Thursday, August 21, 2014

Epic Reaganbook Fail

I recently posted some advice on how to save Reaganbook. Being the sort of guy who actually wants to help them, I decided to use Reaganbook's Contact Us form to let the admins know about my advice.
I'm a professional developer with over 15 years experience creating and maintaining online communities. Having examined your recent launch issues, I've written up a quick list of recommendations to help you get your site back on its feet. I've posted them at: http://blog.matthewmiller.net/2014/08/how-to-save-reaganbook.html I am not trying to solicit business, merely offering up some professional advice on how to address some of the technical issues that caused you difficulty. Good luck and God bless,
Nice, professional and to the point, don't you think? The real fun started when I hit "Submit" on the "Contact Us" page. Instead of a confirmation, I got the error message:

The admin has not set any email address to contact them.

That's right folks.They didn't even bother to set up the "Contact Us" form.


At this point I'm starting to think the site's configuration consisted of domain registration, signing up for a cheap-ass web hosting service, and two hours of diddling with the default PHPfox configuration. It's conceivable I put more effort into my article on how to fix ReaganBook then they put into deploying it.

Being stubborn, I decided to try one last time to contact the folks behind Reaganbook. A quick WHOIS on the domain name revealed it was registered by Janet Porter at "Faith2Action." I decided to try Faith2Action's Contact Us form instead. THAT form gave me the message:

Your message was sent successfully to Faith2Action. Thanks.
As tempting as it is to contact Ms. Porter through the email address on the domain registration, I've spent enough time on trying to give free professional advice to people for now.

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