Thanks for taking to time to look at what I've gone through. I figured if I could post pictures of what I was going through, people couldn't say I was lying. To be honest, this thread started out as a rant thread based on what I saw in the software. I bit my tongue for a few days trying to see if I was crazy and make sure I wasn't missing anything in the way the software was behaving. I want to say this again, becasue it's true, I love my device, but the software needs some work (the devil is in the details).
On Thursday, December 6th, I made two calls to 1-877-Get-Zune (438-9863). My first call lasted 45mins and helped to solve list issue#1. My second call, Service Request# 1051854663, made two hours later, lasted 2 1/2 hours. Over the course of that call, the tech support guy, named Fady, worked on my most recent post above. At one point I pointed him to this thread and he put me on hold so he could read it. At that point this thread had more of a rant slant to it. Eventually he was able replicate the difficulty I was having in getting the software to recognize similarly titled tracks. He agreed it was a problem and gave me the service request number above and told me to post it in the forums for the Zune Team to see, along with a description of what we went through. He assured me that the Zune Team monitors these pages. I have not seen any other service request numbers in these forums.
Other than those two phone calls, I have not directly received help from any of the Zune Team forum members. In fact in my first phone call I asked the service representative if she had heard of the forums and their different
community levels of Zune personnel, and she said she had not heard of either. Fady even remarked that they had changed the process through which users receive support. He sent me
here and was surprised that it lead to the forums. I have read the earlier posts in this sub-forum, it seems like the Zune Team stopped posting, around 11-18 or so (Thanksgiving Holiday?). Doing a search of the users GeminiGuy, estimated1, zmanaaa, and h2odreams proves this, although cesarisok has posted recently. Maybe they're still on vacation, its around that time of year. Some of the Zune team used to have community levels, but now they're replaced with 'Z's for the most part (or maybe I just started to notice the Z's). In regards to the community levels, I have yet to see anyone with a 'S,' 'C,' or 'V' post in the software forum. I thought the phone people would at least be an automatic 'S.'
Although, looking at the number of threads popping up daily (in this forum alone), and language used, I can't blame them for not posting. The Zune Team probably has
real jobs too. Being textually abused is probably not high on their list of priorities. Perhaps they're not posting becasue the issues being posted are repeated and they're fast at work on their solutions. However, in the absence of information from a trusted source, we're forced to speculate. In this instance, speculation is not good. There are some disputes, questions, fears and irrational beliefs that could be put to rest with a simple "we've seen it, we're working on it," or "come on now UserX that is not constructive," or "the software does this function because of X." While the job may get repetitive, the more people who know, the easier your job gets (echo chamber/positive information feedback loop). The same could be said of feature request threads, theres probably a reason why something isn't in the software, it would be great to know why.
Larry Osterman will occasionaly respond to users who comment on his blog enteries about specific aspects of Windows. And sometimes they ask really pointed/specific questions in return, sometime merriting some futher research and response on Larry's end.
Cesar manages to keep his blog up to date too, with the latest Zune news.
I know there are a ton of people out there who just want questions answered and can't be bothered to look them up using the forum search tools. The problem is, there are not enough user-based experts, just yet, to adequately answer all the questions about the new software and hardware. The number of people posting about software problems, alone, is scary. It seems like there is very little documentation about the new software for the old users to look through, I've seen a few threads about users discovering features that weren't completely obvious. Here's another example, of very little information coming our way from an official channel, the
Zune Media Collection Reset Tool. When I do a forum search for that
exact phrase only 12 posts show up, none of them are from a Zune Team Member or Member of the Press (represented by a 'P' in the community user levels). Wouldn't the best person to trumpet this release be a Zune Team or Press member, and wouldn't a decent description and q&a thread (stickied of course) be useful as opposed to leaving users to figure out
what it does and how it does it? There's nothing posted in the '
News' subforum, I would think that's the first place that update would have appeared.
I think this speaks to the final point that I want to bring up, there needs to be more moderation of these forums. I'm a member of
HardForum and each sub-forum has at least one moderator, whose screen name is listed in the lower right-hand corner of the window. Someone acts up: warning, repeated offenses: 1week vacation or permanent vacation (banning). Other than "Read the stickies" and "Don't feed the trolls," there is no expectation or definition of user conduct here, and it shows.
This is what is expected at at the H. Thats not to say that the censors should be out in full sweep and remove everything anti-Microsoft, but keeping it to a decent level is necessary. There's no place for a thread like
this. It's not constructive and doesn't get anyone anywhere. The HardForum is ~95,000 strong. We've got ~65,000 here. One man (Cesar), with a blog to maintain, is not enough against all these people with Zune issues. I'm positive the forums can do a better job calming people down (seriously, you can make your point without swearing or using all caps), and removing destructive threads. If you want to show someone a lesson or make a point, the best way to back it up is with facts. DOING THIS
DOESN'T HELP!!! In most web circles thats yelling. Giving links to relevant information and trying to troubleshoot others, so that they can pass on their learned information in return is a much better process of building an informed and constructive user community and that starts with sharing the Zune Team Braintrust.
Currently I'm working on preventing the software from repeatedly syncing certain songs and so far my results are
promising.Edit: clarity and spelling
Zune MVP
Contributor, http://www.insidethecircle.net
