The following article is nothing more than a mini-rant, and it’s not meant to offend anyone or set anyone straight. It’s merely a report on how things look from our point of view and things that many times, makes us want to bash our heads against the wall. SWAPD heavily relies on customer support to stay afloat, it’s the first website of this kind for me, and I never knew this could be so challenging. Running SWAPD made me appreciate all those poor customer service reps, working phones/emails for countless hours per day for various companies. Don’t get me wrong, it’s our job, and we get paid for it. But we’re human also, and many times even little things get under our skin, especially since these little things get repeated over and over again.
So, what makes us angry?
Aside from the normal things like scammers/pranksters/time-wasters, here are the things that get under our skin. I will try to categorize them by order of magnitude, with the first on the list being the most annoying.
#1 Rushing
I absolutely hate it. It has gotten to the point where if someone rushes me, I will deliberately slow down the progress of the ticket. Evil? Perhaps. But many times, I’ve met with comments such as:
But I have to go to bed soon, can’t we wrap this up now?
And that’s after telling the client that I’ve been on my shift for 16 hours, and that it’s a Saturday night, and I would love to have some time off, also. Clients who expect near-instant replies are super, super annoying. We find it funny that someone who didn’t respond for 15 hours, comes back and replies, expects near instant help from staff, followed by multiple “Hello?”, “Is anyone here?”, “Thought this was a blazing fast site” comments. And yes, that last comment is real, made by one of our clients. Quite often these rushing attempts are followed by admin tag-spam, which leads me to our next point.
#2 Uneccessary Tagging
Here is a scenario (example) we totally hate.
- Admin replied to a ticket.
- A few minutes later, a client replies back.
- A few minutes go by.
- The client begins to reply again, this time tagging the admin because he didn’t respond right away.
- A few minutes go by again.
- The client begins to reply again, this time tagging more individual admins.
- A few minutes go by again.
- The client goes all out, tagging everyone multiple times, for example, “Hello? Please respond @SWAPD @MeG @Administrators!”
Keep in mind that we usually wouldn’t care, if point 1-8 didn’t happen in a span of 30 minutes. The @Administrators tag sends a notification to all admins, so tagging them that way and sending another notification via a personal tag just spams their to-do list. We check each and every notification, no exception. Our workload is pretty high (we constantly hover between 20-40 tickets daily), to the point where we had to disable notifications for likes and non-essential things, so that we don’t get overwhelmed. The @Administrators tag was meant to be used in a scenario where admins aren’t answering for hours, and not in every reply. This is super annoying, and we began warning users not to overdo it.
#3 Unprofessional Behavior
I cringe when I see the way some people post on sites like OGUsers/Hackforums/etc. We don’t want to become a marketplace for kids, nor people who don’t know basic business ethics. This includes simple things like speaking (writing?) like a human being. I hate whenever a client uses slang terms, or terms that disrespect the other client or staff. It’s always “bro this”, “bro that”, “chill bro”, “whatevs”, etc., etc.
It’s just distasteful, and I would love to see this go.
#4 Not Following Instructions
We’ve gotten used to it, but it’s amazing to see people not follow our instructions and then instantly have a problem with us when things go wrong, followed by “but I always did things this way and never had a problem”.
Example:
Admin: Please use a PC on a private tab on the first login.
Client: OK.
Client: It didn’t work, the account got locked out.
Admin: Please send a screenshot of the error message.
Client: Send a screenshot from a mobile device.
Admin: You were supposed to use a desktop device as we’ve asked.
Client: Oh!
#5 Breaking Rules Then Blaming SWAPD
Virtually all negative comments you will find on the web come from scorned SWAPD users whom we’ve suspended for not following instructions or who broke our rules. This really hurts because it tarnishes our rep, but there’s nothing we can do about that. The latest example of this can be found in this gem of an article.
The person who wrote that article had the (excuse my language) balls to call us rude, because we were stern on ID verifying him, after he personally admitted to saying this:
After being asked for identity verification without any apparent reason it was very annoying. And we refused to verify by saying we refuse to verify and did call it shitty forum.
After digging around, we found that the person who wrote that article was a SWAPD member who just kept asking everyone for links, without any actual attempts of buying. We’ve begun combating this type of behavior, and for security reasons we now ID verify pesky users who just ask and quit responding. This user refused to become ID verified, so we’ve suspended him (after he told us to get lost and insulted our beautiful site by saying it was “shitty”).
I have a few more things that bother me, but I will save that for later 
Thank you for reading.
