What’s the deal with making new users wait for so long to create an account?
I appreciate you want us to pay you some money for your services, but surely the best way to do that would be to create a good service? Not by enforcing a wait of hours(?) with the “here are 83 people in front of you (and 18 people behind you), all patiently waiting on their free accounts on NewsBlur. By going premium you can get full and immediate access to NewsBlur.”
Or, if it genuninely takes this long to create an account, WTF is wrong with your setup?
The shutdown of Google Reader has increased the load on this site. The amount of paying customers needs to grow accordingly for this service to be available.
Seriously, there are many ways to get your new users to pay for your services.
Making them wait for 3+ hours is probably one of the worst. Even if I go back to your homepage to try the demo, I’m forced back to the waiting screen. LOL!
If you don’t want free users, don’t offer a free account.
My point is forcing new users to stare at an advert for 3 hours whilst they sit in some ‘pretend’ queue waiting for the system to create their queue is just dumb.
So very sorry you don’t like waiting. Being a premium paying customer my self, I must tell you I AM TOTALLY USED TO IT.
Yes, that’s right, I get that I have to wait. With Microsoft, Intuit, Amazon, NY Times, Sears, The Doctor, The Police, The Hospital, The Dog Groomer, The Vet, The Grocer, The Library, The Tax Office. Since I have paying relationships with all of these.
I would like to be cooler like Tony Irvine and Barry Campbell (hey guys) but I’m a tad irritated because as far as I can tell you’re complaining the free doesn’t equal fast? Really?
“Freemium is a business model by which a proprietary product or service (typically a digital offering such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged for advanced features, functionality, or virtual goods”
I logged out and set up a test account to see about this. The account was created at 8:34am and active at 9:04am. So your “3 hour” comment is, frankly, bullshit.
There is an open demo of the app where you can view almost every feature, nobody is stopping you from evaluating the abilities of Newsblur. The lack of instant gratification *for free* is annoying, but hardly word a childish ranting bug report.
Simon, newsblur is open source, go buy your own hosting and run your own copy so you don’t have to wait to use someone else’s hosting. Problem solved. Now if you don’t want to pay for your own hosting and want to use someone else’s be polite about it.
The 30 minute lead time I experienced wasn’t nearly as terrible as he’s making it out to be.
Users already have a completely open demo they can test with stock feeds without even signing up for anything. Sam’s running a business with Newsblur and pissing off a few cheap people who are probably never going to pay for his service anyway and have zero patience is probably in the best interest of him and everybody else involved in the project.
I created an account at appx 9:30. I got the “you’re in a queue” message. I reloaded. I reloaded. I waited. I tried to go back to the home page to try out the demo, but was redirected to the “You’re in a queue” message. I reloaded. I waited. I reloaded. I still had the “You’re in a queue” message. I waited some more, I reloaded. And again. At appx 12:30 my account was created.
I’m not making this up, nor am I bullshitting. I am trying to give some feedback to the owner of the site. I’m not trying to report a bug. I’m not trying to be childish.
There’s a “logout” link on the “in the queue” message. Hard to spot, but its there. You also get an email when your account is activated.
Threatening to go elsewhere because you had an issue signing up is the equivalent of saying you’re going to take your ball and go home; hence the childish implication. Apologies if that hurts, and we’ve all been there and said that at some point in the heat of frustration, but that doesn’t make it less true, nor does it make your feedback more constructive. Slighting the service by saying that the delay for Free users makes it “not good” is also not a good way to make friends.
It sucks that you had to wait, but dude, they are RSS feeds. They’re not going anywhere, and nobody is preventing you from using Google Reader (for another month or so at least) in the meantime while you wait. And Newsblur is a service that’s worth waiting for. It easily beats Google Reader’s web interface and the iPad/iPhone clients are phenomenal.
Did it every occur to you that the queue system is implemented so that paying users are not impacted by free user accounts? Just maybe at the time you tried it was a peak time for the servers being used by premium users. May the system slows down the free users so premium users are not affected.
I’m guessing if you had a premium account and was told you had wait three hours to use the system you’d be here complaining about that free users were ruining it for you? Did they system stop you signing up? Fail to create an account? Fall over and show an error message? Nope it did what it said and you now have access with a free account.
Look at your post …
“What’s the deal with making new users wait for so long…”
“Or, if it genuninely takes this long to create an account, WTF is wrong with your setup?”
Does that look like positive feedback or someone whining because they had to wait?
To be fair I was also a little puzzled at the 4’ish hour wait for a free / trial account last night. However after trying a few alternatives newsblur seems the closest replacement for Google Reader I’ve tried so far. Other providers didn’t appear to be updating feeds regularly enough or I didn’t like the layout.
I signed up for a premium account once I confirmed it worked well enough, but I was totally board of looking for alternatives.
