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Comment by jen_h | Hacker News Reader

If this means that developer issues are going to be reviewed, responded to, and addressed by a real human being, and real public communication (maybe through the Dev Console, eh?) will be exchanged between Google and developers when issues arise, this is a very good thing - for both developers and Google. Reading these long, terrible, ranty threads that rarely contain any comment from Google is demoralizing and depressing for everyone involved.

If this means the Marketplace forums are closed and nothing else changes, this is terrible. Though maybe there's some silver lining there...one less place to post a "Hey, Google, PLEASE look at this! Please, please, pretty please!! Hey, guys! Hey, guys!" would probably save us all at least a few minutes of time. ;)

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I didn't see anything in that forum post from Google about improving or adding anything. I just saw a link to the already awful contact form and a message basically telling me to stay out.

I went to this forum every day to gauge whether I was the only one experiencing a problem or not.

Was I the only one seeing the "Just In" category missing?

Was the Market not loading for everyone else?

Did anyone else not get their full payout this month?

Is anyone else unable to upload to the Dev console?

Is everyone seeing the "authorization" failures again?

Is the sales report missing for everyone else for July?

At least seeing others with the same problem there meant that they were telling Google, or Google was seeing the problem in the forums, and I could chime in with a "me too" post so they knew it was wide spread.

Emailing using those forms is hopeless. Canned responses come back. I don't know if anyone ever read my question.

This is one sad and frustrating move by Google.

TO GOOGLE: Just open a private developers-only thread accessible from our Developer Consoles. That would be nice.

+1. Market support hates me. I just keep writing them, and writing them, and encouraging users to do the same. It always feels like tilting against windmills and I've never had Market Support solve a single issue or respond with any details that showed they even understood the issue, but I do it anyway with fingers crossed.

You're right about the forums - I've had a few issues that Market Support was useless on, but was solved by other posts on the forums (non-alphanumeric character in a company name causing you to never be able to respond to a customer request, anyone? Argh.).

And add my vote for developers-only forums - but not just accessible from the Developer Console...since you can't associate more than a single Gmail account with a developer account (talk about enterprise-unfriendly...), the principal developer account should be able to invite others to the forums.

That's just the thing.

Have you ever talked to ANYONE who's received a response back from those Google support contact forms that wasn't just a canned response with no indication that anyone has read anything?

Who are they trying to fool with that post asking us to go to the contact forms?

I just do not understand what kind of show they are trying to run over there. It's baffling.

Why not provide awesome support? Why not?

I know what sort of show: a very cheap one.

Customer support is tremendously expensive. Sophisticated support for developers costs even more.

Actually we've received good responses. In one case, we had a user app comment that was simply lots of Russian profanity. Google removed it within a few days.

I used it in exactly the same way.. when I saw an issue I would check for forums to see if others were experiencing the same issue. I'm not sure I would have noticed payouts being lower than they should have been without the forum, and I'm not 100% convinced Google would have either. The "known issues" page only lists a small subset of the real issues with the market. Also more often than not when they fix something, something else breaks.

That forum was the only way I found out I wasn't getting paid in full as well..... I have so many orders, checking them 1 by 1 wouldn't be possible. Developers need another location to communicate, and fast, because if this payout thing happens again, I'm worried Google won't find out. Based on the canned responses I get from the email forms, I honestly can't tell if they read my emails or not.

The "known issues" page is where issues go to die in my opinion. When I see an issue added there I just GROAN because I know that's it. It's probably not going to ever be fixed.

It explicitly says " we feel that one-on-one support is best for the types of threads that have historically been posted to this forum by app developers." So yes it does imply they are going to do more to improve support but yes its more of an announcement to their intentions and not an actual plan yet.

If you want to see the future of Google support, look no further than AdWords "support". This is Google's money maker, and most customers are largely ignored.

Google's "support" is basically a series of weak decision support systems that yield nothing of value, unless you're a complete noob. Email support is a guy in India that does a look up in the public knowledge base and sends you the result.

If you can get your hands on the unpublished support phone number and call it, you'll have to enter your account number. Then the system tells you nicely that you're not important enough to talk to a live person. Fine, for me I understand, I was only spending $400 a month, but there were people on forums that were spending $10K a month and getting the same treatment.

Sometimes I wonder if Google will ever be more than a text box and a button. People knock Apple and MS but these are real software companies who understand much of their business is customer support.

"If you can get your hands on the unpublished support phone number and call it, you'll have to enter your account number. Then the system tells you nicely that you're not important enough to talk to a live person."

I believe AdWords now has phone support for all AdWords customers? I did the Google search [adwords support] and the #2 link has a title of "How do I contact Google AdWords?" and that page has the toll-free phone number. Here's the blog post from April: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-phone-support-fo...

I see nothing implying that real humans will indeed answer. Current market support (not forums), apparently manned by real people, is absolutely terrible at helping. Any inquiry about Market problems for developers is met either with an automated "thanks, we're looking into it" or a "we've sent this to engineers" reply, and never with a followup.

If Google wants to do this right, they need to have a developer-only forum or a support system with valid ticket numbers for followup.

FWIW, based on previous experience with Google's Market support for devs, I have little hope. I think this is a 'no bad PR' move, instead of a 'developer love' move.

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