I’ve been interested in Cloud9 for some time, but I just haven’t found the right use-case to make me sign up. That all changed this week when I bought a Chromebook as an experiment to see how much of my daily work I could do with it.
Enter Cloud9. I’ve got a few small development tasks on my plate and thought the Chromebook and the Cloud9 service would be a perfect match. So I head over to the Cloud9 site, click the “sign up” button, pop in my email address and presto: “Invalid Email Address”. WTF?
I double-checked to make sure I hadn’t misspelled anything. Nope. I retyped my email address. “Invalid Email Address”. I tried my backup email address. “Invalid Email Address”. I tried my business email address, and it actually worked! Double WTF? Are they scrubbing addresses? If they are, what are they checking them against? More importantly, WHY?
I google for anyone reporting the same behavior but come up empty. There’s no support email address or phone number listed on the site so the only option appears to be their community forums. Less than ideal, but whatever gets the job done. I click on the community forum for “account issues”, click the button to create a new post and get a prompt to sign up for the forum. Oh boy.
It turns out that signing up for the community forums is really simple and worked well. (I logged in with my GitHub account) Why is it easier to sign up for the forums than it is to get AN ACCOUNT FOR THE SERVICE THEY’RE SELLING? Anyway, I submit my forum post asking for help and get a prompt response:
Wait, What? So many questions, among them are: What the hell is an improper e-mail address? Do they mean invalid email address? If a user typed in a bad email address, how would they ever complete the signup process? If they never completed the signup process, how could they LOSE access to their account? How bad of a problem was it that they needed to implement this feature? What IS the actual problem?
Questions aside, I still haven’t been able to signup. At this point, I just wanted them to give me a solution so I could evaluate their service which I’d heard was pretty good. After all, Dana was very nice and had given me their email address. This must be a fluke. They wouldn’t be successful if their product was this hopelessly jacked up. I told myself that they’d have me on my way in no time. I sent a message, confident of a quick and professional response to my silly little issue.
Then I got the reply.
QUADRUPLE WTF!?!? My momentarily confidence was now gone. I can’t sign up for the service because my email address is “invalid”, so I email them from that address to get them to help me and they email me back at the “invalid” address to tell me that I can’t use it because they can’t reach that address. Apart from their apparent existential crisis over my email, they also need help understanding how to use nslookup correctly.
I got up from my desk and had to take a walk. I played with the dog. I made a cup of coffee. I thought about how to tell someone they’re a dipshit without telling them they’re a dipshit. I finished my coffee. I wrote my reply:
I don’t know if I really even want to use Cloud9 any more. If it’s this hard to sign up and get some basic help, what would happen if I had a real problem. If I ever manage to get an account, I won’t use it for anything critical, and that’s a bummer. I really wanted to like this service. To their credit, they did email me back:
Yes, something is working. That something is my email.
I’d really like the opportunity to share my experience with Cloud9′s platform, not just their sign-up process. If they ever get back to me, I will update this.