd> 
      <ul class="sfTIconList"> 
        <li class="sfTLinkMessage"><a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">Back to previous page</a></li> 
        <li class="sfTLinkMessage"><a href="/">Go to Homepage</a></li> 
      </ul> 
    </dd> 
  </dl> 
</div> 
</body> 
</html>

**Ryan** · 12-31-2009, 12:23 AM

Also, nothing happens when you click on "Ending Soonest", "Highest Price", "Recently Asked" or "Most Responses".

The following pages seem to be working:
http://wpquestions.com/page/static/name/About
http://wpquestions.com/login
http://wpquestions.com/user/register
http://wpquestions.com/question/step1/
http://blog.wpquestions.com/

**Len** · 12-31-2009, 04:31 AM

Originally Posted by andrea_r

Ryan, that's awesome - both the quote and the free support post. :)

I have no idea what's up with people - I've noticed on another (paid) support forum, it's like pulling teeth to get posters to just give you their URL.

And on the MU forums, the regulars have a special term for those posts; "Help, it's broke! Fix it!"

Because that's a summary of what they said, and one time, that was LITERALLY what someone posted.

Getting people to provide a URL for a problem site is indeed like pulling teeth. I help out in the StudioPress forums now and then and the problem is even there. Of course over in the .ORG forums it is so rampant I don't even reply to threads anymore where the OP is asking for help with a visual problem and refuses to give a URL.

**jakebarnes** · 12-31-2009, 04:27 PM

Originally Posted by Ryan

Lol, I think I spoke to fast. The site appears to be broken!
I'd try to email, but I suspect the address [email] would not work :p

Thanks, Ryan. Fixed now.

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