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Yesterday I had a query about a piece of software called Rescuetime. From within the dashboard on their site (I was logged into my profile) I clicked the Help link. The next page suggested using the forum but gave a direct contact form too. I thought the forum was the best place to start so I clicked the link.

RescueTime Forum - We tend to be most responsive to support requests posted at our shiny new forum.

A search found no answer but there was a large inviting box telling me I could ask a question. So I wrote what I needed to, re-read and re-edited. The next box invited me to use some tags as the program was saying tags would help me. So I tagged. It invited me to add a smiley. Quite why someone would add an actual :) to a question is beyond me so I skipped that. A quick recap:
- I login at rescuetime to see help
- I click Help
- I click to the indicated forum
- I do a search, write a question, add a tag or two and ignore the smiley.
I now scroll down a bit further and click Publish.
Up pops a floating box telling me I had not registered and that I needed to do that or login. Maybe it wanted my Rescuetime login? so I try that - it does not recognise me. Does it say I must not use the Rescuetime login? No. I complete the signup details but find the actual signup box is just below the visible view, so I scroll down. And the little floaty window disappears. I scroll down as far as I can go and retry the signup by filling in all the details again - and again the window is just that bit too small and again the floaty box goes. I max the browser window and try again - success! It sends me the verification email. I click that then come back to the forum and my new profile page. I look for my question but it has completely disappeared. Gone.

They do not tell me that their forum is completely disconnected to their own, they allow a question to be written, for tags and smileys to be added and then - only then - do they prompt for any sort of login and if it’s a new account they do not say your question will be tossed. And that stupid “OMG this is SOO clever” floaty window is just really bloody annoying.

The query I had? Doesn’t matter - how can you work with software produced by a company that can’t even get that most basic of workflows right? But I know for a fact that they do spend all their time in that most shiny of forums because they haven’t answered the email I sent about this yesterday.

[Post edited 13 March]
I shot the wrong app and probably shouldn’t have shot anything anyway.
I assumed that the forums were run by the same people and that my login would work there. Assumptions are never good and to be fair - to me - at no point was I made to think different. To this end I do think Rescuetime should add a line to the Help part of their site and maybe even a direct link to signup. That at least lets me expect to wait before asking.
And the signup at Getsatisfaction does still need to change. Maybe that hadn’t been tested / experienced before though and it looks fairly new so I should have thought a bit more before getting annoyed. Not my strongest of points though.

Thing is, I want and actually will use Rescuetime. On a daily basis I have another program - Active Timer - that tracks my browser use but I want longer stats as work varies not only by day but by week and only after say 3 months do I think I can accurately work my time out. I use browsers - Camino for one part of the job, Safari for another with Thunderbird / Firefox adding a few minutes here and there. So I don’t need urls (which is good because today alone I’ve visited easily 150+ blogs if not more so while *.wordpress.com would be useful any subdomain tracking is not and from a forum post wildcards would seem to be planned). And the Getsatisfaction forums do look good - I’m registered now anyway so I don’t have to do that again.

So was I right to post what I did? Yes because there were flaws in what should have been smooth
Was I right to take it out on Rescuetime? No. I was wrong there.
And was it good of both guys to comment? Yes, definitely.