Spineless Apologists

I know that earlier this week I said that I was trying to confine myself to one political rant a week here, I'm afraid I'm going to have to indulge in another mini-rant today. That said, it isn't about politics. So I'm not really contradicting my earlier statements. Anyway, what's 'grinding my gears' at the moment is an attitude I keep encountering online, for wont of a better word, we could call it 'sycophancy'. But before launching into a rant, let me give you some background. A couple of days ago one of the web stats services I use suddenly became inaccessible, although its help forum stayed up. This state of affairs persisted for more than twenty four hours, with no explanation from the site administrators on the forum, nor has there been any subsequent apology or explanation for the outage. As this wasn't the first time this had happened, I voiced my dissatisfaction on the forum in the relevant thread, pointing out that persistent outages and no communication from administrators represents an unacceptable level of customer service, even for a free service.

The reaction from other posters was incredible, as they rushed to defend the site, telling me how wonderful it usually was. One apologist tried to convince me how reliable the service was, pointing out it was only the one server which kept going down - and even then it had only suffered major outages three times in a twelve month period! Even more sickeningly, they tried to defend the lack of communication - 'just because nobody is posting here doesn't mean that they aren't aware of the problem and are trying to fix it.' But the point is that users do need to know that admins are aware of a problem and are addressing it. Especially if it persists for more than a few hours. As a site owner, I have to consider the possibility that the service has gone off line permanently, in which case I have to decide whether to remove the (possibly) defunct code from my pages and find an alternative service.

But apparently I'm wrong. We shouldn't ever dare to criticise people for failing to provide the service they advertise. Instead we should sycophantically pussyfoot around them, asking them nicely if they might consider fixing it, if that isn't too much trouble, but not to worry if they don't as we customers aren't really important. Jesus Christ! What's wrong with these people? What do they think will happen if they take a robust critical stance with these service providers? Frankly, I'm doing them a favour by using their services on my site! But no, creeping around them is the order of the day. Indeed, most depressingly, I discovered that the original poster in the thread about the outage had subsequently posted a truly cringe worthy paean of love to the service provider in another thread, telling the world what a brilliant service they provided! Yeah, so brilliant they weren't providing you with any stats and were completely ignoring your requests for help! Grow some balls!