Entries Tagged 'Niteflirt issues' ↓

Much time has passed since we first met, online as it were.

It was as “ON” I first met her. She wanted the background removed from an image. I felt sorry for her, as she described her health issues. We had a couple of long calls. She described to me how a designer had taken $2K and failed to deliver the website she was supposed to get, leaving her with purchased software (photoshop, dreamweaver, paintshop pro) that she found unusable.

She felt designers deliberately talked down to her by speaking in incomprehensible jargon rather than everyday language she could understand. She did not see any value in trying to learn what the terms they were using meant.

I charged her a few dollars and gave her the image in several sizes. She came back and wanted support to install it on her listings in a payment mail button. I gave her the code to do that, but it was not what she wanted. She wanted me to take a piece of javascript she said some friend had given her and make it work using her image. She wanted me to do it for her. She did not want to know how it was done so she could do it for herself. I explained that I didn’t know any javascript and had no idea how to make it work, that all I knew is that I had never seen it done that way.

She emailed me back with a snarky, “A friend of mine did it for me for free.” And she posted on the forum outing me for ripping her off by giving her the image in a format she could not use (.gif!) and failing to give her what she needed. That a designer could not do what some friend of hers was able to do for free.

I blocked her on all her accounts I was aware of and put a notice on my help site that I did not work with javascript at any price.

Time passed and she contacted me on a new account of hers, “FA”. Or was it “F A”? It turns out she was still blocked on the old account she had renamed. The account she contacted me on was a spacing variation of the real account she needed the work done for.

She had a story about how an inexperienced designer had given her something she was unable to work with after charging her several times the initially-agree-upon amount. Silly me, I guessed who it was and should have contacted the girl to get the scoop.

We did not speak on the phone this time. I don’t recall if we did IM’s. But I know we did emails, hot damn! I got at least 2 emails every waking hour, and she wanted them all responded to promptly.

I ended up reworking a sliced-image photoshop template to make it easier for her to work with, to match up something that wasn’t quite right and fulfill her stated needs. I did not ask for money, but she paid me generously. I spent a great deal of time on the project.

Finally it was finished, and she now pointed out that she was not able to do something she needed to do – she needed an expanding text box in a certain location, which you don’t get in a photoshop template. without. asking. in. advance. Which she had not done, and which I would now have to start all over again to do.

I was finished. I wanted nothing more to do with this, as I now realized who she was.

She told me a friend had fixed it for free. She posted outing me on the forum for cheating her by giving her back a sliced image template – a table coded up for the images. Apparently she later sucked some other designer into trying to fix it, too, and it became the epic of “The $200 Template”, where yet another helpless, naive newbie was portrayed as victimized by flirt designers who cheat them and veteran flirts who won’t give a newbie a break.

The pattern: Complaints that veteran flirts and designers cheat newbies, and she is here to help by warning them, sometimes trying to “help” with “tutorials” trying to convince them to use low-grade html editors that apparently she can’t even use herself. Or warning them to be prepared to get the designer to agree to demands for unlimited communication in advance, and to be prepared to sue her.

I see posts like that and I get flashbacks.

I still get emails from her various personae trying to get me to work for her, unaware that she is well-known.

She pretends she is someone the designer does not know in order to get them to work for her.

Radioactive is the word.

I really feel sorry for someone who cannot permit herself to learn to do things for herself, who is incapable of communicating her needs. Or I would if she was not so resolutely malevolent and vindictive. How can someone lead their whole life blaming everyone else for the same things that go wrong, over and over again?

Q: Where is my callbutton? I can’t see my callbutton in my listing, I can’t see it in the category indexes! Nobody can call me, I won’t get any calls!

We have never been able to see our own callbuttons in our listings while logged in except in the ‘edit preview’ mode. Now we are also unable to see them in the category indexes. Everyone can see them but you. To see them, log off and look again. If you have another account, log into it and you will see it, too.

 

You can’t call yourself, so you don’t need a callbutton to click. That callbutton being missing from the category index makes it easier for you to find your listing’s position, too.

Q:I keep getting calls and missing them even though I’m on a call already!

The old call status used to go into ‘busy’ well in advance and stay that way. This one goes in at the last minute and comes out when the customer is adding money. Sometimes it doesn’t go into busy at all, or resets itself to available even if you are still on the call (and ultimately correctly credited).

 

The solution is simpler than the explanation. Shut off your account when you start a call, and it will stay off until the call has ended and you turn it back on.

Q: The new callbuttons don’t change from available when you take a call!

Nope, they don’t. This is a major issue, because the callbutton is static. The code they give you permanently reflects the status you were in when you took it. The system will put through calls to you if someone clicks a button that says you are “available” even if you actually are not, and you will miss them. Somebody messed up when they were designing the code. It is going to be a big deal for them to fix it.

 

The only thing you can do is to not use the callbuttons. Instead link to your homepage or to a listing you would want them to call. The callbuttons Niteflirt displays on your account will correctly show your account status. See that button in my sidebar? It is always live. I am on 24/7 and only flirts see this button, so it’s not a big deal for me.

Whatever you do, don’t put callbuttons into your listing! They will see buttons that say you are both unavailable and available and click the available one.

Q: I can’t tell what account or listing the call is coming in on!

Pick an account (I used a slow one) and add a listing from each of your accounts to your favorites. Keep that page open. When a call comes in, after you click ’1′, refresh the page until it shows one as ‘busy’.

Oh YEAH I am getting into this! Niteflirt now has full external CSS stylesheet support!

If you know what that is, you may be as happy as I am, because right now I am streamlining all my listings and getting rid of every damned bit of inline formatting and html formatting. Yeah!

If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it. I may write some tutorials about it sometime, but it’s kind of a broad subject.

Somebody can now check to see if we can reference external javascript files, please. I won’t get to it at least until next week.

Some of us were using Call manager scripts to log us in and out of our multiple accounts when we got calls. Well, they don’t work anymore.

Heck, you can’t even see your callbuttons change anymore. If you have multiple accounts and add one callbutton from each to your favorites of one of the accounts (pick the slowest) then you can see all your accounts at the same time and hopefully tell which one is busy.

This script should open up your favorites in an iframe that refreshes every 60 seconds. Save it as an html file and open it in a browser File=>Open.

I wrote a little script to help girls log in and out quicker, now that the old ones no longer work.

Download the text file, open it in Notepad, and edit it so you replace the dummy accounts in “Account #1″, “Account #2″, etc, and the dummy passwords, “Password #1″, etc, with your own.

Do not use a word processor. If you have a Mac, you will need to download a free text editor. Get one that sounds like it’s intended for coders who are typing code. Make sure it is not a word processor.

Save on your computer as an .html file and open it in a browser. Bookmark it in your Bookmarks toolbar folder, so you can open it at a click.

If you click the logout buttons while you are in a browser window where you are logged into a Niteflirt account, it will log you out and change your availability status.

I have disabled the login feature so garbage doesn’t get submitted.
Demo
Text file

If you can’t get this to work, I can customize it for you for $5, but I think you can get it to work. It’s simpler than you think.

In fact, the upgrade has made it simple to view older payment mail buttons, even though they still haven’t gotten round to putting a link to page 2 (or even older ones) and there are only 25 buttons showing, half of which are phantom duplicates.

Login to your Niteflirt account to follow along. All the screenshots of listings are linked to the actual page. Screenshots of payment mail button pages are linked to a URL that will only show the account you are logged into.

Here’s the secret:
If you click on the new Niteflirt homepage and look at the url, it looks like this:

So now click on the link to Find Women, and the URL looks like this:

Now click to the next page. Wait, what?

And now the next:

Do you suppose that if you changed that ’3′ to a ’4′ it would take you to the next page? Try it and see. (If you’re lazy and just want to guess “yes”, you’d be right.)

Now the whole site is written on the same platform, the same code, which is completely different from the previous type of code.

Let’s look at the URL for page 1 of our payment mail buttons.

There’s no link to page 2 here. There’s not even any indication that page 2 exists. In fact, 12 of the 25 buttons showing are dummy duplicates of other buttons, so you’re really only seeing 13 buttons.

Let’s fake up that URL and see what happens.

Some of you ran out of payment mail button space on Page 1 long ago, even though there were maybe 200 buttons on each page. Now there are only 25 buttons, and half of them are fakes. But here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you links to the first 50 pages. You can take it from there.

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
Page 8
Page 9
Page 10
Page 11
Page 12
Page 13
Page 14
Page 15
Page 16
Page 17
Page 18
Page 19
Page 20
Page 21
Page 22
Page 23
Page 24
Page 25
Page 26
Page 27
Page 28
Page 29
Page 30
Page 31
Page 32
Page 33
Page 34
Page 35
Page 36
Page 37
Page 38
Page 39
Page 40
Page 41
Page 42
Page 43
Page 44
Page 45
Page 46
Page 47
Page 48
Page 49
Page 50

On one index page I counted 20% of flirts as stuck in busy except for one listing.

Here’s how to fix it: get your live callbutton from the listing that is available by opening it to edit and saving your changes. Before going back to your account, you land on a page with this link:

Click it, which brings up a popup window containing your code:

Copy the code to your clipboard and paste it into Notepad. The number I have circled is the SID number of that listing. You should replace it with the SID number of one of the stuck listings.

Get that by going to the stuck listing. It is in the url.

Edit the code for the live callbutton to replace the listing SID with that of the stuck one, paste it into the busy listing. Drop the price to .21 so you don’t have to pay much. 

Call it from another account, or have another flirt call it. After the call has started, both of you hang up. The spell is broken.

I have a forum that can be used to discuss Niteflirt issues.

http://help4flirts.com/members

They’ve got a beta site up, http://beta.niteflirt.com which apparently can be used to take calls, but they are giving mixed messages on whether it is safe to take calls and consider the payment secure. Most of the “advice” on this is being given in the new forum, http://forum.niteflirt.com (gotta be a flirt to access this forum), where the overwhelming majority of advice is given by flirts with no understanding of this sort of situation and no inside track on what is going on, and posts after the original one come up in some weird reverse order that makes it sometimes impossible to understand what is being discussed.

If you’re a Niteflirt customer, saw a “We’ll be right back!” page when you tried to access the site but have been wondering when the site will be back, the real answer is, “No one knows, they say they’re working on it”. Flirts are giving out contact information on their sites or in twitter (all my followers are flirts, so I’m not giving out info there). All of my sites have a contact or email me link on them, including this one, so if anybody needs me they can email me to find out how to speak with me.

If you’re a Niteflirt customer who’s been getting a “Bad request 400″ or “The connection was reset by the server” or “Server not found” page for days, it means that Firefox cannot view a simple HTML page due to the type of cookies the site has chosen to use. They’ve known about this problem for days, and the fact that they have not fixed it is telling me that they aren’t intending to. Damn. My desktop only uses Firefox.

It is, what? Right now they are 24 hours past the loose deadline they gave us for coming back online. I understand that it’s hard to accurately predict these things, and I’m willing to cut them some slack, since they said that the site would be basically restored, except for some features that we use a lot, but which are not essential from the customer’s standpoint.

But should we believe that part? What if the site comes back and we all have to completely recreate everything we did before? With different restrictions and the pages are all different? Not getting a warm fuzzy feeling on this…

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Niteflirt’s website was due to come down shortly for a major upgrade, and it has been down now since 9:30 pm ET last night. They told us the site would be down for 8-12 hours. Now they are saying it will be down until tomorrow morning @6:00 am. I’ll believe it when I see it.

No hard feelings against Niteflirt on this one, so long as it actually does come back up. The kind of upgrade they are doing (complete replacement of the platform with minimal difference visible to customers) is more complicated than hardly anyone could imagine.

We will be without customer lists for a month, and featured listings will be gone for a long time. Placement will be based on LVS alone.

Those of us in the forums were unable to convince the powers that be to notify the general flirt population in advance.

I have a forum where I have created a Niteflirt transition board to discuss this in, if anybody wants to post about the issue.

Niteflirt Customer Service is tweeting at http://twitter.com/NiteFlirtCS