I personally don't get really sites like these that try to be a one stop shop for fixes and tech help when there's google to search the whole web!

but I do concur that for NEW problems you could not find answers for via google, that this would be a good idea.

qrius

Maybe I'm just becoming an old fart, but this site bugs me. Not the service per se, but how you interact with it. I ran into Satisfaction from the O'Reilly media website, and I couldn't figure out how to enter a new "ticket." I kept looking for something like "Submit a request/problem report" and didn't find it.

Then I tried to search Satisfaction, and nothing happened in Seamonkey. So I switched to IE and tried again, only to have IE try to download a page. Weird.

(No I didn't submit this to Satisfaction as an error report. I was getting to upset.)

mb

I have to say how extremely happy I am with Satisfaction. I discovered it via Twitter. I had an answer in a few hours, and I am amazed that someone didn't think of this way of handling trouble calls before. Not only are there the paid experts, but normal people who have previously experienced a problem are also there to lend their advice to you. Bravo Satisfaction.

dj-anakin

Hi! I'm with Satisfaction, wanted to pop in and reply. First, thanks for the kind words, Dj-Anakin! Much appreciated. And now to address the other issues:

MB: Yeah, we know. So sorry about that. We were a little too clever with the submission form for our own good -- the entry box looks more like a search field than a submit, and so people sometimes miss it. We're changing it to be more obvious about how to start a new question/problem/idea for a particular company over the next couple of days and hope to have that fix out next week.

QRIUS: I'm not entirely clear on the distinction between us and google...? Our pages are pretty well search-engine-optimized, so we get a lot of traffic to specific question/answer pages from people looking for support. We aim to be one of those suppliers of answers to people who come from Google. Obviously we don't cover everything, but for the areas we're covering we do get a lot of traffic. Our goal is to make it even easier to get from question->Google->answer, by creating more answers and getting 'em ever higher up in the search ranks (and getting the better answers up higher on the page, too, since it can sometimes be a challenge to find an answer on, say, a forum page.)

Also, one last thing to add -- since we're sitting here in the middle of San Francisco, and have been working with a lot of web app companies, and since we're all kinda gadget freaks, there is a lot of tech support on Satisfaction, but that's not our only focus. In fact, one of our most robust areas is the area for Timbuk2 bags, which has a ton of customer and company participation. but there are some other interesting uses, too -- like the City of Ann Arbor has been using it to communicate with their constituents. It's fun for us to see what kinds of clever uses people come up with.

lane becker

I am posting this here hoping someone from Satisfaction will read it, because (ironically) I cannot get help at the Satisfaction site, since I cannot log in to Satisfaction. I signed up, and somehow my user name (aka "canonical name") and email address were captured before I verified my account. Now, when I try to verify my account, or reset my password, I get an error "Canonical name has already been taken". Since there is no place on the reset form for me to enter my "canonical name", this means that at one level Satisfaction recognizes this name belongs to my email address, and at another level, it does not. And I cannot get help on the Satisfaction site without logging in. Gotcha!

GBMax