#patrecon

So Wolf 359 released their series finale last Christmas. They continued the patreon campaign for a few months to release some more bonus content and stuff. Then, y’know, since the show was over they didn’t want to keep taking everyone’s money, so they talked with Patreon who apparently told them they would work it out so Wolf 359′s campaign could be basically permanently paused but patrons could still access the archive of AMAs and commentary tracks and the behind the scenes podcast they did and all that.

And it works that way. The first month. They paused at the end of May, so no one was billed for June but the platform was still fully accessible.

Then July rolled around and we start hearing murmurs that people are losing access to the patron content, despite still being “patrons” according to their homepage. I believe at that time it was about half the patrons were locked out?

 So, July 18 I opened my first help ticket with Patreon support. Explained the situation, infodumped everything I could investigate from the client side. Four days later get the generic “Have you tried turning your computer off and back on again?” Despite this clearly impacting multiple users and evidence that it was bad data coming from their api, I humored them and tried turning my computer off and back on again, tried a new browser, the whole thing. I give them more information about how it’s definitely a spreading problem and attach the API fetch that populates the post feed and showed that their servers were returning that I was not allowed to access the post, even though the data that populated the sidebar showing which tier I was on clearly did.

Three days go by. No response. I ask for an update. Five more days go by. Get the “We’ve shared your concern with our team and will be investigating!” I say “Okay cool, I’d like to be kept updated.” The ticket gets marked “solved” and closed to further comments.

August billing cycle rolls through, and I think for a while we had access again? So I optimistically thought maybe it had been handled.

Then September rolls around. I’m locked out again. So, it appears, are all but one of the patrons. There used to be a “patron count” that displayed on the posts that was recently done away with, but fun fact, that data still appears on the API fetch even though it’s not rendered to the page.

So now we know not only is this not fixed, it just got 100% worse. I open a follow up ticket.

This time I get someone who thankfully doesn’t start me at  “have you tried turning it off and back on again.” I explain my observations, we end up working out that I can unlock the content again if I update my payment info. They tell me they’re passing the info along to the team and hope to have a fix sooner rather than later. 

Thinking we are actually getting action on it this time, we wait until the October billing cycle rolls around. I get the campaign pause email as usual, and check on things. I still had access to posts, but the “patron count” numbers were still way below where they should’ve been. I relay this to the support person, ask for an update. Then suddenly it’s “Where are you getting that count? It doesn’t seem to correlate to anything, I don’t know what that number is, I don’t know where that data comes from, I don’t think it’s a reliable measure of how many people can access the posts.”

Fun fact: I had been observing that patron_count property on the fetch data. When we worked out the workaround of updating payment info to regain access to content, that number incremented by one. And it did that both times I’ve done this stupid workaround to regain access. So personally, I feel like there may in fact be a relationship between that number and how many people can access the content. But I digress.

So whatever, I’m not gonna fight this right now, I explain my observations again and why I felt that had a relationship but also that most people were still reporting that they couldn’t access shit.

Now I get “Well, if anyone’s still having trouble just tell them to update their payment info or contact us.”

Reminder that there’s almost 900 people on this campaign. They’re putting this on the back-burner because they have a workaround which is “Have nearly 900 people individually and manually update their payment info to make up for a flaw in our system.” That’s their actual plan.

It’s around here that I discover I’ve been locked out of posts again. So I’m at “What the actual fuck” point right now. Help desk person is like “Huh, that’s strange. When did this actually start?”

I explain again, and they say yeah, that makes sense, that pausing repeatedly every month is doing something weird, and they tell me “It probably would be better if they switched to pay-per-post.”

So I relay this information back to the people in charge of this campaign, and they try it. No dice, everyone’s still locked out.

We go back to Patreon support again, saying “Hey, we tried the thing you said to try and it also didn’t work.”

And here’s where things get fun. Because here’s the part where Support informs me, “Oh, this campaign is pay-per-post. If there’s no paid post in the last billing cycle, patrons will get locked out of content.”

Y’know. Apparently by design.

So I just had a support person tell me it should be pay-per-post, which now makes this bug actually the expected behavior of the site.

What kind of bait and switch bullshit is this, right?

In the interim, my ticket has been marked “solved” and closed to comments again. So we open up help ticket number three.

Now that I’m as pissed about the customer service as I am about the  actual bug, I ask for contact information for whoever’s in charge of the help team. And since they still won’t give me an estimate, I ask them to explain their workflow procedures so I can at least get a sense of where this issue is in the pipeline.

The latest support person declined to do either.