Hello everyone – it's a little bit sad that I have to write this post, but I definitely want to keep things positive and encouraging! :)
📖 A Couple of Quick Anecdotes
Some of you may have seen a post today from a user who claimed that "Journaly doesn't respond to Customer Support emails" and refused to respond to their request to remove their account. Before writing that post, the user had sent a handful of emails during the middle of the night where I live – the same email, just repeated – and after a very long day at my full-time job I logged in at 9:44pm to handle their request and remove their account. The total response time was approximately 18 hours.
Last week, a different user signed up, wrote 6 posts in different languages that all got tremendous feedback, and then they wrote an angry post in all big letters about how the comments were unnnecessary and "snobby", and then sent 10 emails to our Customer Support asking to delete their account, one of them that just said "I WANT TO DELETE MY ACCOUNT" repeated about 200 times.
⭐️ You're Amazing!
Don't worry! This isn't a rant and I'm not upset or angry at all. I just thought this was perhaps a good time to both share some praise and raise an interesting point.
So firstly, I want to praise to you, the community, once again! I did see that a few of you tried to help the first user I mentioned by providing our Customer Support email and with supportive words. I also saw that when the second user made that angry post, all of you who commented kept things so encouraging and positive, simply explaining our culture of helping each other to improve and providing constructive suggestions to the user for future posts. Seeing these kinds of interactions on the platform over and over again make me feel so proud of the Journaly community and it always warms my heart – thank you!
Secondly, because I know a lot of people might not be aware of this, I thought I would just take this chance to share that Journaly Customer Support is me – nobody else. Over the years I've handled thousands of Customer Support requests by myself and I try really hard to get to them as quickly as I can. Most people have been kind, but I've certainly had to deal with some angry, rude, and even abusive emails over the years.
☎️ Journaly Customer Support Efforts
In almost all cases, if the request has been urgent I have replied within 24 hours. I will definitely admit that for non-urgent cases, although I still often reply within a day, it can sometimes take me a week or even a little bit longer since I had to come back to working a full-time job. But I really do try my best to help everybody, and after nearly 5.5 years of spending thousands upon thousands of hours working at Journaly's Software Engineer, Designer, Marketer, and Customer Support agent, I'm still doing all of this completley for free and at this time I continue to pay some of my own money each month to keep Journaly online for everyone to use.
🌲 Conclusion
So with all of that said, I feel like responding to that user today and addressing their request in less than 24 hours was perfectly reasonable, and didn't deserve them posting publicly like that. But at the same time, I also understand that my situation is perhaps a little unique and when people use a platform like this, they probably don't imagine that the creator is also the one Customer Support Rep, and they probably don't imagine they're working for free. I think a lot of people might forget that there's a human being on the other side of those emails.
But like I said, more than anything I want this to be a positive moment. The fact that the vast majority of people over the years have been pleasant, kind, and respectful; and that I can go to sleep at night knowing that whatever someone posts on Journaly, the community will respond with kindness, helpfulness, and support on my behalf, is all just absolutely incredible.
Lastly, I would like to apologize to any users who have received slow response times. I promise I will do my best to improve this and I thank you for your patience!
Happy language learning and happy journaling everyone, you all rock! 🎸✨
Headline image by wilhelmgunkel on Unsplash
Hi Robin, thanks for posting this, it's really helpful. Can you pin this in the new user section? I know you've enough to do but... would it be possible in the future to add a 'delete account' function to cut down on manual requests. Thanks for all you do, I'm fairly new but I am really enjoying this fantastic website.
Robin, you're amazing and inspiring. It's nice to know a little more about you through this post. Thank you for creating opportunities to learn and build friendships through Journaly. You truly rock too!
Wow! What a labor of love! Thank you so much for providing this wonderful platform where people who share your passion for connection can support each other! ❤️
Oh, I think I missed the all the drama and part of me is great for that, lol. I'm sorry this happened to the community and you. Sadly, the tiny percentage of the unrespectful and selfish people will always make the biggest noise and impression. Let's focus on the positive side. We always appreciate you!
Hi Robin, thank you very much for your work! I'm sorry you have to deal with those disrespectful people from time to time. Don't let them discourage or upset you. As @Little_Louis suggested, a method of letting users delete an account by themselves will probably save you a lot of work in the future. You could also mention that response time can be longer in the welcoming e-mail? Bearing in mind that there will always be someone that cannot be satisfied (as surprising as it can be with such an amazing platform like this one), we have to accept that in all aspects of life. Thank you again! ♥️
Thanks for the kind and supportive comments, everyone. I really appreciate them! Regarding an account deletion feature, the reason that I haven't added this as of yet is because I've always wanted to consider account deletion thoroughly and handle it with care, with respect to how it impacts other users and the community. If the deletion is simply handled in a very basic fashion without much thought, that means that all records related to that user would also be deleted. So if the user left really helpful comments to lots of Journaly users, all of them would lose their comments. Likewise, if lots of users kindly left the deleted user feedback, their Journaly statistics would be impacted ("thanks" they gave/received would be gone as well as comments posted). I feel it would be a shame for other Journaly family members to be impacted like that – it's nice to be recognized for your efforts with the statistics and badges, and although this part is definitely not black and white, but in some sense you could say that if we give somebody else feedback/corrections to help them improve their language skills, those comments now belong to them and it would be a shame for them to suddenly lose that feedback.
So a long time ago I designed a system that would try to handle this as thoughtfully as possible, by assigning all of those related records that impact other Journaly users to an "anonymous" account. This way, the user can delete their account as they wish, but any people they helped on Journaly would get to keep those valuable comments, and users who helped them would keep their statistics and recognition for doing so.
The trouble is that this is simply quite a lot of work to build and until now there have just been more important projects to work on, since this is something that doesn't come up very often and I can still help to delete accounts, especially with the new admin (programming) scripts we recently wrote.
I'm always happy to take your feedback, though! Do you feel that my desired system is valuable and worthwhile? Or do you personally not really mind if you could potentially lose comments you've received from a deleted user and some stats you have related to them?
Oh my goodness! I had no idea how complicated account deletion could be! Yikes! My preference would be to keep the feedback comments that I had received. As for my stats, those are nice, of course, but not as important to me. Just my 2 cents worth. 😉
Personally, I wouldn't mind the lost comments, even less the stats. I also feel it's the property of the person who wrote the comments, so if they wish to disappear from the site they should have the right to disappear completely. But I always write down for myself the most helpful comments.
I was wondering what would happen to the comments and corrections, but what a thoughtful system! I think it's a great system. I personally don't mind my feedbacks and comments getting lost. As for the feedbacks, I always take notes so that I can keep them elsewhere. That being said, if deleting all the feedbacks and comments of a deleted account generate some confusion, I would definitely prefer your system. For example, if said deleted account was the only person who had corrected a certain post, then, when their feedback/comments were completely deleted, would that post emerge again as a post with yet-no-feedback? I don't only learn from feedbacks on my posts but also on others' posts, so I would appreciate if the past feedback stays intact. But, I can understand if a person would want to delete everything in the process, too.
I missed this drama episode, and as @Lariza said, I'm glad I did. From the looks of it: This is the typical troll episode, which (a) can cause emotional damage, (b) unfortunately happens almost everywhere on the internet, (c) I forgot what my third point was.
To be more constructive here: What do you think about just disabling a user (profile), without deleting all of their produced contents (posts, comments, feedback, posts, etc.)? A user could then be just inactive, meaning they can't log in to Journaly anymore and keep writing stuff. That should be relatively easy to implement (= much less work than the aggressive strategy of deleting all entities related to a user). So by all means and purposes, they're out of the community (not participating actively), but what's there is still there. That's not only technically easier, but I think it also fits better to what Journaly is for.
An alternative could be that they can log in, but not write posts. You could even put that (in)active flag in the user settings, so you can decide to be active again in the future.
Maybe have a word with Steve who runs readlang.com (he’s just relaunched). He runs it by himself and probably deals with similar problems? Is there a business group you could join, where website owners are tackling common issues? Just a thought. Also, I had a look at your help page, and wondered if it might be good to add an automated response when people email you, which states, 'I aim to review all emails within 28 days, as a sole operator, I receive multiple emails daily - and unfortunately there may be some delays in response. For account deletions [this will happen]. For all other matters, [this will happen]. You are valued member of the community and I thank you in advance for your patience'. Or something like that maybe?
Is readlang still a thing? I loved that app. But sure, he has a lot more to do with copyright, since people just copy whole books in there :D. Journaly is quite different (in principle), since people write their own texts.
Hi @edufuga. I've edited the previous my previous comment, and yeh, good point about differences :)
From self-experience, I can tell it is possible to have a quick response to a mail. I did have one the only time I sent one.