New Support Form
Some of you may have already noticed, we have a new support form.
https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=support.msg
It still has some bumps that need smoothing out, and it does require javascript! Some tests results are still being refined, and we plan to add more in the future. Suggestions and comments are welcome.
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May 7th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
So are you guys getting a lot of fake support requests right now of people testing the new form?
May 7th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Great Job =D
May 7th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I misread that as Support *Forum* at first, and ended up being very confused. But it still looks and works pretty dang well!
May 7th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Ehmm… and if the form does not work… do I have to submit a support ticket via smoke signals?? hehehe cool
just kidding folk. Seems nice to me. Great work!
Cheers from Buenos Aires
May 7th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I like it!
May 7th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Thanks for the kind comments! I’ve already fixed the problem where it was telling pretty much everybody that their DNS changes hadn’t propagated yet.
May 7th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
I always appreciate the humor you guys put into your site, job, and interactions with us damn pesky customers.
May 7th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
What about the erroneous display that a hosting plan has expired?
On four active accounts?
Pete?
Peace,
Gene
May 7th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
I really don’t think it’s a good idea for a support form to require JavaScript. If a user is having problems, they might have to access it from who-knows-what-browser, including text-only browsers, browsers without JavaScript, a JavaScript-filtering proxy, restrictive client-side filters, etc.
Please do not require JavaScript on the only way we have to contact you when we are having problems.
May 7th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Why would problems with a users website affect what browser they use to access the support form??
Also, hasn’t the panel ALWAYS required javascript?
May 7th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
’tis pretty
May 7th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Will try the new form out when I have troubles.
I wish I don’t have to use it
May 7th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
shell service for user xx on drpepper warning Your account is using too much memory or CPU time.
Is this just a bug? ô.o
cant imagine my small scripts are taking that much o.o
May 8th, 2007 at 12:19 am
@NightRyu
Looking through the logs it looks like a website under that user grabbed a bunch of memory all at once at around 7 am PST. I didn’t see anything for the rest of the day or yesterday either, so I would not worry about it unless it is happens again. It could of just have been someone repeatedly reloading the page or a spammer trying to abuse a comment section if you have one. People do tend to spaz out about anything anime, so you may have just had an overeager visitor such as someone with a site download bot.
May 8th, 2007 at 12:51 am
Your account is using too much memory or CPU time.
Yeah,got that too, guess it is just a little misjudgement.
That, or I am hosted on a 486
May 8th, 2007 at 3:34 am
The panel.dreamhost.com is not working!!! (8.5.07) since a couple of hours. Is’nt it?
May 8th, 2007 at 4:37 am
My sites are down. And support form isnt working in my browser and cant send emails to support
May 8th, 2007 at 4:55 am
Just to let you guys know, when using the Opera 9.02 browser and attempting to select websites that are experiencing problems, clicking the next button after making the selections does nothing.
May 8th, 2007 at 5:02 am
I can’t get past step 2 in Opera 9.20. That sucks. Also, it still says “Step 1″ on the step 2 page. I guess the JavaScript needs a lot of tweaking, and a server-side fallback wouldn’t hurt either. Right now, turning off JavaScript and trying to click a “Next” button only reloads the page.
Also, I wonder why the heck you’re inlining such huge amounts of JavaScript in the HTML code. It would be much more efficient to include it with an SRC attribute on the SCRIPT element, to allow sane browsers to cache the scripts and not load them on each and every page load.
I would have said this in a support request, but currently the support form isn’t working for me.
May 8th, 2007 at 5:05 am
I really believe that DH needs a more generic option for submission of requests too.
It’s been previously discussed/mentioned that email from the registered hosting owner’s email address could be used to start a support request. It does not appear that this works, but it would be VERY beneficial when you simply can’t get to an updated browser that DH has tested on.
Not everyone likes this Web 2.0 BS. Lynx and handheld browsers are only so capable.
May 8th, 2007 at 5:18 am
Horrible. Did you guys really try that with a real support problem?
May 8th, 2007 at 5:22 am
And I can´t sent my requests to support. I´m stuck in the … mud.
May 8th, 2007 at 7:07 am
According to the new form my account (which is on automatic rebill) has expired. So, besides the fact that it looks nice, it’s crap to work with.
May 8th, 2007 at 7:49 am
My account too seems to have expired. Man! That’s a false error. I am having some problem with .htaccess, the directory index file is not loaded anymore. Here’s the .htaccess file’s contents:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|js|css|robots\.txt) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off
http://site.com say ‘No input file specified.’ Can anyone help?
May 8th, 2007 at 7:56 am
Dan:
That’s the equivalent of a 404 error. You’re accessing a page that doesn’t exist.
Fix your rewrite :P.
@DreamHost people:
I have to concur with some of the above. JavaScript should be used to enhance, but (for lesser folk) the page should revert to a plain html experience when JS is unavailable.
Please do not REQUIRE JavaScript! Just actively use it when present.
I use my cell phone and if I’m ever away from home and have to contact support, I need to do it from quite a lesser interface.
May 8th, 2007 at 8:00 am
@Jason - what cellphone are you using?
Cause even my ancient Sanyo PM8200 support java (and works with the panel).
Not to say you’re wrong however, as I somewhat agree that they shouldn’t *require* java, though it sounds like the requirement is specifically for AJAX features which will work to (heavily?) reduce the load on the Panel servers. Which is a bonus I suppose, but there must be somehow to provide backwards-compatibility with older devices (ie. cellphones, as you mentioned).
May 8th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Well its good and properly displays everything, But for someone in a hurry i think its not a good ploy, Please consider selecting between the old form and the new one at the beginning! Thanks
May 8th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Why is having 5 separate pages better than the old 1-page solution? Too much clicking and loading.
Suggestion: Put the old support page back. Or at least take Sanjaya’s suggestion of giving us a choice.
Further suggestion: Don’t force us to use this page at all. Accept emails to support that include a matching registered user name and account number (as shown on the “Account Status” tab) in the subject line, regardless of what email address they come from.
Even further suggestion: In the future, show us changes like this as beta, so that we can comment before you put something like this into production.
May 8th, 2007 at 10:02 am
unless you add a ‘check all’ option on the bunches of checkbox lists you’re showing, this is definately not an improvement.
May 8th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Slick, but not that great for dedicated customers. I don’t like all the extra steps to just send in a simple request. When something affects the whole server, do I have to check every single hosted domain? Seems ridiculous.
Needs a tweak for dedicated or a “select all” box or something. Oh, yeah, what he said. (I just read that).
May 8th, 2007 at 10:14 am
I appreciate the feedback so far.
I have examined the support form under Opera 9.2 and it seems to be an issue specific to Opera. The next button uses a standard Prototype.js Event.observe() system to initiate an ajax call and for some reason Opera is the only browser it doesn’t work on. I’ll continue to try to figure out exactly which part of the code it’s balking at, but it’s going to take a while considering Opera doesn’t appear to have a javascript run-time debugger (unless anyone knows of one?)
Errors regarding expired hosting plans or misconfigured jabber services can be ignored for now. They’re false positives and will be fixed.
Jason: I do plan to offer an alternate form (much like the old one) to browsers without JavaScript enabled.
brasscrest: We did beta this in the Beta section of our discussion forums. I think two or three people in total gave us feedback!
May 8th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Pete: Glad to hear your are following up on the Opera issue espeically. There is a Error -consol in Opera.
http:// www . opera . com/support/search/view/728/
Where do I find debug information about JavaScript and Java problems?
For debugging purposes, Opera creates a log of JavaScript errors. To see the log, go to Tools > Advanced > JavaScript console.
May 8th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Pete: Do also see : http://my. opera. com/community/dev/jsdebug/ - “How to debug JavaScript problems with Opera”
May 8th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Thanks for the help. In this case, by “debugger” I specifically mean the ability to place break lines and watch values and step through a javascript function line by line as it executes. So far, no dice.
May 8th, 2007 at 11:45 am
One major issue: My site’s down. I’m trying to find out why and submitting a ticket. I submit the ticket,and poof, stays at ‘Please wait while we submit your ticket to our technical support department.’ and does not progress. I don’t know how I am supposed to contact them now since this is broken and you can’t find a phone number anywhere.
Suggestions anyone?
May 8th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Good job!
What about preloading the selected background?
May 8th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Good luck with the Opera problem. I haven’t been able to get Opera to work properly with Prototype on any of my websites.
May 8th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Good news. I’ve fixed the Opera problem. Opera still has a problem canceling a ticket or an outage, but you can now go through the entire ticket submission process without any problems. Thanks so much for letting us know (it did used to work on Opera but a change I made late in the development broke it, oops!)
May 8th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
The new form sucks. How could a web hosting company decide to use javascript for it’s ticket system. This just shows how far DH is from reality. Kids games, massive downtime, now cut off a % of users from support. What’s next?
May 8th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Not to be combative, but the reality is that 99.99% of our panel users have javascript. We did research this before making it a requirement. Don’t worry though, a non-JS alternate will be forthcoming.
May 9th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Much easier for both the end-costumer who is able to label the support request to the proper support department and the support itself who doesn’t have to re-route support tickets which are mislabeled!
Good job!
May 9th, 2007 at 4:15 am
Pete - SWEET! Thanks for hearing us.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:26 am
@Greg: please post here with what domain you host with DreamHost. What the hell does ‘kids games’ even mean? heh. you mean posting like a nintendo power fan boy on playstation blogs?
May 9th, 2007 at 10:12 am
I don’t mind being combative, Pete
My feeling is that anyone using an up-to-date system (and you can’t imagine how many hosts out there use ancient versions of PHP, etc.), ought to have an up-to-date browser with all the bells and whistles to test sites on. And use as many browsers as possible. I live in both the Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista environments to make sure all my stuff works properly. So Javascript’s the least of it.
Peace,
Gene
May 9th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
@Mousee: Java and JavaScript are two infatomably different and completely unrelated technolgies. Java is a compiled langauge that runs on a Java framework, Java 2 ME most commonly on cellular phones. JavaScript, however, requires browser support, and even though the mobile phone supports Java, doesn’t mean the web browser installed on it supports JavaScript. Opera Mini is a web browser written in Java that supports most web pages, but it hasn’t got JavaScript capabilities and thus can’t work with any web pages (like the new DreamHost support form) that requires JavaScript.
Requiring JavaScript is in the first place completely wrong, since you can’t guarantee its support. HTML, however, is pretty well supported across all browsers, operating systems, platforms and whatnot, so adding JavaScript as an optional addon to existing HTML functionality is always okay. Requiring it, though, on top of creating something that only works in some browsers, is completely unacceptable, at least for such an important feature as the support form.
May 9th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I should probably have reloaded the page before I replied, because the entries I read before replying was a bit stale. Anyhoo, much what I write in my reply still aplies. Not having fallback functionality sucks. I mean, the functionality is already there on the server, the difference is that it’s only callable through AJAX and not by submitting the form. By encapsulating the server-functionality appropriately, it should be callable by both AJAX and by the form submission. Please fix this.
Fixing this makes any further “improvements” to the form such that JavaScript at least can be disabled and thus make the form work, however slow it might be. A slow and boring Web 1.0 form that actually submits the form with an HTTP POST and relaods the page is much better than a cool and snappy Web 2.0 form that does exactly zip, because the JavaScript involved doesn’t work for whatever reason.
I think the new form looks good and I wouldn’t mind using it, but please add fallback functionality!
May 10th, 2007 at 5:04 am
@Asbjørn Ulsberg - Sorry, I should have been more politically correct in specifying *java-script* and not just the generic “java” phrase, despite the fact that most current cellphones commonly support both
May 10th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
@Mousee: It has nothing to do with politically correctness. Saying “Java” while meaning “JavaScript” is like saying “.NET” while meaning “TCL”. And, most current cellphones don’t have fully JavaScript-capable browsers, at least not in the DOM-part which script libraries like Prototype use extensively. Nonetheless, requiring JavaScript (even if it isn’t broken) is a bad practice.
May 10th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
It should have already been quite obvious I was refering to javascript, I was just too lazy to type out “javascript”.
But feel free to nitpick words all you wish.
May 11th, 2007 at 11:59 am
You’re both wrong. It’s obvious that Mousee was talking about some sort of coffee beverage when he said Java.
May 11th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Ah, but of course!