PSA: Last week's LJ outage

[redbird]

I have a feeling that some of my friends who have paid accounts don't read the paidmembers community. If you had a paid account when LJ was down last week, they'll give you a week's extra paid time, but you have to ask for it. No, I don't know why they don't do this automatically: maybe to encourage people to read that community?

Comments

[erik]

Because coupon fulfillment is a cheap way to lower the cost of a premium. Generally the fulfillment rate on this sort of things is less than 20%.

And Our New Robot Overlords Six Apart is run by money grubbing jerks. So (unlike when this sort of thing happened in the past) you have to ask, and they don't make it too widely known...There was no news post about it, for instance.

[laurel]

I remember having to ask many times in the past over the years, FWIW. Though yeah, was often also mentioned in news (This one may yet be announced there, was only just announced in [Unknown site tag] right before redbird posted).

[liv]

My memory of what went on pre-SixApart was that "they" used to refuse adamantly to give anyone any compensatory paid time whatsoever, and just point to the bit of the TOS which said they didn't guarantee the service. I have a lot of problems with SixApart but I don't have a rose-tinted view of what communication between staff and users was like in the old days either.

I suspect the reason why they don't just assign everyone the extra paid time is that they want to compensate only the people who were actually affected, not the people who hadn't been near their computer in weeks at the time of the outage. I can't begin to guess whether the amount of money saved is worth the administration costs of making that distinction, though. I kind of suspect not; although a week of paid time is "worth" 50¢ per user and therefore amounts to tens of thousands of dollars if every single paid member takes up the offer, I doubt that is the actual cost to LJ of offering a week of extra paid time to people who have already paid anyway.