Posterous is Down | Hacker News Reader

Posterous is Down

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9 pointsd4nt10 comments

And rather than posting any useful details in the twitter feed they simply spam it with @replies saying the same thing. Oh, and post.ly links which are also affected by the apparent DDOS.

It would be vastly more beneficial to post a link to the instructions than simply repeatedly posting:

"if you have a custom domain, pls send an email to help@posterous.com for instructions; otherwise u should be up in 1 hour"

Can't say I'm impressed with how they are handling the PR aspect of it.

As a small startup team, they may be putting most of their efforts into getting it fixed quicker, with the intention of dealing with the PR after.

So instead of replying to the people who are too lazy to check their Twitter page / follow @posterous they should... not do that? Oh, and if you took two seconds to click the "more" button, you'd see they have posted a link to the instructions. Using post.ly and bit.ly. But by all means, make up more things to complain about.

Which link are you referring to? I went down back to where the tweets stopped looking to be referring to the incident. To do so, I took many seconds to click "more" repeatedly. Every link I saw either didn't response to expand (post.ly) or redirected to their blog... on posterous, which didn't respond.

I don't see a single tweet explaining what they changed (they mention IPs, did they change IPs, IPs for all servers, or just bring up additional ones) or why it is that custom domains are affected (I'm assuming it's an IP change, but is this a permanent change, or one I can just ride out).

I also don't see an actual announcement other than the @replies, although it's possible it's buried under those. As I'm not a frequent user of Twitter, I'm not aware if there is a way to filter out the replies and see only the useful content.

*edit - after typing that Posterous "finally" started responding again, so I can see what the blog post said.

I really want my $ back now.

You can mock me all you want, but communicating effectively with your customers, especially during a "crisis", is important.

It will affect how people perceive your product and your ability to continue to provide it. If they want to monetize, they need customers.

We're not talking about a major undertaking. Simply providing useful information in the main avenue they have open during the DDOS seems like a pretty straightforward thing to me.

Actually, I'm phenomenally impressed with how Posterous is responding personally to all of their customers. Their messages is pretty straight forward "DOS - hope to be back up within the Hour" - That's all I'd really need to know.

Ironically, I came to ycombinator first to see what the status was and didn't even have to click through to "new". :-)

Sorry you feel that way. A lot of our users have been thankful for a personal response. I think we can agree to disagree here.

CNAME anyone?

CNAMEs totally work -- the problem is that they override MX records. Earlier on we used to encourage users to use CNAMEs, but then they would inadvertantly lose ALL their email, even if we tried to explain to them that they shouldn't use CNAME's if you have MX records on there. So we stopped telling people to do that.

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