hey, @posterous. i’m pissed.
we’ve been on really good terms up until this point. i’ve even managed to get a couple of friends to move over to your services. but the last few days have been kinda’ hellish, all culminating tonight in a big, huge massive load of FAIL. shall we bullet point?
- autoposting: its my understanding that you’ve recently updated the autoposting feature. i’m sure there are some great tools there, but none of them are useful to me. what it has done is slowed down autoposting to a crawl. sometimes its 45 minutes till an autopost appears. it used to be instantaneous. wth?
- facebook: i don’t understand why when i log out of one posterous account and log in to another, i’m logged out of facebook. i even went so far as to write an email asking why this is, because i always log in with an email address, not via facebook connect (or whatever). your response?
Luke –
We log you out of facebook because facebook accouints can be used to log you into your facebook account.
Cheers, and thanks for using Posterous,
Vince
aside from the fact that was completely unhelpful, i don’t even know what that means.
- auto save/drafts: you know, it never really occurred to me that there’s not an auto draft or save function like in EVERY OTHER BLOG I’VE EVER USED. how did i come to notice this? i had a very long, informational, detailed post for our business’s blog that i had to work on for two days (because life happens). when i started it, i looked to make sure it was auto saving… and then i found out there was no auto save function. so i left a window of Safari open for TWO DAYS while i worked on the post. why didn’t i just do an email, where a draft is automatically saved? because every time i’ve done that and sent it in, the formatting is all wrong. not just little things, but bullet points and text bolding and italics. i’ve even tried working in Word or Pages and copying/pasting and still comes out wrong. and when i go in to edit it to try and make sense of it all, it doesn’t work. anywho: so after two days of working on this post, i wrap it up, check it two or three times for spelling & grammar, and click over to the “Schedule this post for the future” button. i click that. go in and add my tags. lastly, i go to fix the date and time for when it should post… and the browser window goes blank.
nothing.
white screen. nothing’s loading, nothing’s moving. frantically, i go back to the previous page, and nothing.
all this to say, you’re on very thin ice with me right now as both a Posterous “evangelist” and a regular user.
edit: see that third bullet point? formatting is completely off because i copied and pasted that email response from the original email and for some reason, it carried over. WTH.
Hi Luke –Sorry the response was a bit short. Answering 100′s of emails in a day incentivizes brevity.
The longer response is basically that because Facebook accounts can be used to log you into Posterous, if we don’t log you out of Facebook, you’re really not logged out of Posterous.As for Autopost, yes, it’s been unstable over the past few days for various reasons. Part of it was switching to a new system of autoposting and some of it was just plain old increased demand for autopost. We add servers whenever we need to but we can’t add them instantaneously. So as we add more workers to the queue, there’s this cross over period where your posts might be delayed. Cheers,Vince
what I’m not getting though is this: I’m not using Facebook to log in to either of my Posterous blog accounts. at all. I’ll readily admit I’m not wholly savvy on all the behind the scenes stuff, so I may be missing something, but I don’t understand why, if I’m logging in with only my email address & password and never touching the little ‘log in with Facebook’ how or why that affects my logged in status with Facebook. that’s where I’m perplexed. is it because I have an autopost connection with my account?I do have to say: this entry autoposted MUCH faster than the past few entries, so kudos on that. but why no acknowledgement of the third point? I’m genuinely curious. is that just something y’all don’t plan on implementing anytime soon? or is it, and you’re just playing your cards close?anywho; thanks for the open response here. it’s appreciated.
This is very small potatoes, but Opera is the only browser that doesn’t automatically reload pages when you hit the back button. Meaning if you went back to find your post, it would have still been there. (It even works if you close the page, then reopen from the trash can and go back!) It has saved my butt a few times. The rest of your points are indeed a bucket of fail.On a side note, even though I’ve officially quit Facebook, I still can’t get away from it. I browse over to The Wall Street Journal last night and on the right-hand side I get this “Most Popular on Facebook” crap with a note saying “You need to be logged into Facebook to see your friends’ recommendations.” Ok, thanks. But. No. I’m on the freaking WSJ. I don’t give a shit what my Facebook friends think, usually because 80% of them are ignorant about anything on The WSJ anyway.
Wowsa. I guess I messed up closing my a href tag! Oh, well. Now you have to notice it.
So one of our philosophies at Posterous is that we want to leverage the automatic, built-in features that our users already use everyday, rather than spend our time recreating the wheel.While we’ll probably add support for drafts and autosaving into the web editor at some point, it’s definitely lower on our list due to the fact that, as you mentioned, email handles this kind of thing quite well, and we think we do a reasonable job handling posts via email, and the vast majority of our users apparently agree. We’re, of course, always trying to make it better, but we think it’s miles ahead of any other service’s similar feature.For folks, like yourself, who want fine-grained control of the formatting and structure of a post coming in by email — and, trust me, I know how you feel — there are a few things worth remembering:1. When you send in an HTML email, we try to respect as much of the original markup and styles as possible. We aren’t stripping out inline styles, and if your email leaves tags unclosed after a blockquote or something, it’ll probably still be that way in the post. We’ll get better at judging what should and shouldn’t stay, but it’s worth knowing that we err on the side of trusting your markup.2. We support Markdown. It’s a super-simple way to ensure that your intention comes across via the email and into the post. Markdown has been my preferred post markup syntax for years now, well before I joined Posterous. More info here: http://posterous.com/help/markdown3. We support plain text emails just fine.Hope that addresses your questions and helps out a bit in the future.
only you Luke
I know, I know. but in my defense, had this been something for this blog (my personal blog), I likely wouldn’t have been so frustrating.but yes: only me.
i’m pretty impressed that someone actually took the time to respond to this in detail (presumably you sent this to Posterous?) – but, i think i’m convinced to stay with WordPress for now.you made the case for posterous when i asked a couple of weeks ago – what was it again that you DIDN’T like about wordpress? just that you can email in a post?
LiveJournal 4eva, haha.
well, the email part is pretty nifty, but its not just that. Posterous really is dead simple easy and fast (autoposting has now picked up the pace again), especially when it comes to just emailing a photo or video in and BAM, its done.if they’re working on auto-save & drafts, i do believe it. so far, they’ve been growing really fast and user suggestions do get taken seriously. and its not that there’s anything wrong with WordPress, it just felt it a bit cumbersome to what my changing needs were.and no, i didn’t directly send this Posterous, i just made enough noise on twitter about it that they took a minute to look at it. now that i’ve cooled off a considerable amount (you cannot imagine how angry & disappointed i was about this last night), i still say Posterous is where i’m staying. i mean, c’mon: they took the time to personally respond here. i never really had such luck with WordPress or Blogger.
ew.
Hey Luke, I have had a similar experience with a post gone missing. It does suck big time. So now, whenever I am writing a longer post, or take really long to write a shorter post, I just post a first draft marked as private. That way, I can take all the time I want writing it, hitting the save button every time I want to do someting else for a while. Its not a real draft function off course, but it works pretty much the same.