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Post by fitzoliverj on Aug 11, 2024 8:35:02 GMT
And they won't want to do a big sale or something if people aren't going to trust the website
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Post by sherlock on Aug 11, 2024 8:48:51 GMT
And they won't want to do a big sale or something if people aren't going to trust the website Given publishing the message from Jason Haigh-Ellery almost seemed to crash the website, an actual big sale would bring it to its knees.
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Post by timleschild on Aug 11, 2024 12:00:32 GMT
And they won't want to do a big sale or something if people aren't going to trust the website Given publishing the message from Jason Haigh-Ellery almost seemed to crash the website, an actual big sale would bring it to its knees. JHE needs to appear on a special edition of the podcast focusing on the website/app issues.
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Post by theillusiveman on Aug 11, 2024 12:04:59 GMT
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Post by timleschild on Aug 11, 2024 12:14:28 GMT
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Kestrel
Chancellery Guard
Likes: 2,718
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Post by Kestrel on Aug 11, 2024 13:46:15 GMT
Also, I think it's a bit unfair to assume that BF just paidf the lowest bidder to do the job. In my job, I've seen plenty of companies and contractors overpromise and underdeliver. BF don't do this stuff in house so they must ask experts to advise them. They don't just Google "make me a website" and pick the top result. They might be naiive but they're not imbeciles. Big Finish has been around for nearly three decades by now, it's unfair to excuse errors of this scale as mere "naïveté." Honestly, I'm not sure I'd buy that excuse from a newly-born media company, either. The question isn't whether they're naive or stupid -- it's to what extent this disaster is the result of ineptitude, desperation or malice.
As has been noted before, there's a reason why so few of us are inclined to be particularly forgiving here. If this was a one-time thing, sure, we might be inclined (rightly or wrongly) to extend to Big Finish some benefit of the doubt. Some patience and belief that they're dealing g with us in good-faith. But there's a pattern here, going back years, especially prevalent in the past 12 months alone, of Big Finish demonstrating an extreme lack of care, regard, and respect for their customers. And I think it's important that we be clear here: the only thing -- the only thing -- preventing this from being a company-ending catastrophe is the sheer passion of the fan base, who are generally willing to endure this BS out of sheer love for Doctor Who.
And to be clearer: we can't even be certain of that. It is entirely possible that even if Big Finish manages to turn this around quickly, they'll still have done irreparable, irrecoverable harm to their brand. God knows that if I were working there I would be very nervous about the sales numbers for August and September, and I'd probably start thinking about finding new employment elsewhere. In Big Finish’s defence, I think iOS 16 being a minimum requirement for the app is more than reasonable. It came out two years ago and devices that were released seven years ago are all more than capable of having it installed. No, the argument here in Big Finish's defense is that this anti-consumer malarkey is more Apple's fault than theirs (not that they haven't pulled their own full fair share of anti-consumer crap, too). Like it is absolutely absurd that hardware more than seven years old is obsolete, and outright pernicious that Apple has worked to create a culture where it's perceived of as "normal" for people to upgrade their phones/tablets every year or two. Like... this is really, really evil **** here. True, but another reason why it is better to have a download use a third party audioplayer. That's just off-loading a bunch of work on us, ultimately. Just more hoops to jump through, making the experience worse. How many hoops would y'all really be willing to jump through to listen to something like The Last Day?I just recently went to all the trouble of redownloading all of my audios, which I then had to thoroughly reorganize because (and I'm done using kind words about this) Big Finish's own organizational schema are trash.And to then use those newly-organized files with a third-party app, I'd have to spend even more time meticulously editing the metadata, because you know Big Finish is really bad about that, too, and find a decent app that'll play my own audio files like audiobooks, not music, all the while avoiding ad-riddled shovelware (always difficult on the App Store), subscription-based scams, and (always fun) paid-app roulette. And then cross my fingers and hope that this random audio-player app won't suddenly cease to function and be abandoned with the next iOS update. Which is only ever a question of when, never if.And they won't want to do a big sale or something if people aren't going to trust the website Big Finish hasn't wanted to do a big sale in years. They seem remarkably hostile even very small sales -- amounting to little more then temporarily resetting releases to either the (obfuscated) "new release" price points, or -- if we're very lucky -- lowering them down all the way to what would've been full price prior to last year's hikes. I can only see them actually doing a big sale if they're absolutely desperate, and the future of the company is at stake... or they have totally new management... or the whole thing is shutting down.
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Post by pawntake on Aug 11, 2024 13:52:33 GMT
Just restore the old one and the old app.They were never broken so why fix them! From what i have heard is that the old website is unlikely to return I know! i understand they were cost-cutting but its all gone horribly wrong.
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Post by relativetime on Aug 11, 2024 15:14:18 GMT
I've been steadily downloading the rest of my library to an external hard drive - or at least, what's available of it anyways - and of course the website decides to stop working in the middle of it. Honestly my biggest worry lately is that Big Finish will collapse before I have time to save everything I've bought from them over the years.
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Post by timleschild on Aug 11, 2024 16:51:27 GMT
We here are the core customers of BF. & the general tone is so negative. What hope is there?
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Post by muddyviolet on Aug 11, 2024 17:18:53 GMT
We here are the core customers of BF. & the general tone is so negative. What hope is there? The tones negative as it's all we've had from Big Finish for almost two weeks now. I'm sure when buissness is back as normal, the tome will start to shift. Also assuming Big Finish didn't anticipate this, that means we'll have two weeks worth of news. Whilst we won't get them all at once, it'll hopefully mean a faster pace for reveals for the rest of the month. I'm sure the tone will shift by the end of the month.
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Kestrel
Chancellery Guard
Likes: 2,718
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Post by Kestrel on Aug 11, 2024 19:12:31 GMT
We here are the core customers of BF. & the general tone is so negative. What hope is there? For my part, at least, I'm not feeling particularly hopeful. Nor do I really feel like Big Finish has said or done anything to encourage to be optimistic. Not just with regard to this current fiasco, but over the past year. And speaking of negative tone, I really do think it's largely a consequence of Big Finish's own actions over the last few years rather than a simple, immediate reaction to the recent changes. If folks had faith that Big Finish could or would respond adequately, well, I think we'd be seeing very different conversations. I'm sure when buissness is back as normal, the tome will start to shift. Will it? I think the negative feelings of the community have been simmering for a while now -- this latest disaster merely brought things to a boil. I think we've also, in general, been more critical of Big Finish's stories in recent months than we would've been even just two or three years ago. Folks seem to have a lot less patience for mediocre stories (and for once I don't mean to use that word in a pejorative sense), and I suspect that's at least in part due to Big Finish's recent string of (understandably) unpopular decisions: the price hikes, and the stealth price hikes; the conclusion of the monthly range; the reconfiguring of the boxset format resulting in fewer stories; the bizarre scheduling of ostensibly-serial sets, spaced months or even years apart; the overall (deliberately generic) direction of the XDAs, the rather obvious missed opportunities of the Season 6B and The Last Day sets; etc., etc. I could go on -- I won't. If and when things are "back to normal" (setting aside that "normal" here ain't the same as "good"), we're still gonna remember this whole FUBAR situation. And, as I've noted before, that lost trust, that lost faith, that damage to the BF brand... it isn't something that's gonna be easy to regain. How on Earth could they possibly not have seen this coming? They had access to the website and the app long before we did, they could look at both and quickly draw the same conclusions we have. Which means they either knew and didn't care -- or didn't even bother to look in the first place, which would be a staggering act of negligence. Simply: there is no possible excuse that doesn't make Big finish look bad here. As others have mentioned, Big Finish chose to execute all of these changes simultaneously, rather than phasing things through a little at a time. This, alone, even in the face of a successful website/app relaunch, would be a sign of ineptitude. In the vast majority of contexts, when you overhaul something, it's best to stagger the changes as much as you can, so that if there are any problems, they're easy to pinpoint. Ands that, in cases like this, you don't suddenly lose everything,
Like, there's just no way in hell folks would be this upset if it was either the app or the website crashing and burning. It's seeing both ships sink, simultaneously, that engenders such ire. And while I'm thrashing Big Finish for incompetence here, let's also not forget about the total lack of communication here. I didn't even know there was a new app or website coming until I read about it here, after both blew up here. My app just suddenly stopped working, with no indication why. At the time, I just assumed it was some temporary server issue. Did they even send out any emails in advance advising customers of the overhaul? Telling us that we'd have to reset our passwords, or that our phones/tablets would no longer be usable with the new app? Or even directing us to the new app -- which, nowhere in its description, is actually identified as the new app -- in the first place? All I remember seeing pop up in my inbox -- until the half-assed pseudo-apology -- were the usual weekly ads.
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Post by coffeeaddict on Aug 11, 2024 19:13:54 GMT
I don't think I will ever understand how a business can be this inept when it comes to simple things like communicating with customers. The apology was too little too late and rings hollow. Anyone else would have learned from past mistakes and taken steps to ensure that a far more robust testing phase had been followed. Instead, it seems that BF looked at the worst aspects of government project management and followed those steps. With a screw up of this nature, BF should have been issuing a statement to customers on every available (preferably) working platform at their disposal as soon as issues were noticed. As usual, it seems that consideration of the people who keep them in business was an afterthought. I am pretty sure that in any other business someone would be getting fired over this - that won't happen here, nor will they hire someone who actually has a clue who to approach crisis management.
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Kestrel
Chancellery Guard
Likes: 2,718
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Post by Kestrel on Aug 11, 2024 19:20:01 GMT
As usual, it seems that consideration of the people who keep them in business was an afterthought. This is really the crux of the thing. I should maybe dig through some of my posts from last year, because I'm pretty sure I predicted (an admittedly easy prediction) that if BF kept on pushing their most dedicated fans, like stretching out a rubber band, eventually we'd snap. And once that a rubber band snaps, you can never really put it back together again. Like... people can only tolerate so much, and just about the last thing you ever want to do with any person (if you care about that relationship at all) is find out exactly how much is too much.
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Post by relativetime on Aug 11, 2024 19:21:31 GMT
We here are the core customers of BF. & the general tone is so negative. What hope is there? The tones negative as it's all we've had from Big Finish for almost two weeks now. I'm sure when buissness is back as normal, the tome will start to shift. Also assuming Big Finish didn't anticipate this, that means we'll have two weeks worth of news. Whilst we won't get them all at once, it'll hopefully mean a faster pace for reveals for the rest of the month. I'm sure the tone will shift by the end of the month. Honestly though, the tone here has been trending negative for a while now though. The new website and app and the recent controversies with some of their writers/producers has opened the floodgates, but I feel as though a lot of us have been just generally dissatisfied with the current state of affairs at Big Finish for a while now. The price increases, the creative direction they're taking with a lot of their output, and so on. I still love Big Finish's Doctor Who, but I feel less enthusiastic about it than I did a few years ago and I don't think I'm alone in feeling that way here.
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Post by BHTvsTFC on Aug 11, 2024 20:16:40 GMT
Whilst the website revamp has been a cock up of magnificent proportions I think it's difficult to say whether or not it reflects the enthusiasm for BF in general. Yeah, the gimmicks are eyeball rolling in the extreme but they have been a major part of the output for about fifteen years now. At the same time there are plenty of great releases it would be a shame to be without - Merfolk Murders, Revolution in Space, Goth Opera and Operation Werewolf are crackers.
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Post by shallacatop on Aug 11, 2024 20:56:58 GMT
Yes, I must say I’m missing new releases and news. Even if it’s stuff to take the mickey out of, it’s part and parcel of what to expect from the company. And August of all months features releases from my top three - River Song, War Doctor & War Master - that I’m desperate to hear from. Plus a long awaited sequel to Susan’s War. Even Deathworld I’m looking forward to as Noonan & Troughton’s performances will be a laugh if nothing else.
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Post by jbatty8 on Aug 11, 2024 21:01:04 GMT
I think creatively they are in a big rutt. They have been for some years, and the final year's of the main range showed this off, definitely finished with a whimper. Arguably the box set premise they tried to sell us on, hasnt really captivated some of us in the same way.
Recent years are chock full of A+B vs C as it appears they cant do anything original or braver. It's sad that the ingenuity, early creativity, and breaking new ground seems to be gone.
I listen to Nick Briggs occasionally on podcasts and CD extras and I think he needs to give it up. He won't obviously, I'm sure he has a mortgage and family to support, and I can't imagine anything else out in the market would be solid enough to provide the income he gets from BF.
But I wish the company had a new younger, creative vision as it would bring new ideas and hopefully something to care about again. It's crying out for it. The same person in charge for nearly 20 years for a creative product, that's literally all about changing its main characters every few years? It's not right.
I can't add anymore to what's been said about the website and app.
I hope it's not the end of BF but it needs a positive regeneration right now.
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Post by Ela on Aug 11, 2024 21:25:57 GMT
The whole thing is a big mess. Though I don't think there was any malice involved, as was suggested upthread, just thoughtlessness.
From the message JHE put out, I got the impression that the main reason for the upgrade was so that the website would sync with their stock control, dispatch, and payment. JHE indicated those systems were tested thoroughly to make sure they worked.
The customer facing end seems as though it was either tested minimally or not tested at all for ease of use and convenience to the customer, and that's a real shame. You can have your backend working as well as you like, but if your customer facing side isn't working, you are bound to lose customers. I've worked on websites for non-profits as an amateur volunteer and we did a LOT of testing with a variety of browsers to make sure the site worked for everyone.
I seem to recall a poll going out before the previous website upgrade asking us what we wanted and didn't want, and what we found useful. Anyone else remember that? I don't know if they took any of the input to heart, and there was plenty of moaning about changes after that upgrade but at least the site was usable, you could find your own stuff, and you could make a purchase.
I expected a similar experience with this upgrade but that's not what we got. Thank goodness I rushed to make sure I downloaded everything before this recent "upgrade". Even with that, I'm going through my collection and re-downloading everything again from the new site onto an external drive. It's going to take me weeks, considering how long I've been buying from BF, but it's a way for me to figure out if everything I bought is in my account. So far, I've gotten through all the Main Range releases and a few other things here and there. I started on the Eighth Doctor Adventures on Friday. It's a very slow process.
Meanwhile, it doesn't look like any work at all has been done on the website. I'm still missing lots of order records and I have no idea at this point how many releases I am missing. Like I said, it's a very big mess. Disappointing to say the least.
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kk
Member
Likes: 79
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Post by kk on Aug 12, 2024 8:20:07 GMT
Although customer service should be paramount, especially for a smaller company with a niche product, I sadly think the main impetus for Big Finish sorting this mess out will be when they see how few orders and how little income they have received over the past few weeks.
Call it cynical but I'm expecting the fixes in September, once they clock how dire the August sales have been.
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Post by sherlock on Aug 12, 2024 8:25:23 GMT
I think creatively they are in a big rutt. They have been for some years, and the final year's of the main range showed this off, definitely finished with a whimper. Arguably the box set premise they tried to sell us on, hasnt really captivated some of us in the same way. Recent years are chock full of A+B vs C as it appears they cant do anything original or braver. It's sad that the ingenuity, early creativity, and breaking new ground seems to be gone. I listen to Nick Briggs occasionally on podcasts and CD extras and I think he needs to give it up. He won't obviously, I'm sure he has a mortgage and family to support, and I can't imagine anything else out in the market would be solid enough to provide the income he gets from BF. But I wish the company had a new younger, creative vision as it would bring new ideas and hopefully something to care about again. It's crying out for it. The same person in charge for nearly 20 years for a creative product, that's literally all about changing its main characters every few years? It's not right. I can't add anymore to what's been said about the website and app. I hope it's not the end of BF but it needs a positive regeneration right now. I don’t think it’s a coincidence the best thing Big Finish have made of late was the run of Eleventh Doctor Chronicles produced by Alfie Shaw; which really lent into new talent. If the company is serious about being around next 25 years then it needs more of that, but as is it still feels reliant on producers and writers who have been around for years.
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