Stealth admissions

When I pay for a service and find it poorly executed I normally write a polite letter to the service provider suggesting changes. Usually, however I get politely told to get lost. What amuses me however is that some months down the track I often note that my suggestion has been adopted -- without notifying me, of course. My usual bank, the Bank of Queensland has been particularly apt at that. I think I have got just about everything I asked for from them -- eventually.

And the same is true of Telstra/Bigpond. When they first made available the service you are now reading -- BigBlog -- it did not even have an option for uploading pre-coded html. If you did upload html, it was reproduced, not rendered. Can you imagine anything more hopeless than that in a blog? I of course complained and got told huffily that they had "no plans" to introduce a html facility. Yet just such a facility popped up earlier this year and has now made it worthwhile for me to use this blog.

The latest innovation that I have noticed is that they now have a blogroll facility of sorts. I wrote a couple of didactic letters to the long-suffering Francis Croydon about that -- which got zero response -- but I noticed recently that they now have a "Favourite links" feature. I have no idea WHEN it popped up but much searching revealed no such thing when I looked originally.

In a recent unanswered letter I also insisted that a blogroll facility had to be on the front page and I now note that the "Favourite links" feature is now to be found there -- as well as being a menu item. It could be however that the front page feature only appeared when I first used the menu item concerned.

The facility is still a poor one as you have to enter links by hand one at a time. On my other blogs I just copy and paste a whole list at a time into a new blogroll. Maybe that facility will silently pop up on BigBlog some time soon as well.

I guess that somewhere deep in the ratlike recesses of their brains, these guys know that I am doing them a big favour by giving them a user's viewpoint and thus enabling them to improve their product but they are never big enough to acknowledge that.