Virginia Web Designers: Joomla, Drupal, Open-Source, CSS, and PHP Northern Virginia / Maryland / Washington DC web designers

When companies don’t want you to contact them ..

Ever notice how the bigger the company, the harder it is to contact someone? We all know how hard it can be to reach a live person who also happens to be helpful and knowledgeable. Today I was trying to get some simple HTML code for a Skype status button, and during that process Skype presented a link “Save this HTML snippet” – at http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/tell-a-friend/get-a-skype-button/save.php. However, that link leads to a 500 Internal Server Error, and if you attempt to access that link directly, it gives a 404 Not Found error. So, being the helpful person that I am, I proceeded to find Skype’s contact link so I could let them know about this bug. There is no such link. I then tried their forum, but it contains no bug reporting area. So I posted it in their Suggestions forum and here, and hope they sort it out.

The irony here is that the bigger companies get, the more you’d expect them to have internal QA processes in place, however if they opened up the floodgates and let just anyone contact them, it would be unmanageable. It would be great if they could rely on regular user feedback for improvements, but I suppose they can’t afford the required staff … but in this case QA missed this one, apparently.

I did finally figure out how to contact them, by logging into Skype.com and then going to Help, Related, Get more help. However, that still offers no mechanism for reporting bugs or other feedback.