Free service with minutes and text allotments that worked for me.
Helpful and interesting members.
RP Samara App.
I won't miss
Non availability of reasonably priced data add ons
Watching a company mismanage and shoot themselves in the foot so many times you would conclude they believed themselves to be a millipede
Being told by an ethical committee to shut up or be banned
Being told it was ok to start a separate thread about moderator overreach and then having another moderator try to derail the conversation while another moderator deleted the thread and banned me
Listening to mods and other R+ sheeple disparage members and break forum rules with impunity
I will miss
Free service with everything included at limits I thought I could use
A Full-service paid account that made it so I never had to worry about anything, but was still super inexpensive (MAD Snow)
Helpful user-base
Learning precisely what my usage patterns are and what 'unlimited' means for me. (Pro-tip a heck of a lot less than what I thought it would be - even in a 'busy' month.)
I won't miss
Lack of support to the point that the user-base had to learn to help each other.
Non availability of 'choose your own' packages/having direct power over what features at which allotments.
Seeing the writing on the wall for months, but still feeling compelled to 'stick it out' because they MIGHT get their stuff together
Forum (mis)Management that has only gotten 1000x worse in the past week.
People complaining about stupid crap (some to the point that they effectively ruined 'free service').
I really enjoyed learning from knowledgeable members about the technical aspects of cell phones and how carriers operate.
The more general discussions were also fun, especially seeing how differently people could view and interpret a given situation.
Will Not Miss
One thing that always concerned at RingPlus was the Billing System. I felt it was possible to wake up one day and find that I had been charged a huge amount through some error. It seemed to me it would be very difficult to resolve that in my favor if it ever happened. That is a worry I have not had elsewhere.
The best of what WAS:
It worked...mostly;
The allotments were good...for a while.
The worst of it:
Unresponsiveness of the principals;
Irresponsible behaviours on the part of all who had any authority whatsoever;
Unjustifiable heavy-handedness;
Wanton censorship;
Or in short if one prefers:
The insanity of it all was quite tiresome.
Will miss:The knowledge,humor, experience, and helpfulness of the members.The uncertainty there that brought the members together. The fritzy space bar that still hasn't been fixed.
Won't miss: The fritzy space bar. And , as "Oldbooks 1" clearly pointed out, the fear and trembling caused by the litany of errors forever pouring forth from the billing and accounting departments, and the horrible thought that one might not be able to correct such errors.
Yes, you shouldn't have it with FreedomPop given how long they have been around now. Pretty, much, we've had them from the beginning on at least one device, and, as long as you get out of the charges, they've pretty much left us alone with no issues at all. And by trading with a few folks who donate bandwidth near the billing cycle end, it's a pretty large amount of data for $0.
Wow Ken, everything you listed matches up with what I was going to say! But I'll add a couple more things to the "Won't Miss" list.
Firstly, I won't miss the goofy default names the forum software gave to people. When I first arrived in the forum almost a year ago I had a hard time changing mine. It would work for a bit with one message and then change back to the weird name again with the next message I posted. This led to my first unpleasant experience with a moderator, on my third day after joining. I complained about the silly name coming back yet again and the moderator deleted the complaint. That set the tone for the rest of my time there.
Secondly, I won't miss the "moderator groupies" who were constantly patting them on the back and gushing over how wonderful they were. Some of these groupies loved to imitate the mods by quoting the TOS to people who had problems and basically just rubbing their noses in their problems being their own fault. The time to lecture someone about what they did wrong is after you help them try to sort it out, not while they're still in the middle of the problem. One of the groupies annoyed me so much so often this way that I compared his behavior to watching an accident victim bleeding on the ground after being thrown through a windshield and saying, "That's what you get for not wearing a seatbelt." Naturally that comment was deleted by one of his buddies.
Wow Widsith. Your experience mirrors my own as well as my observations.
One of my first posts on Social was to do with a problem I had with a paid upgrade. It was met with an avalanche of comments telling me how stupid I had been. Seems like a lot of people at Social have a deep seated need to feel superior by pointing out perceived flaws in others and don't care or know how that is unhelpful and negative. I'd guess that their need to get across their supposed superiority on an MVNO forum is directly related to their lack of standing in the real world.
After the "welcome" I received from fellow members, I suspected that the welcome for the average newbie who didn't understand all the idiosyncrasies of being involved with the satanic trinity of Sprint, R+, and the CDMA, would be much worse. And sure enough, in most of my observations, that turned out to be the case. Knowing what it felt like, as you point out Widsith, of receiving unhelpful lecturing while you were in the middle of a problem, I always felt sorry for these newbies. The very people Karl needed to get to [strike]300,000[/strike], I mean [strike]500,000[/strike], I mean 3,000,000.
Worse was that the moderators did nothing about these off topic comments. It seemed it was completely allowable for some to continually make these comments that were off topic and personal and therefore against forum rules.. I suspect that moderators actually felt the same way as those who continually made such comments but being unable to make such comments themselves as often they would like, limited themselves to allowing such comments to go unchecked. Certainly, the evidence supports this because I can recall almost every R+ moderator making both off topic and personal comments that broke forum rules in a similar vein.
Will not miss
Being ripped of for hunderds of dollars and no help
wont miss being banned for no reason and yet other swore cursed and fought with mods and are not banned
bad service
billing errors
having to use a ticket to get help only to have it closed time after time and not resolved
whinners
list goes on
Reminds me of, yet another aspect not to be missed. You know? It really says a lot about a site's ethos when its "members" feel the need to have to attach a statement like this to their posts:
I will miss the 1/2 Mad Man and Fert and Double Fert. However, anyone with a modicum of common sense new those were unsustainable plans at those prices and the demise of R+ was truly inevitable after having to decommission their RBT platform.
Still waiting for that Smart Dialer to show up!
I won't miss the the many issues with the RBT platform
Latency
Call quality
Not identifying Busy signal
Not identifying disconnected number
Horrid Voice Mail service
Semi regular outages
Completely broken activation system, as in: new activations, swaps and ports
Complete lack of C/S
Telling us to bugger off if we wanted Sprint voice Mail disabled.
Of course the vindictiveness and vendetta approach to Moderation on both Discourse and the Social Forums and where volunteer mods who were and still are nothing but toadies doing the bidding for R+.
The list is longer, but does it matter?
Does anyone also find it interesting that there is little need to help other users activate, configure and provision a device or mention of sideways ports on any of these other Sprint MVNOs?
I am sure there are and will always be some issues, but no where even in the ballpark/stratosphere to the many issues that cropped up on R+. Just goes to show how pathetic they really were and mostly due to the complete lack of even basic customer support.
