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Subject: 
Re: Hey, like, is anyone there? (was: When is Mac support coming for LEGO Mosaic?)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.lego.direct
Date: 
Sat, 3 Feb 2001 06:17:56 GMT
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In lugnet.lego.direct, Tom McDonald writes:
Perhaps this is a lousy idea, but what about a monthly or bi-monthly update
which would be posted in lugnet.lego.direct by LD? It wouldn't have to be
prosey. It could be strictly utilitarian. It could address chosen concerns
with short responses. In short, a problem tracker that we all can see.

Tom, I don't think this is a lousy idea--in fact I we have suggested it to
Brad as one possibility. (Brad, by the way, does still work at LEGO Direct,
Todd.) As David Eaton said in the next thread-branch over
(http://news.lugnet.com/lego/direct/?n=1729), we need to figure out what the
best way is for us to respond to all of your questions in a reasonably
timely manner. I don't know if that shuold be a "bug tracking system" or
exactly when or we're going to come up with an good plan, in part because we
have a lot going on right now, like Jake said. We are hosting some meetings
with AFOLs here in New York this weekend and next weekend, and we're putting
up websites like mad. www.bionicle.com, for instance)

LEGO may seem like a vast, faceless company sometimes, but please try to
keep in mind that LEGO Direct, for the most part, is a few dozen people
sitting in a small office in New York, most of us working away on designing,
writing, building, and fixing our website. We also get a huge number of
questions, comments, and bug inquiries to deal with from other sources
besides Lugnet -- phone, e-mail, and so forth.

For now though, I will try to help answer some of the questions that Todd
reminded everyone of near the beginning of this thread:

- Problems with Shop at Home. In my experience, and after consulting with
one of our tech gurus, I believe that several of the posters in this thread:

http://news.lugnet.com/lego/direct/?n=1687

had the right idea -- this kind of problem is very often caused by a
corrupted cookie. I've encountered similar problems before, as a user and
producer of other websites. So one handy tip when encountering strange
problems with a web page is to clear your cache (aka temporary internet
files), which can be done from the preferences/options panel of most
browsers. It's analogous to the simplistic "cure-all" of rebooting your
computer to try and flush out a system problem.

- Slowness of Shop at Home. As someone pointed out, Shop at Home was
redesigned recently to improve speed. We were very aware of the problems, so
we have been working on them. Macintosh users, who were experiencing the
wost slowness, should no longer be seeing those "menus loading" messages.
The dynamic menus are still present for users on other platforms, although
it sounds like SunOS might be another platform that's slow? Although we do
have a QA department, I'm afraid that like most companies, we don't QA on
Sun workstations. Further changes are planned, but I'd rather not go into
detail, because I'm not directly involved in Shop at Home at all.
Professionally, I would want to either let the folks who do speak for
themselves, or at least discuss things with them first. This is one of the
things we deal with when trying to answer questions.

- Mysterious Set 6500. Another good example -- there are probably at least
one or two people somewhere who remember what happened to set 6500 five
years ago, but it's not a matter of pushing a button and getting an answer.
Since I'm curious about this myself, I checked through our databases for
1996 and 1997, but there was no mention of that product or product number,
probably beacuse it was never released. Now, I may continue to ask around
about this set when I happen to be talking to someone who might know, but
don't expect an answer any time soon. (At least not from me.) The most
likely answer is that the set was planned, but was cancelled. This does
happen sometimes, for all sorts of reasons; 6500 may have gotten far enough
to get a number and an advertisement, unlike many other cancelled sets.

- Fixes that were made to the site. I fixed that comma on the INmotion
page,  requested that the scrolling speed be changed in the About Us
section, and requested a printable version of the legal documents in that
section, all after reading Todd's post. To be fair to our staff, we did know
about the scrolling speed problem. But hearing from someone outside LEGO
does give us even more reason to get it fixed. I didn't think to post after
I was told the problems were fixed (trumpeting a minor fix didn't seem
worthy of a post). I had a note to myself to thank Todd via e-mail, but I
never got around to sending it. My bad. Also, Todd noticed the fix pretty
quickly after I did. =)

- Appreciative comments for quality of the instruction paper. Thanks! We
appreciate it. If I find out who was responsible for the new paper, I'll try
to pass the comment along. LEGO has many employees and since I just started
in October, I still only know a fraction of them. However, I have to say
that in the last few months, I've found the LEGO Direct team to be quite
competent and professional, including the programmers and QA staff, who seem
to be scapegoated ocasionally around here.

- Reading Lugnet newsgroups. There are several of us who read
lugnet.dear-lego and lugnet.lego.direct daily. I frequently do so at home,
so that I can get other work done in the office. So yes, we're listening --
we're just figuring out how we can answer these questions. If I knew all the
answers off the top of my head, believe me, I'd post. And when we do know
the answers, we do post. This is especially true of specific questions. Jake
responded</A> to the Microsoft deal "controversy,"

http://news.lugnet.com/lego/direct/?n=1608

while Kiernan Mathews pointed out some of the features of the Technic C-3PO
right away after someone wondered about it:

http://news.lugnet.com/starwars/?n=9502

After I finish this post, I'm going to go write another one about Bionicle,
which I am more than happy to try and field questions about. Please
understand if we can't answer every question, even in our particular field.

If anyone has further comments or questions, please feel free to e-mail me,
but since it's now the weekend, I'm going to be at home, not working, until
Monday.

Tomas Clark
LEGO Direct



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Hey, like, is anyone there? (was: When is Mac support coming for LEGO Mosaic?)
 
Tomas Clark wrote: Snipped post by lego direct. (...) This is exactly the sort of post we want. Just a regular update as to whats happening at lego. (23 years ago, 3-Feb-01, to lugnet.lego.direct)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Hey, like, is anyone there? (was: When is Mac support coming for LEGO Mosaic?)
 
(...) Perhaps this is a lousy idea, but what about a monthly or bi-monthly update which would be posted in lugnet.lego.direct by LD? It wouldn't have to be prosey. It could be strictly utilitarian. It could address chosen concerns with short (...) (23 years ago, 2-Feb-01, to lugnet.lego.direct)

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