Those of you who have followed this blog over the years may have noticed that it had ads on it for a long time, and was at the address superverbose.wordpress.com. Then, last September, the ads went away and the address became just superverbose.com. Now the ads and the old address are back. Why? Well, there hangs a tale.
I started this blog in 2004 on LiveJournal. LJ was a great home for a long time, but in 2011-2012 it started to feel like it was falling apart. I got more and more of a feeling of impending doom… which I guess turned out to be wrong, because it’s still running and hosting the old version of this blog, but in any case I moved over to WordPress.com in 2012. I’m careful to call it WordPress.com because there is also a WordPress.org, and they are apparently two very different things. People have strong opinions about the differences between them.
Well, I’ve loved being on WordPress.com. It makes having a blog extremely easy, it handles all the hosting stuff, and I think it looks great. Plus, the basic level of it is free and pretty good, albeit ad-strewn. So as I wrote more and more — Album Assignments, Watchmen, Geek Bowl, etc. — and got more and more visitors, I felt like it was time to pony up. Mainly, I wanted to get rid of ads, and the fact that I could have my blog on its own domain (rather than a subdomain of wordpress.com) was a bonus.
So in September of 2019, I decided to buy a “Personal Plan” — basically a bare-bones subscription that did what I wanted. When I bought it, the site seemed to offer me a free upgrade to the “Premium Plan” for a year, which I really didn’t need or care about, but hey, free, so why not?
Fast forward a year. I keep getting notices that my Premium Plan is expiring, but that’s fine — I’m happy to let it expire since I still have another year of the Personal Plan remaining. But then I notice — I’ve been switched to the free plan! A glitch, I guess. So I write the “Happiness Engineers” (yeah, that’s what WordPress.com calls its support staff) and say, “…now that the Premium has expired, it seems like WordPress has forgotten about my second year of the Personal plan. Can you please reinstate me to the proper status?”
The reply I get back tells me no no no, I didn’t get a free upgrade to Premium. I traded my two-year plan for a one-year plan. That was my “free upgrade”. WTF?!? I would never have traded two years for one if it had been in any way clear that I was canceling one plan and choosing another. In fact, my billing history shows full payment for two years of Personal, and another $0.00 for one year of Premium, which is why I thought I had a free one-year upgrade as a promotion, hoping to entice me to continue at a higher level. In my experience, plenty of subscription services offer such free temporary upgrades in hopes that customers will enjoy the higher level of service so much that they’d continue paying for it after the trial period expires.
Nope, after multiple back-and forth exchanges with multiple “Happiness Engineers” (who did not engineer my happiness very well at all), WordPress.com insists that they never offered any such promotion, and that they “understand that you might’ve missed that information while checking out on the upgrade.” ARGH!
So now they’re insisting I have to pay for a second year, when in my mind I’ve already paid for it. As the old Alison Moyet song goes, “I feel I’ve been had, and I’m boiling mad.”
I’ve gone round and round and round with these guys. No luck. The best offer I’ve gotten from them (the only offer I’ve gotten) is a code for 17% off their “two years for the price of three” deal. I can’t quite swallow that right now. So the ads are back, and I guess I chalk it up to a learning experience. I’m posting this for anybody thinking of paying for WordPress.com. Don’t fall for the same trick that swindled me!
One last note. My day job is as the product owner of a web site that provides critical services for college students. We have a User Experience (UX) team whose entire mission is to prevent ridiculous snafus like this. So in my final email exchange with the Frustration Engineers, I said this: “From your side, here’s what I’d request or suggest: you guys have a UX team, right? Will you please pass along my experience to them? I think a tweak to the UX when it comes to upgrading could avoid this entire issue. For instance, if in the process of claiming my ‘free’ upgrade, I’d gotten a message like ‘WARNING: You are cancelling your two-year Personal Plan and exchanging it for a one-year Premium Plan. Do you still want to proceed?’, I could have been saved many headaches and you could have been saved many emails.” Grrrrrrr…
Leave a Reply