Clearly, spam has been a huge issue for you, our customers, and us, especially over the past couple of weeks. From a Support Pages perspective, the team has been kept really busy keeping the content up to date with the many fixes that have been put live; not least the new Webmail and spam filtering. It’s been heartening to read some of the great feedback left as ‘Smiley face’ ratings for these pages. It really does make one heck of a difference to know what ‘hits the spot’ and conversely, what perhaps goes ‘wide of the mark’ in our Support Pages.
I collected my ‘home’ email the other night (it’s not work so I don’t often I have to admit) and nearly fell off the chair. I only downloaded 35 emails, not the usual 600 or so. Then I remembered I’d had our new spam filtering activated and all the mail tagged as [-SPAM-] is now kept server-side and not downloaded – brilliant!
The following paragraphs explain a bit more about the new Spam Protection, how to benefit from having less unwanted mail flood your Inbox and how to use Webmail to check on what spam you have received.
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As you may be aware on Thursday 24th May we introduced our improved Spam Protection feature for all customers. If you did not opt in or out of this via the Member Centre then we will have automatically switched on Spam Protection for your account.
What is Spam Protection?
You can move any emails that are marked as [-SPAM-] by our spam filters to new ‘Spam’ folder in your Webmail. These emails will not be downloaded by your email software so you should see a big decrease in the amount of junk email which arrives in your Inbox. For full details on how it works read our Spam Protection guide.
Where is my ‘Spam’ folder?
If you opted in for Spam Protection then as soon as you receive a message our filter thinks is [-SPAM-] a ‘Spam’ folder will be created in your Webmail. If this hasn’t happened then please do the following:
1. Visit: http://webmail.plus.net and log in
2. Click the ‘folders’ link at the top of the page
3. At the bottom of the page there will be a folder called INBOX.Spam
4. Select the folder and click the ‘Subscribe’ button
5. Click [Check mail] on the left-hand menu pane
6. Your ‘Spam’ folder will now appear at the end of the folders list, underneath ‘Trash’
(Customers on Force9 and Free-Online would use http://webmail.force9.net and http://webmail.free-online.net )
Note: You will have a ‘Spam’ folder for all of the mailboxes you use. You can check these in exactly the same way through Webmail. Any emails which that are left in your ‘Spam’ folder will be deleted after 30 days.
What happens if my email is wrongly marked as spam?
When you log into Webmail you can check your ’Spam’ folder and see what emails have been marked as [-SPAM-]. This means you won’t lose any legitimate messages, but you will be able to delete any unwanted spam. For information on how to stop legitimate emails being marked as spam and find out how to train the spam filters to pick up previously undetected spam please see the Spam Protection Guide.
I am back working on the Community Site again, having taken a small break to work on some of the other projects that are on the company, department and my personal roadmap for a few weeks.
Since I started back on this, I’ve spent most of my time bug fixing some of the small little bugs that have been annoying people that have been posted to the Bugs page and the Forum.
I’ve also started looking at some of the backend changes that need to be made, most of which aren’t really visible to the front end – some reports and some optimisation in places.
If you’ve mentioend bugs to us, why don’t you check and see if they’ve been fixed?
Customers now have the option to make their passwords stronger, and will be forced to choose a password at least 8 characters in length when signing up or changing their current password. More details can be found in this article on strong passwords.
Here is the round up from Day 2 of BarCampSheffield held over the weekend. 14 demo’s took place and the winner walked away with a cheque for £1000 to help get their idea off the ground or buy themselves some more equipment to expand.
Meecard – Best of Show WINNER!
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Andy describes meecard as “Neatly combines all your Web presences into one appealing little card – a snippet of youness on the Web!” and this world exclusive demonstration proved a great success with the audience. So much so, that Andy & his business partner walked about with the best of show award of £1000. Looking forward to seeing this launch in the next couple of weeks.
afeeda – Best of Show Runner Up!
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Dave demonstrated his feed aggregator which is both fast and easy to use. It can aggregate content from sites such as flickr, blogs and news sites into 1 easy to read news-reel. The site is currently in beta and is due to launch in the next couple of months.
ThinkFold – Best of Show Runner Up!
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Matt demonstrated a web app for outlining ideas and thoughts in realtime with others. Currently in private beta but looking to launch in the next couple of months this web application uses lots of javascript to make the interface very slick and fast.
Travel Manager
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Mike demonstrated his niche “CRM solution for the people transportation industry”, with a focus on how its possible to build a web application on a budget for a niche market and still generate decent ROI. His application includes CRM, document management built on Amazon’s S3 infrastructure, geocoded maps built on Google maps and asset (people & vehicles in this case) scheduling.
TrafficJammr
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Stuart demonstrated how using a bit of ingenuity and Map 24’s mapping solution he solved his problem of deciding which route to take to work in the mornings from Hull to Sheffield. Built on PHP, XSLT and the aforementioned Map 24 he built a near real-time mapping service to choose the route for him
QuotationBooks
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Amir demonstrated his website which provides over 40,000 quotes from a large number of well known figures in one easy to use interface. He demonstrated how he has integrated a number of other technologies such as spinvox to bring the written word to the masses.
theDiveBuzz
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Lucy demonstrated her niche web app for divers. Novel functionality included allowing divers to link to each other as “buddies” on each dive and share information / photo’s of the dive.
Facebook Friend Plotter
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Matthew demonstrated his mashup of facebook, google maps and google code to plots where your facebook friends are in the UK. A deceptively simple interface belies a good set of functionality.
Super Web Creator
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Michal demonstrated a new approach to Web based Content Management System using static files to create fast, easy to navigate and SEO friendly websites.
Twitcash
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Tom had an ingeniously evil idea one day, and built this web application “because he could”. With a tag line of “Damn, that’s evil.” you’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to signup to this service which allows you to sell you twitter contact list to the highest bidder and allow your contacts to be SMS spammed but all and sundry. Clever use of technology to show off Tom’s skills in all things mashup.
Dynamic website layout using file structure
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Caius demonstrated his proof of concept technology for building fast websites which are SEO friendly using only flat files and templates.
Regards
Dean
Congratulations to George & Andy from meecard.com for winning the web apps demo at BarCamp on Sunday. I’ve signed up for a beta invite but in anticipation of that, I thought I’d put up some links to my various web presences.
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Please add yours below and let’s get connected!
If you’ve raised a Question to our support team and had a response from them, you might have noticed that you get the chance to rate their response. Ever wondered what happens next? More…
In a previous newsletter we told you about our dedicated business support team. Since then, the team has gone from strength to strength. We answer 99% of calls with an average wait time of less than 20 seconds, and 85% of Questions raised online within just 4 hours!
Martyn Tanner told his friends and family about PlusNet and was lucky enough to get a huge reward. He was the lucky winner of our £30,000 VW Golf – read more and see the photos on the Comms Team blog. More…
House Moves: Processes, Payments and Problems
Moving house is something that everyone is likely to do at some stage in their lifetime. Moving broadband from your old house to your new one is something a number of customers ask us to do. I’d like to outline the processes that we at PlusNet perform to move your broadband from one address to another, costs incurred and some problems which we may experience along the way.
Processes and charging
In order to allow our customers to request such a house move, there is a page on our website that allows you to make this request and asks you for all of the relevant information. This page can be found here:
http://www.plus.net/my.html?s=0&action=adsl_reprovision
This page will ask you when you want your house move to occur, as well as asking you for the new telephone number and the address at which you want us to move your broadband service to. It also asks you when you want your existing service at your current address to be removed.
Because we have to pay BT Wholesale £40 to activate a telephone line with a broadband service, we give you the option to either pay this upfront, or to defer the charge. What this means is that if you choose to defer the charge, we will pay the £40 charge to BT on your behalf and if you stay with us for over 12 months, we will write off the charge.
Unfortunately, when we place our orders with BT Wholesale, there are associated timescales with cancelling and ordering a new service. Currently, a cease order takes 5 working days (although there is work ongoing within BT Wholesale to reduce this to 1 working day) and a provide order also takes 5 working days.
When you are requesting a house move and changing your telephone number, we can request a new provide as soon as your new telephone number is operational, taking 5 working days.
However, if you are keeping the same telephone number we are, owing to a long term flaw within the BT Wholesale ordering system, unable to place a new provide order until the cease at your address is completed. This means that the process will take approximately 12 working days (5 days for the cease, 2 days for BT’s database to update and 5 days for the provide) In real terms, this equates to about two and a half weeks. The implementation of the one day cease will reduce this to 8 working days, which is great news for our customers that wish to keep their telephone number when moving house – something that many people (quite understandably) choose to do.
There is also an option to do something called a “simultaneous provide”. This allows you to move both your telephone number and your broadband service on the same day. Please bear in mind though that this requires a considerable notice period, preferably about 2 weeks. You will also need to call BT Retail (150) and ask them to move your telephone number to your new address and ask them for a simultaneous provide code at the same time. You can then provide us with this code, which will allow us to request that BT Wholesale move your broadband on the same day. It’s worth bearing in mind that the success rate for simultaneous orders isn’t fantastic, partly owing to the extended lead time when placing them, along with other issues such as receiving incorrect simultaneous codes from BT (these codes are also referred to as “start reference” or “fast peter” codes by BT).
Potential problems
As with anything in life, problems can arise, even with something that may sound as simple as moving a broadband service. I’ll outline some of the potential problems that can be experienced which may cause delays in the re-provision of the service.
DACS
A DACS is a Digital Access Carrier System. Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Access_Carrier_System
I would generally refer to DACS as simply just a line sharing device that does not support a broadband service (it also reduces the potential speed of a regular dial up service). There are two different types of DACS. An internal one, which would require a BT Engineer visit to remove it, which we would need to book with BT Wholesale on your behalf with your prior consent.
Unsurprisingly, the other type of DACS is one external to your premises. This can vary from something on the outside of your house, to something on your street, to in extreme cases, something buried under a road which then requires BT to gain planning permission from your local council to remove.
We can experience delays in internal DACS removal as we need to contact you first to find out any suitable times for BT to visit and BT generally insist on 5 working days notice in order to do this. With external DACS work, this has to go through BT Wholesale’s Planning Department to determine potential costs of performing the work. This add to the potential delays. BT also have a budget of £1,000 for DACS removal. If the work that is required exceeds this amount, they will not perform the work which unfortunately means that our ability to provide an ADSL service is impossible.
Exchange Capacity
Every exchange has a finite amount of capacity. This means that they can only support a certain number of broadband services at any one time. In busy exchanges this can result in what is essentially a queue for service. When the exchange becomes “full” we have to wait for other broadband services to be removed before new orders will be accepted. This again, causes delays in the order becoming completed. We will contact BT on a regular basis to try and gain a timescale for when the orders is likely to occur, but often this is difficult owing to the length of the “queue” being unknown.
Tags-on-the-line
Tags-on-the-line are essentially “markers” left on the line by a previous service. Imagine you have just moved house and asked PlusNet to move your service to your new house. However, the previous owner of the house also had a broadband service with a different ISP. The previous tenant then did not ask his ISP to cancel the service or the ISP failed to remove the service from the line correct. This then results in a “Tag” being left on the line preventing us from placing an order.
We then have to contact BT Wholesale’s Tags Team on 0800-1690934, which is a service open for both ISPs and customers to call to determine what kind of Tag is present on the telephone line. They will then be able to remove any service on the line, although this currently takes 5 working days for the cease to complete (remember I spoke about one day cease earlier).
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consumeradvice/internet/customer_service/tagonline/
Again, this adds to any potential delays, but we will always call BT Wholesale on your behalf to get as much information about the delays being experienced before letting you know why we are experiencing problems in completing your order.
Incompatible Products
Incompatible Products are services on telephone lines that prevent the ability to have a broadband order placed. I spoke about DACS earlier, but there are a few other instances which prevent broadband compatibility. These include alarm systems, PBX’s, ISDN amongst others. If we are unable to gain this information from BT Wholesale, we may need to ask you to speak to BT Retail, as often we are unable to ascertain the type of incompatibility and BT Retail will not pass this information on to us as we are not their customer – we deal exclusively with BT Wholesale.
That’s pretty much all I can think of at this moment in time! As you can see, it’s not quite that simple process that many people may believe and I hope I’ve been able to provide an insight into why delays may occur.
A(nother) new experience for me since joining PlusNet – which was attending a ‘BarCamp’ which I’d never even heard of until recently. I’ve already written one post on this for the blog, and have at least two more to write once I’ve collated my thoughts.
As a concept, the BarCamp was completely alien to me, but the 62 people attending the event made it a worthwhile 2 days. Dean has posted some statistics of the day and links to the pictures on his blog.
It’s been interesting being introduced to new ideas and technologies, and having some interesting conversations with people over Pizza, Beer (or not, in my case) and just generally chatting to people.
More thoughts later hopefully from myself and Kelly and Tam who were also at the event.
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