How not to do an upgrade

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

After spending much time and effort trying to get my wife’s blog to work I could easily write a book about what not to do when you do an upgrade. For example:

Don’t update any of your support documentation before you release.

Be sure that said documentation lists as a troubleshooting step to check a box that doesn’t exist in your new interface. (Where did the “No File Rename” option go? I have a sneaky suspicion this is one of the problems with people unable to publish suddenly.)

Leave the part of the documentation that says “Support is only available to BloggerPro and BlogSpot Plus subscribers”, but stop letting people sign up at the same time. That way when they have issues with your upgrade, you make them believe there’s no way for them to get help. (Despite what the intro to BloggerControl states, you can use it as a free user)

Don’t review the issues posted to the BloggerControl for at least 3 days. (And counting!)

Change a major part of your service so that many third party tools break with the upgrade. (Post ID’s longer than 17 digits broke every comment system that treated the post ID’s as a number)

Don’t offer a commenting system to people affected by the broken comments they now have. Make them work for a solution!

Don’t make FTP logs available any longer. They weren’t REALLY useful for troubleshooting FTP problems, were they?

Am I missing any others? (I know there’s a bunch of developers pissed about the API, but I’m not a developer, so I don’t even know where to start with that BS!)

Update: Not Blogger related, but the local newspaper’s website upgraded their job search section, and as part of the upgrade they were nice enough to delete all the resumes and cover letters I had stored there. Actually they simply switched vendors for the site with no notice so everything just disappeared. Nice. I’ve really about fucking had it today…

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