Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role | Hacker News Reader

Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role

kotaku.com

189 pointsmorphics61 comments

I've owned a domain for 10+ years that's spelled correctly and is kinda neat and i'll do something with it some day. A few years back a start up got some funding, tried to buy my domain several times, and ended up going with a variation of the domain, but minus a vowel. eg, if i owned flicker.com, they ended up with flickr.com (it's neither of those domains, BTW).

I semi-regularly get support emails for them. If i'm in a good mood and see the email as it comes in, i'll tell them the correct email to use (no one has ever thanked me for that, as it happens). Normally I just ignore them, or don't notice them for a few days.

I find it mildly amusing when there's a series of emails from the same person with panic escalating over a few hours.

"Where is my project?"

"I need this for my report in the morning!"

"I'M GOING TO SUE YOU!"

I wonder if you could train a spam classifier to identify & autorespond (or to randomly just drop/bounce/"help"[1] if you want to automate your current workflow :) ) these messages?

Maybe even a simple regex for <theirdomain>.tld would work.

Probably want to have it after a whitelist-known-contacts step to avoid upside-down-ternetting[2] your friends though.

[1] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl

[2] http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html

"Maybe even a simple regex for <theirdomain>.tld would work."

It won't. They are mailing to hisdomain.tld ; probably support@hisdomain.tld

I meant in the body of the message

"I can't log in to my stupid $theirdomain/$theirservice account!"

Gawd. I used to have a phone with attached fax that was one digit off a popular fish and chip shop number. I would get advertising faxes at the rate of about 1 roll of fax paper per week from an advertising company. I rung, faxed emailed and tried multiple times to correct them. In the end I got one of their faxes, faxed it back to them, then tapped the bit that came out the fax to the bit still going in. A vicious fax loop. It ran all weekend. I got one grumpy as fax back on Monday about how I'd used up a massive roll of fax paper, and they had been unable to delete the queue for some reason, so it had used up the refills too. $$ Were demanded. The spam faxes stopped and I never heard from them again.

LOL, that reminds me of the time my work number was one digit off from the company switchboard. I worked for a telecom doing .NET stuff. So surprised I am when a mobile phone customer calls me at 2am in a panic that he had lost his phone. Three questions ran through my mind: how did he know I worked for the company, how did he get my personal number, and why did he think I could help him? After a few more instances, I realized these people weren't calling my personal number, they were fat fingering my work number, which was forwarded to my mobile. It was so weird until I figured that out.

See also the English comedian Tony Hawks and the US skateboarder Tony Hawk.

(http://www.tony-hawks.com/skateboarding.php)

(http://tonyhawk.com/)

The strangest thing is that the only email, specifically accusing Tony Hawks of abusing his name's similarity to Tony Hawk is in Dutch. Likely, however, Mr Hawks has received numerous complaints about it in English and chose to ignore those, but kept the one in Dutch as he did not understand it (or did not care what it said).

It's not the he didn't understand or didn't care what he said. It's that he had a funny response. It's his own name, for Heaven's sake. And the people writing to him are clearly not doing their own due diligence either.

yea but like, maybe he could just change his name to Tony Falcons? a mafia gangster would be proud to have that name

> And the people writing to him are clearly not doing their own due diligence either.

The people writing to him are eight years old. And he is making fun of their inability to spell.

Also, Opera (the browser) and Oprah (the TV personality):

http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/05/25/oprah-winfre...

I am tearing up from laughter at these emails and their responses.

As funny as that is, the majority of those are kids. Kids that just had their hopes and dreams shattered ;)

A friend of mine's surname is the same as a large US private bank. He bought the .com address for his own company years before the bank got online and so regularly receives emails from the bank's customers containing sensitive information, including financial data, account numbers, SSNs and more.

He's told the bank many times that their customers are sending stuff that really shouldn't be in an email to the wrong address, offered to set up redirects or even sell them the domain, but do they care?

Not one bit.

edit: better article: http://www.yalelawtech.org/ip-in-the-digital-age/why-nissan-...

The money Nissan spent on legal fees may have been better spent buying his business outright.

It may still have legs if they can put a value not having control over nissan.com.

Uzi Nissan used to be my ISP when I lived in Raleigh (he had one of the first ISDN modems in town -- 128kbps bonded channels, baby!) Cool guy.

But I have to admit that he messed up when he started hosting ads on his site (Link Exchange, IIRC). Sure enough, the software started putting auto-related ads on there, and that's when he got in trouble with the lawyers.

Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Chief Executive Officer Role

Seven Year Old Girl Wanders Into White House, Sworn In As President Of The United States

So Zynga was originally going to call the game "Themepark" but Eric already had that domain, and so they changed it to "Coasterville"?

The game seems hosted on a themepark.zynga.com subdomain, so yeah.

They obviously concluded that 'Themeparkville' just didn't have that certain zyng to it.

I imagine the bigger issue is that it's a clone of the Electronic Arts game Theme Park.

From experience, it is quite common to have internal code-names for Facebook games for the purposes of preventing leaks from development canvas apps and the like. These are usually related to the general gist of the game. To coin a made-up example, 'SimAir' might be called 'flying' internally.

My experience has been that the main reason is that development usually starts before marketing has even decided on the final name. You need to call your dev servers, code repository and bug tracker project something and it's often hard to change retroactively.

It's not even unusual to see multiple different working titles float around.

Wonderful - so much mischief potential... I love that the user was told to press "meh" repeatedly.

I think I'd do the exact same thing in his situation, you can either be angry about it or have some fun with it.

They're semi-funny reply emails, but I don't really understand how he was having fun with them. Doing it for the lulz of punking individual users trying to get help?

Seems a bit like being a bully on an individual kid.

Possibly cathartic though if he's being swamped by misdirected support emails... maybe?

Sadly my favorite story about a person dealing with a motel with nearly the same number turned out to be false. It was still funny though. I like this guy's sense of humor but he could include in the end of his response the real address (or set the reply-to on his responses to be the actual address)

I worked in a 24/7 technical support center, which one was number off my country's major airline. The amount of times I had to inform people, that just because they'd managed to call a software company in my country, didn't mean that I could change their flights.

You would get people who would call up, launch into a rigmarole about their booking, I would listen for a few minutes before interrupting and saying 'You are aware that this is Company Name, right?', and they would still keep going. Fun stuff.

Trying to actually reach intelligent humans at these large companies can be a real pain. I've had similar issues with large providers doing stupid things, my customers blame me, and I can't do anything about it because I'm the small guy.

LOL worth a read for a quick grin.

What's a random stranger anyway? I'd imagine that all strangers are random, right? By definition, you have no acquaintance with them, so you can't predict them.

Anyway, I thought it was an oxymoron. Maybe I'm just being random ;)

Not really? If I know someone that you don't and introduce them to you, at that moment they are a stranger to you, but definitely not random.

Good point. My head started hurting while thinking about it. What is random anyway? Arrrrgh!

By following your own logic, it wouldn't be an oxymoron. It would be a pleonasm.

Pleonasm. That's a new word for me. Thanks.

I know it just isn't possible in many situations, but transparent support goes a long way in avoiding situations like this. Zendesk has tried this out with fully visible support chat, and it's worked well for them.

Misleading those users was unnecessary. From the user's perspective they are stuck between Zynga and Eric who decided to have some fun with them.

I wonder how much time he had on his hands to toy around with feedback emails everyday. Would an email filter with an automatic response not have sufficed ?

It (hopefully) made Zynga think, now they are going to be more careful.

Users of Zynga products deserve a wake up call.

I get several emails per year that are meant for monash.edu. I simply write back pointing that out. I most definitely do NOT say "If you can't tell the difference between .com and .edu, you're unlikely to have much joy with the Monash University admissions office."

Not to be a party-pooper but I wonder where he stands legally with this.

What an asshole. I mean, really, people contact him asking for help and instead of setting up an email rule of "Sorry, this isn't Zynga" he knowingly messes people around.

It'd be one thing to mess with Zynga but people who've just emailed for help? That breaks "Dont' be a dick".

I was expecting an awesome story about how he looked into the game and took on their role and actually helped people but instead we have someone on the internet being a dick.

Excuse me? It is stated that he did the right thing first:

> When Zynga didn't reply to his messages pointing out the error, he started doing their job for them.

He then decided to play along, and that it his right. He did not say "delete system32" or such things. The asshole here is Zynga more than Eric I'd say.

Yes, I'm sure most of the people receiving these responses were really "messed around"... They have bigger problems if they were actually taking his "advice".

That was my reaction too. I am surprised many people here feel otherwise.

You can look at it as punishment for playing those mindless Zynga games :P

I would expect Zynga kindly apologizing, for their screw up, to their customers. Eric did do the wrong thing, by making fun of the customers here.

But isint it a huge mistake that you wont expect from some BIG BRAND like Zynga to do? They surely disappointed their users.

If he actually took on the role of customer support, Zynga never would have updated the email address. They would have accepted the free customer support rep and it would have continued.

You may be interested (or incensed) about Matt Besser's "May I Help You, Dumbass?" project, where he got sick of people calling his phone number, which was previously an AOL support line:

http://www.amazon.com/May-Help-You-Dumbass-Explicit/dp/B003V...

First of all, they are playing Zynga games. It's not exactly a mission-critical application.

Secondly, do you really think that each of us has a responsibility to put unpaid time and energy into providing TLC for every misdirected email we receive?

He said he tried to get it corrected. There was a time when I was in $BIG_CORP where I kept getting added to the distribution-list of some upper-management email. I kept telling them I wasn't suppose to be on it, but the emails kept coming in. Eventually, I started replying to the emails telling them to make corrections in the Excel-spreadsheet attachments and started rescheduling meetings. They quickly removed me from the email-list.

Troll.programmer? Placeholder forgotten there? How.the guy email.ended there in first place?

EDIT: whooo! I write a question, downvote-fest!!!

For context, I was the first comment, and I was genuinely curious. But thanks for the downvotes and no reply.

random punctuation along with missing words (probably caused by autocorrect) makes your post extremely unreadable hence the downvotes

Too bad I cannot edit it again now that I am on a computer :( (I typed it on a phone)

this is not excuse. i write like an idiot that never graduated grade school regardless of whether i'm pecking on a phone or on a keyboard. much to learn you still have

I think he just answered his own question ;)

Curious about what? Your "question" is non-sensical.

If I'm decoding it correctly, I think a description of how his e-mail ended up in Zynga's game would in fact be an interesting story.

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