h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Jimster,

You suggested I continue the "Fume" debate somewhere else, so I hope you don't mind me taking it here. Apologies if it's a bit long, but I have a few things to say. It's intended to be helpful and reconciliatory, so I'd appreciate it if you made the effort to read it.


1. Who is this troublemaker, anyway?

I'm a very laid-back guy, as others will testify, but I see red every time I see people or organisations who are failing their customers and being deliberately obstructive about it. If you take my previous responses to be rude then I apologise for the rudeness. Tone apart, I cannot apologise for the content.

In some ways it has provoked a debate which would otherwise not have happened.

I'm direct and in that respect I'm different. I don't expect the instant support of other researchers here as I don't believe many of them yet understand what I'm saying. I'm happy to be unpopular on this, as any other reaction would invite you to accuse me of stirring up trouble, I'm sure. My message is not for them, it's for you and your organisation.

To get to the point, there are a couple of areas which I believe you, as a site host, can take action to ensure the ongoing existence of this community...


2. How do we manage an online community whose existence is threatened by apparently unassailable technical problems?

As the service continues to deteriorate, you will see more dissatisfaction. Some members of the online community will simply leave (as you suggested I do - thanks for that, ever the perfect host), and some of those will not return, even if the service improves. Others will try to set up alternative communities on non-BBC sites. A few will stay to the bitter end, whatever that turns out to be.

If you have any responsibility for the health of this online community, I suggest you start planning how you intend to manage this exodus and its aftermath.


3. Communication, communication, communication

Forgive the text-book sentence, but communication is the foundation upon which the success of modern organisations depends. I'm sure the BBC are banging on about it all the time internally. Sadly, as your workload has increased with these difficulties, you have chosen to let communication suffer as a result.

It has been effectively reduced to issuing a single statement, "We are trying to fix the problems, please be patient", despite the fact that this problem has been going on for many months, and it is getting gradually worse. You may say you have given more information, but this is all at the operational level. You need to communicate with us on a service level.

Think about what we as customers really need to know. We don't care how many bits are in a byte or how many blade servers you can fit on a rack in Maidenhead. We don't even care how many staff are working on it - that's your business. We do care about the effects of the problems in terms of the services you provide us, though. We would like to manage our use of h2g2 to minimise those effects. How long is this going to go on for? What can I do to help? Which operations should I avoid doing, and when?

And then there are the long term effects. What should I do if this gets worse? How are the BBC going to safeguard the h2g2 community and the guide itself?

There are lots of things you can do to make things easier to swallow.


4. What service should I expect?

Well your T's & C's which are helpfully posted on each page tell me what not to expect. It's not the same thing is it?

The BBC delivers online services, and presumably has an online service manager. So what do you deliver? What services are there?
What times are they available? How often do you take them down for repairs? What percentage of web pages should load first time? How quickly do you respond to issues we raise? It's all reasonable stuff. I would guess that you already have these service levels. Why not share them with us?


5. Am I shooting the messenger?

That's up to you. You are the single point of contact I have at the BBC, apart from

1) a feedback forum where I can post what error message I just received.
2) The BBC complaints service. Is this really the way to get something done around here? I'd like to leave it as the last resort.

I would expect you to take ownership of anything that your customers raise with you, but to pass them on to another authority for
resolution if necessary.


6. So where do we go from here?

Well, what do you think? Of course if you don't want to discuss this at all, you can always remove this posting, I suppose. If you don't think I have any right to say it then you could always revoke my h2g2 login. Now that would make me go elsewhere.

Hi Icy,

Sorry I've not been able to reply to your post. I'm afraid we've had a few serious issues that needed investigation. Now's the first chance I've had to come to my Personal Space since Thursday and I found your message waiting for me.

I've forwarded your queries on to one of our Executives to look at; some of them are outside of my sphere of responsibility. In the meantime, while I can assure you most of your suggestions are already in place (we automatically escalate these issues each time they happen, so there's really no need to suggest this as a potential new course of action), I did want to draw your attention to one aspect of how h2g2 runs.

h2g2 runs on a form of macro-management. there are only three in-house team members and thousands of h2g2 community members, so it's impossible for us to provide continual one-on-one discussion about each and every issue. We make announcements whenever we can - or whenever we feel the situation has changed sufficiently to warrant a new announcement (hence the gap between the announcement on 18 January and the most recent one). But we also use our volunteer schemes, the Aces who greet people, the Scouts, Subs and Curators who provide editorial advice, the Gurus who know a lot of the technical answers, and so on. Now, in the rather heated discussion last week, our volunteers provided you with a few answers and you were quite dismissive of them. When I answered the same questions you stated that you didn't believe me. When one of our most experienced volunteers backed up what I said, you told him you disagreed with every word he said.

Now, the answers you received might not have been the ones you answered, but they were the answers nonetheless. I'm willing to discuss matters as long as time allows, but if you're not willing to listen, I don't think there'd be any point in wasting time trying to convince you. This is why I pointed out that if you were trying to pick an argument - which it did look like you were trying to do - I wasn't interested in continuing the discussion.

If you wish to discuss the way h2g2 handles day-to-day matters, you can always post a message to the feedback forum listed in the main menu. The in-house team monitor the forum of a weekday and a lot of our volunteers are subscribed to it too. If you have questions about the wider DNA project, the DNA site called the hub is the best place to start (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/hub/).

OK, thanks Jimster, and thank you for forwarding my concerns upwards. Please let me know if you get any response that you can pass on.

It's the escalation in technical problems over a period of many months and the continual degradation in service particularly at peak times which has scared me. I can see this culminating in any of a number of possible outcomes which could result in the end of the h2g2 community in its current state. It has happened before at the BBC, after all.

The big difference between this and one of the other BBC communities is the edited guide, and I cannot see how this could survive any catastrophe which might befall the community which supports it.

I wasn't reassured by the volunteers that the BBC was focussing on the health of the online community. All the feedback is purely technical, and the volunteers appear happy to take the BBC on trust.

Maybe I'm wrong to be concerned. I hope I am anyway, but we'll find out soon enough I suppose.

Just to show that I'm not completely unreliable, I thought I'd post to say that the site performance has improved considerably in the last week or so. Yes there have been some problems, but overall it's been better.

The Server Too Busy message has been pretty rare, and the lag in showing which conversations have been updated seems to be restricted to certain peak evening periods.

Now I don't know (or care) what technical fixes may have taken place to cause this, but it's going in the right direction. Can you keep it up?

I do hope so

And thanks for the feedback - which I'll also pass on.

So I'm a stirrer now, am I?

My comment on that thread was a simulpost, so it looks worse than the joke it was. There is a serious point about final editing done without any communication with the author, but maybe you don't want to go there.


I've deliberately been lying low on monitoring & commenting on your performance, but I've followed the last few weeks with interest. We've had a few upgrades in that time, designed to fix the STB error, and the post counting & displaying problems. One was (quite rightly) backed out last week after it caused some serious problems. We're now in a worse state than we were last time I posted.

It's beginning to look like your technical team are unable to adequately test fixes before they release them. I'm not saying this is the case, but that's how it looks. If you want it to look more professional, then consider some of the communication points I mentioned last month. Did you get any feedback from when you escalated these?

See, I'm not quite sure how to take these kinds of posts. I could read them as good-natured 'sitrring' but to be honest sometimes you're just plain rude.

The facts don't really bear your argument out - the situation is visibly much better than it was a month ago, even with the occasional server issue - and I'm not really here to answer for our hard-working and very capable tech-team, so if you'll excuse me...

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OK it's a difficult question to answer, but you could attempt to find out. I did ask the question on DNA feedback a while ago and they wouldn't answer it either. It just doesn't look good, that's all.

Should I care that the technical team are hard working and capable? That's your problem. Let them prove it by results. I'll just report it as I see it, and I see conversation lists which don't get updated for hours. I see frequent server too busy and other error messages. I see software releases made and then backed out because they caused worse problems than they solved.

I could list dozens of conversations here which catalogue the problems over the last few weeks, but I won't insult you by doing so.

I don't enjoy this, Jimster. I just want to get on with using h2g2. I've got a stack of ideas for guide entries, but I wonder whether there's any point in carrying on when the infrastructure looks so flaky.