Free Fall
Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/07/2009 - 00:03
The ratings for Fast Dial are in free fall, and not going to recover soon, nor ever recover fully.
What you should do is
- issue an apology
- start a new series ("Fast Dial Reloaded" or somesuch)
- make some promises — which you keep — not to change user settings wherever doing so is avoidable
Re: Free Fall
Submitted by Mafia_Penguin on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 01:17I think that "Fast Dial Reloaded" should:
a) be a direct divergent of 1.90, or
b) be a direct divergent of FD 2.11.
An "Advanced" tab would be nice.
Also, warning boxes about known bugs (like a checkbox for "show fast dial icon in tab bar" would show a message saying, "This is not compatible with Tab Mix Plus' New Tab button. Continue?".
Great ideas, anonymous!
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Re: Free Fall
Submitted by chiaroscuro on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 02:48The ratings for Fast Dial are in free fall, and not going to recover soon, nor ever recover fully.
I think they will.
Needs more communication and with Userlogos down it is impossible.
Let us hope it is up and running soon.
Re: Free Fall
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 04:37>>The ratings for Fast Dial are in free fall, and not going to recover soon, nor ever recover fully.
>I think they will.
Nope. To some extent, it's like a GPA. If it dips low enough, long enough, then as a practical matter one will never get back on the honor roll.
But, continuing the analogy, in this case it's like a GPA where they limit your class load if your grades are bad, so that you cannot get five As as quickly as you got five Fs.
Potential users looked at the rating that Fast Dial had, and were motivated to try it; now they're motivated to avoid it. Meanwhile, established users are unlikely to rate new versions except when either they feel that the version is notably worse, or immeasurably better.
Only a small minority of users are going to come to UserLogos when things go wrong. Most will just uninstall, and most of those who do more will just blast the addon at Mozilla.org.
Re: Free Fall
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 05:58> Only a small minority of users are going to come to UserLogos when things go wrong.
You cannot come to userlogos when it's down.
> Most will just uninstall, and most of those who do more will just blast the addon at Mozilla.org.
I was happy with the version 2.11 and my selfcreated logos. But the update deleted my logos. So everything is messed up. I uninstalled it.
I never needed an account for Mozilla addon page, but yesterday I made one to give the new fast dial a really bad review, because I'm really pissed about the update.
Using SpeedDial now and will never look back.
Re: Free Fall
Submitted by Nina (not verified) on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 09:27It's just utterly bad manners towards the users if you mess up their very private settings and push something onto them they simply didn't ask for.
It's not that fast dial itself is "completely messed up" now, it's more of a breach of trust. and that actually, by overwriting (instead of adding... or was this just a bug - that the developer intended to just add them and now they got overwritten?) shortcuts of the users, the developer has deleted user data without asking, even though it may just have been 200 bytes, but it is user data which has to be handeled like a sanctuary.
You could very easily just replace those added shortcuts and delete "userlogos" from the search engine liste, setting google or yahoo as your preference again, no big deal, and you would of course remember the 3 lost shortcuts easily.
Then, you'd be back to normal AND you have an updated add-on.
And to be honest, it isn't any malware at all or bad content. It's, again, just bad manners, because the programm didn't ask to add those shortcuts.
But many users will ask themselves now: "can you still trust this addon anymore? What will be next, deleting more of your user data? changing your settings up to a point where your browser doesn't work anymore like expected? Maybe even changing or adding stuff outside of Firefox?"
I wouldn't suspect that because I hope the developer learned from this mistake, but all the other users (of which most may be already gone by now) will still be very suspicious about this add-on and maybe don't trust it anymore.
It's not about a messed-up add-on, which it is not (if you would install it newly, you probably woudln't have any problems, because there is no previous data to overwrite)
It's about an "epic communication fail" (the communication between add-on and user) and the resulting significant breach of trust.
Re: Free Fall
Submitted by Zapotek (not verified) on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 12:07An apology would be nice. Not that it'd get me back into using Fastdial - that page cannot be turned again, the trust is gone. But still, an apology is fair and presupposed to follow this kind of mess and inconvenience. I'm disappointed.
Re: Free Fall
Submitted by Dacian (not verified) on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 13:35i stil love this add-on, can you put back the icon on tab bar, with an option for disble it for other mean persons.
id did not mess any of my bookmarks in fast dial, i just make the 4x4 to 5x5 thumbs, and they were there, no logos diappeared.
it just won't loan when firefox starts with blank page, appears only in new tab after stars, I use tab mix plus, I did put the crome.... thing in there
Re: Free Fall
Submitted by Ege (not verified) on Fri, 01/09/2009 - 04:00Firefox have updated several extensions at once and i was so dissapointed when I noticed that the mess created after the install was caused by FastDial. I do not say that you should keep everything the same; every program needs an interface update... But, changing our preferences, default search engine, deleting our bookmarks, deleting our thumbnails (it was nice to see my blog's old theme as the preview, which is gone now), releasing buggy software as an update (showing thumbnails in a crappy way that they all seem noisy and ugly, not showing in new tabs, buggy preferences dialog etc.)... You just can't imagine the number of users who once loved but now hate this plugin. Just a small dialog, asking our permission before changing anything would be enough!
Re: Free Fall
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 01/09/2009 - 20:09The apology has come very late. In any case, here are your best further moves:
1. Fork Fast Dial into two lines, Quick Dial and Power Dial.
* Quick Dial will be a speed dialer. (The name "Fast Dial" is trashed. If every one of the next 590 reviews were 5 stars, the over-all score of Fast Dial would still only climb to 4 stars. And the next 590 reviews just aren't going to be that good.) Make a *promise* that Quick Dial will never have any spam, will never change user settings without permission, and will not depend on a site such as Userlogos to work.
*Power Dial will be your attempt to realize the vision that caused you to run Fast Dial into a ditch.
2. Make one last version of Fast Dial, which will be pretty much the same thing as Quick Dial. Write the final description of Fast Dial to let people know about Quick Dial and about Power Dial.