PlusNet Community Website

We were talking in the office today about some of the reasons why the Internet took off in the way it did. For us old timers, it seems odd now to think back on how we had to explain the positive benefits of going ‘online’. Of course it was ultimately the popularity of broadband and the social pervasiveness of sites like Google, Amazon and eBay that brought the Internet to the mass market.  For me though, back in late 1996, it was the new fangled worldwide web that was the draw.. I’d read ‘Neuromancer‘ some 10 years previously and was captivated by the interconnectedness of ‘websites’.  We were wondering though.. what was it that first made you think ‘I’ve got to get Internet’?
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Since we launched the Community Site Beta on April 4th, 2007 it’s been a pretty busy place to be, especially for those of us in the Comms Team. Some of you (much like myself) are rather keen (obsessive) with statistics, so I thought I’ve give you a very quick break down of exactly how busy it really has been!

There have been:

122,481 unique visits.
757,335 individual pageviews

Of these (over 3/4 of a million!!) individual pageviews, there have been:

577,099 visits to the main forum page.
60.013 visits to the Comms Blog.
48,459 visits to the Community Site homepage.
19,461 visits to the Blogs page.

Out of our 122,481 unique visits:

64,482 have been using Internet Explorer.
48,355 have been using Mozilla Firefox.
4,055 have been using Opera.
3,944 have been using Safari.

It also seems that we’re renowned throughout the world, but I’m not going to bore you with those details. Maybe next time

James

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A detailed incident report relating to email delivery problems that occured on 22nd August, is now available over on the Comms Blog.

Ian

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A bit of an odd day for the Support Centre as customers in the Manchester area called in reporting dropped connections en masse. Over the years we’ve seen lots of things that can cause broadband to disconnect; Xmas tree lights, trains and, now of course, earthquakes. The BBC tell us that there have not been any reports of injuries (thank goodness) and that there was only minor ‘rattling of beds’. There was however enough ’shaking’ to apparently cause a temporary interruption to broadband connections for some of the goodly folk just across the hills from us here in Sheffield.

Hot off the Press: I’m pleased to be able to say that the incident report for last week’s email problem will be published to the Comms Team blog later this evening.

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Cornerstones are the whats, whys and hows of PlusNet. They began life back in the early nineties when we began offering non subscription dial up access under the pseudonym ‘Force9′ - Essentially a reaction to the packages Freeserve were offering around the same time. This led to an extremely hectic month with us jumping from about 10,000 customers and a comfortable manual backend to about 300,000 customers and a need for something a little more streamlined than having to manually add email boxes via command line!

We had a choice. There was a lot more work that suddenly needed doing. We could have employed a large amount of new staff, or we could find another way to do the work that didn’t need manual intervention. Thus was born the PlusNet business model.

Automation was indeed the way forward. There was still a need for staff growth, in particular the development department due to the large amount of software that had to be written – essentially a platform capable of running an Internet provisioning service. PlusNet did indeed grow from here, leading to a need for more formal operating procedures.

Fortunately because we started small, people were used to knowing everything that was being done, by whom, and why. It seemed obvious that this should continue, simply because running the business would be a lot easier with this information to hand. Therefore it was decided that this model should continue to grow along with the business, to make sure that all the new people coming on board understood the whats, whys and hows.

And now, in an attempt to help everyone else understand them as well, we will be publishing a series of blogs explaining the many and varied parts of Cornerstones, what they mean to staff and how they make a difference to their working day.

Is there anything you want to know about? Think this is a good idea? Think it sucks? Please tell us. Comment on this blog, join us on our forums, or even raise a ticket and we’ll see what we can do for you.

Matt Taylor

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The following report provides a detailed account of the incident that resulted in the loss of legitimate customer email during the day and evening of Wednesday 22^nd August. We would again like to express our sincere apologies for this disruption to your email service. Everyone at PlusNet understands the importance of email, and we do recognise the inconvenience this problem has caused.

Throughout these events, we have provided regular updates via Service Status and have been discussing the incident in our Community Site discussion forums. More…

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Back in July some customers may remember reading a commitment that was made in one of my Email/Antispam updates that made reference to the introduction of spam and not spam buttons to our SquirrelMail webmail interface.

This was something that was raised as a suggestion way back in December last year by the UserGroup using their Issue Tracker.

It’s also one of the most requested features when we’ve asked our customers how we could improve our Webmail service.

Those who have seen the Usergroup Exclusive will already have heard the good news that the spam reporting buttons have now been rolled out to the live platform.

If you receive a message that’s marked as [-SPAM-] which isn’t, or a message that isn’t marked as [-SPAM-] but should be, then we would normally suggest that you forward it to our spam training addresses. This however can be cumbersome and some customers have been known to get confused about which details require forwarding.

Well help is at hand. If you use our Webmail platform then all this can now be achieved by a simple left mouse-click!

Bob

• PlusNet Webmail
• Force9 Webmail
• Free Online Webmail

One of our customers, ‘Webwise’ on the portal forums, has also taken the time to create a plugin for Outlook Express that some of you might want to check out here.

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PlusNet are happy to announce that our Anytime+ home phone product has been improved. We have completely removed the old 1000 minute fair usage policy, so all calls to UK 01 & 02 landlines are included in your package, provided they last under 60 minutes each of course

For only £15 per month you now get the line rental and as many calls as you want to UK landlines as part of the package! Unlike most companies you don’t have to pay for the line rental on top of this, the £15 already includes it!

That’s not all, included in this you will also get 300 minutes to the top 20 international destinations. The £20 cancellation fee has also been scrapped, not that you’d want to leave of course!

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It’s easy to make assumptions.. try as I might not to (with all my experience of what happens when you do), I still make them. I’d expected to be able to announce the publication of our incident report in the EOD today, but I ‘assumed’, because I wasn’t aware of the sheer amount of behind the scenes investigation underway. What I can tell you is that our team is working extremely hard right now to comprehensively detail the sequence of events that led to the occurrence of last week’s email problem. Clearly we need to make sure that we properly explain what happened and why, rather than rush to put out a more general statement. Meanwhile our priority will always be to ensure our network is working optimally and our technical team has been focussed on ensuring stability across the platform.
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Since the holiday photo competition opened on the 30th July over 440 pictures have been entered. A panel of judges made up of staff members from across the business have now selected the top 10 pictures.

Please take the time to vote for your favourite picture:

Holiday Photo Competition Poll

The poll will remain open until 9am Monday 10th September and the winner will become the lucky owner of a brand new Canon SLR camera!!

Good luck to all the Top 10 and thanks again to everybody who entered pictures into the competition.

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