Upwork Tech Support Strategy

[6a6db855]

1. Tell the user that you will get back to them in 24-48 hours.

2. Wait two weeks.

3. Deny that the bug happens.

4. When faced with incontrovertible evidence that the bug happens, claim that that's the intended behaviour.

5. Close the ticket with a big cheerful "SOLVED!"

I think this must be their official strategy, because that's been my experience every time I've reported a bug to them.

The latest one is about missing notifications for messages. I keep getting messages from clients which fail to trigger the browser tab alert (the red square with the number of messages in it that appears superimposed on the browser tab icon) and fail to alert me with an email, so sometimes I don't see them for days. I had the setting to email me about unread messages set to 15 minutes. After much back-and-forth, tech support said it was because of that. So there are two issues here. Firstly, that a setting which says it's just about emails actually also controls browser tab notifications, unlike other websites (like Facebook or Slack) which will immediately update the browser tab icon for unread messages, regardless of the email frequency setting (and these popular websites set the standards for what behaviour users expect). Secondly, even if that were the correct behaviour for that setting, it's clearly missing messages which are much older than 15 minutes and failing to alert me about them.

I now have the email frequency set to "Immediately". This isn't what I want, because I don't want to be bombarded with emails when I switch away from the messages tab for a few minutes (which was why I set it to 15 minutes in the first place). But it seems to function as a workaround for the two bugs mentioned above. I'm guessing that, if you set it to "Immediately", it triggers the browser tab alert and the email unconditionally, whereas if you set it to 15 minutes, it uses some kind of faulty logic to determine whether messages have been read, which gives false positives for messages open in inactive tabs in inactive browser windows or somesuch. I've asked them several times to tell me what algorithm this check is supposed to be following (so that maybe I can avoid the configurations of browser and tab status that incorrectly flag messages as read), but they won't. I expect they don't know; probably someone wrote the code years ago and has now quit.

[g_vasilevski]

Hi Rachael,

I`m sorry about the inconvenience this had caused you. 

I checked your ticket and I can see that you`ve answered the questions our technical team has posted, just to confirm that I`ve already escalated your concern to our team to investigate it further.

I would also like to point out that if you have the mobile app open or the message center from the desktop app in the background, it can open the message. This will result in detecting the message as read within few seconds and not showing any number next to the messages tab. Thank you.

[6a6db855]

I'm glad this issue is being looked into. But the main reason I made this post is that this is the unhelpful pattern I see *every time* I report a bug.

As for the specific issue, what do you mean by "mobile app open"? Do you mean running somewhere on a phone as a background task while the phone is locked and its screen is off, or running as the active task on a phone whose screen is on? I haven't been doing the latter at the times when this issue has happened, and I hope you'd agree the former would be a bug and outside of any sensible definition of "read". Similarly with the desktop app running in the background. It sounds like your developers need to rethink what "read" means and correct their algorithms accordingly.

There is also the second issue of the behaviour of the "email frequency" setting. The tech support people seemed to think it also controls browser tab alerts, even though it only states that it controls email frequency (and, as I said in this thread and also on the tech support ticket, industry standards that define user expectations also suggest that it should only control email frequency and not browser tab alerts). The behaviour should be changed, or if you can't do that, at the very least the text on the settings page should be changed to make it clear that it also controls the browser tab notification and setting it to anything other than Immediate will result in missing alerts for messages.

[g_vasilevski]

Hi Rachael,

Thank you for your feedback, I will share it with our team.

I have also shared your concern with our team that is handling your case. If there's anything else I can help you with let me know, thank you.