Web Africa Programmers... not evolved yet?

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Several clients of mine with Web Africa (and myself) received a little "BodyTextGoesHere" announcement just now.

This makes me wonder if Web Africa has a development enviroment and/or if they have programmers that knows how to do their job?

Sure, mistakes do happen, but then these mistakes needs to be made on the development server before going live.

I demand this programmer get reprimanded for this mistake. I sure as hell would almost get fired if I made a mistake this big.

What is next? Emailing out your entire client list of emails out to everyone? (Ala Sentech a few years back?)

If this was the first mistake I would let it slide, but this is mistake #3 from what I can remember the debit order billing reminders and blank credit notes being erroneously emailed out.

I have a good mind to report this on hellopeter as well
 
lol @ acid razor

sheesh man, i'd like to know wha tyou do for a living. Mistakes happen, we'r all human.

Lol @ his demand. even bigger lol @ getting fired for a mistake as minor as this.
 
1st Mistake, fine, 2nd Mistake Irritating, 3rd Mistake... well... someone has to die now....

Imagine you have a client base of 1000.... 1st Mistake happens "oops"
It grows to 10000.... 2nd Mistake happens "er... We're sorry for the inconvenience"
It grows to 100000.... a million... 2 billion....

When does it become okay for this to happen still? Isn't there any controls or functional specs that needs to be signed off before a programmer can go ahead with something like this?

I sure as hell need a sign off before I can make anything live...


And if nobody complains... would WA get any better at this or keep making these little mistakes until one idiot programmer compromises the accounts of their entire subscription base? What will happen then? "Oh we didn't know"

Well they sure as hell know now don't they?
 
Moederloos said:
sheesh dude - take a pill.
mistakes happen - we all make them.
Click to expand...

Mistakes should be made on your dev environment and tested and tested AGAIN before anything should go live... I'm pretty much convinced they have no idea what happened just now
 
He's paying for a service and it's not unreasonable to expect good service delivery.
 
AcidRaZor said:
Mistakes should be made on your dev environment and tested and tested AGAIN before anything should go live... I'm pretty much convinced they have no idea what happened just now
Click to expand...

Got a spy camera in their offices?
Probably went more along the lines of:

MD: We MUST send this URGENT email NOW!!!!
Programmer: Let me test it quick
MD: NO!! NOW!
 
100% true AcidRaZor!
But i think i speak to most people here when i say that as long as the "bad code" doesnt effect our service or ability to control our accounts then its not a big deal. If its something malicious, thats a different story.
Im not quite sure about the problem you experienced but it looks as if some text didnt display on a webpage somewhere. Which at the end of the day is not going to bring down servers.
I work for a software development company and although we try our upmost not to release a new version without sufficient testing, we dont always win. Our clients are demanding and require mods on a constant basis and a release is expected asap, we then cannot unfortunately put it through the various testing phases. These things do happen, as long as we are made aware of the problem right away, we can correct.
I cant unfortunately speak for webafrica, but taking into account that they are just an ISP, i wouldnt expect their development skills to be up with the best.
 
Your signature is rather funny in contrast to your post.
 
I think some forumites should remove some of the carrots from their orifices so they sound less like girly boys :)
 
Slooth said:
He's paying for a service and it's not unreasonable to expect good service delivery.
Click to expand...
Well said. However, I worked in a similar environment where I also had to send out bulkmails frequently and yes, on 1 or 2 rare occasions even after you've tested it successfully, in production the webpage you're calling to send out through the mail server, fails to load in time and then a bulkmail with no loaded content goes out, like the one mentioned on this thread.

Besides the fact that you obviously hoped it would never happen it creates a lot of extra work because you have to do a lot of damage control, usually contacting all the clients and profusely apologising for the mistake. However, I'm referring to scheduled bulkmails that are sent out at specific times like weekly newsletters; so the clients are *expecting* them. Luckily this just appeared to be an ad hoc mail. Impact is less (unless someone decides to start a thread about it on this forum!). ;)

What sometimes bothers me, is when I subscribe to newsletters (not at WA, but elsewhere) that are supposed to be sent out on a specific day every week, and I just never get the mail. That creates a bigger problem because does that mean there's something wrong my subscription? Must I follow up? Will it be sent out again? Was I the only one that didn't get it? I'd actually much rather receive a bulkmail with one error in it, frown for 5 seconds but at least I got the info I wanted. Well, then again that's not true, I want everything to be picture perfect. :)
 
Last edited:
Hi All,

We do apologise for the mail sent out earlier, we were performing an update to our mailing system and performing a dry run using real data to see how well it functions in a production environment prior to making it live. Unfortunately an error with the code itself resulted in that dry run instead being a live one.

Once we had realised what was happening we disabled the system and identified where the error was situated, the problem has since been resolved. We do agree with using a sandboxed environment in which to perform development, and in most cases this is what we do. However, ultimately testing must be done in a live environment to ensure all is 100% prior to making it truly live.

Again, we apologise and will be working on preventing this from happening in the future.
 
MrG said:
Your signature is rather funny in contrast to your post.
Click to expand...

you pointed that out before yes. but remember, out of them all they're still the best. with constructive crit and a pissed off client (me) they get better...
 
Surv0 said:
100% true AcidRaZor!
But i think i speak to most people here when i say that as long as the "bad code" doesnt effect our service or ability to control our accounts then its not a big deal. If its something malicious, thats a different story.
Im not quite sure about the problem you experienced but it looks as if some text didnt display on a webpage somewhere. Which at the end of the day is not going to bring down servers.
I work for a software development company and although we try our upmost not to release a new version without sufficient testing, we dont always win. Our clients are demanding and require mods on a constant basis and a release is expected asap, we then cannot unfortunately put it through the various testing phases. These things do happen, as long as we are made aware of the problem right away, we can correct.
I cant unfortunately speak for webafrica, but taking into account that they are just an ISP, i wouldnt expect their development skills to be up with the best.
Click to expand...

if it was some web page that I couldn't see then I'd email support. If there's a bogus mass email that was sent out to me and all my referrals I do business with, then thats a beginning of the problem Sentech experienced...
 
Globetrotter said:
Well said. However, I worked in a similar environment where I also had to send out bulkmails frequently and yes, on 1 or 2 rare occasions even after you've tested it successfully, in production the webpage you're calling to send out through the mail server, fails to load in time and then a bulkmail with no loaded content goes out, like the one mentioned on this thread.

Besides the fact that you obviously hoped it would never happen it creates a lot of extra work because you have to do a lot of damage control, usually contacting all the clients and profusely apologising for the mistake. However, I'm referring to scheduled bulkmails that are sent out at specific times like weekly newsletters; so the clients are *expecting* them. Luckily this just appeared to be an ad hoc mail. Impact is less (unless someone decides to start a thread about it on this forum!). ;)

What sometimes bothers me, is when I subscribe to newsletters (not at WA, but elsewhere) that are supposed to be sent out on a specific day every week, and I just never get the mail. That creates a bigger problem because does that mean there's something wrong my subscription? Must I follow up? Will it be sent out again? Was I the only one that didn't get it? I'd actually much rather receive a bulkmail with one error in it, frown for 5 seconds but at least I got the info I wanted. Well, then again that's not true, I want everything to be picture perfect. :)
Click to expand...

Seeing as I'm on my 4th bulk mail app (now including fax and sms functionalities) I can say that I too have had a few bugs, but NEVER sent ANY mass email to ANY client because I tested extensively on my dev enviroment. (Working in a publishing environment with editors and DTP would teach you the value of NO MISTAKES AT ALL very quickly)

Sure, mistakes do happen, but I don't get paid to make mistakes and let my company look like idiots...
 
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