petergear

Hi,

Has anyone else had trouble with Gmail spam filters scooping out loads of genuine emails this past week or so?  Currently about half of my normal / desirable emails are going into spam.  Not good!

Been aware of at least one other gmail user having similar problems.  I love gmail, so very much hope this is a temporary glitch.

How's everyone else's performing?  Cheers.

Internet at our house is completely off just now.  We're in Lerwick, with TalkTalk.  Has the big undersea cable been chopped again??

Blow me down!  Was having a quick flick through some of the photos in the museum and archives collection, and stumbled upon this great one of Bootsy, when we was working a part-time job on the tills at Bells Brae Stores, in the early 1990s.  A certain Mrs V. Tulloch is the dashing maiden in the middle, she was vampin' wi him at the time.  Fantastic.

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r46/petergear/BootsyworkinatBellsBraeStoresin80s.jpg

I wonder if there are any other photos of him up here?  What's Bootsy Doin'?

I got in touch with TalkTalk, to request:

• That they ask their management to look into subscribing to the "backup" system.
• That they weren't to charge me the full fare for the 2 and a half week blackout.

Very happy to say, got a very decent compensation offer from their customer services (a lovely South African wifey I spoke with), and better still, she said she would put the word to management that Shetland needs the backup option.

The more customers who do this, the more likely TalkTalk is to sort the problem out for the long-term.  If no-one raises the issue, they won't do anything.

My internet's been off completely for a couple of days. Anybody else, or is it just me?

Also, different rates for different categories, allows for zero charge, for posting in "free / recycling".  

I personally would be happy to pay more than 10p per domestic ad.

But, in setting rates, if it was me, I wouldn't want to scare sellers away to the "free" advertising options elsewhere.  So, would suggest starting any domestic fees at a very low rate, so that people can get used to the idea, and then possibly gradually increasing it (5p per ad equals £1 for every 20 ads) to see what effect it has on sales.  I don't think 3p would curb the number of adverts significantly, but I suspect 10p might.

More obviously though, charge different rates for posts in different categories.  50p for vehicles?  Â£2 for property sales?

The reason I suggested the £3 unit for credit, is that PayPal don't half sting you for each transaction charge....!

PS, this probably isn't the right place to post this, but I'd just like to say a quick "thanks" to everyone who works behind the scenes to keep Shetlink going, for the benefit of mere punters like me.  Great effort!  

Regards charging for adverts, even if you only took a fixed amount of 3p per ad for the "domestic" adverts, it would make a big odds regards your server / development costs.  Every 33 ads, would be another £1, it would soon stack up.  The 3p contributed by the individual being next to nothing, so everyone would (presumably) be happy to pay?

To avoid high transaction and admin overheads, and to streamline the process of setting up adverts, you could maybe have a system where people "buy" credit up-front (in, say, £3 units) to top up their seller account with.  It would take a hundred three-pence sales to whittle away at £3.

Just as an aside - From the buyer's perspective, something I would love would be a "saved search" facility on Shetlink, like-wot ebay use, to alert sellers by email when something tasty turns up that they've been looking for.  I never have the time to trawl through the Shetlink classifieds regularly enough, unfortunately, but there's a huge range of hellery that I'd love to be alerted to, if and when any of it does appear in the listings!  Again, you could charge for this, say, 10p per "saved search"?  I would be very happy to pay this.

Likely tae tak' a peerie coarn o' time tae code onything lik dis though!!!  Volunteers...?!

Yep tarrymittens, my experience as well. Was semi-reasonable for a peerie while, but it's just as bad again noo. I am also wi TalkTalk, as it happens... and have also been getting consistently better upload speeds than download speeds - what's that all about!

Miracle of miracles, I have over 1Mbps this evening! Hoping to goodness this happens every night, it's literally 20 times better than our usual peak-time of 0.05.

Every day, great internet, about 5 without fail. Every evening/night, down to 0.05 without fail. Boohoo.

Download speed is at 0.02Mbps tonight. It's getting worse... (although on Friday evening I was getting good speeds for a change, bizarrely).

TalkTalk had, despite promises twartree days ago that they wouldn't, closed down the fault AGAIN, sneakily marking it as "resolved", just as they did last time. GRRRR. They have now opened YET another new ticket.

Is there anyone else we can hassle, other than our apparently utterly ineffectual ISPs?

The salesman at BT tells me that TalkTalk put 250 people on each line, compare with BT's 50 to a line. For other non-techies like me, this is called the "contention ratio".

However, TalkTalk "support" team lady tells me categorically that the BT salesman is stating complete and utter rot, and that all ISP's have exactly the same contention ratio, of 50:1.

Who do I believe?

TalkTalk also tell me that the consistently excellent speeds we're getting through the day (about 5Mbps), and consistently appalling speeds at night (about 0.05) is definitely a "backhaul" issue. And that they can do absolutely nothing about it. They apparently can't even nag BT about it??

They suggested the only person in a position to ask BT to improve things is OFCOM! But....

TalkTalk girl also says the "21st century network", fibre connection, is due about the end of January. She says because putting this in place, is BT acting to sort the problem, we'll just have to wait patiently until then for an improvement. Basically, they're ignoring pleepsy-weepsers like me at the moment, because there's a decent fix on the way next year.

In the meantime, our evening speed is well below the 0.6 Mbps defined by BT as the minimum "acceptable" rate for this line. Wail, moan, gnashing of teeth. Any suggestions?

Mucho gratitude for aa-thing, unlinkedstudent! Here's hoping desperately that a fix is forthcoming.

My download speed's down at 0.03 tonight. Yes, I got the decimal point and the zeros in the right place, and yes, I was extremely patient posting this comment.

TalkTalk's "customer care" is going from abysmal to worse. Where's Esther Rantzen when you need her??

I am finding TalkTalk's "customer care" to be simply abysmal.

And, incidentally, my upload speed barely dips in the evening, it's only marginally better through the daytime. Hm. Thoughts, anyone?

Boohoo. My speed is still regularly down to about 0.1 each night (see speed-test below), this has been going on for some months.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2316361252.png

Great through the day though, usually about 5.

Have been hassling TalkTalk about it, on a prolonged ongoing basis, but no joy so far...

Midnight came, and suddenly my broadband takes off at full lick???

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2295424351.png

Also having identical problems to other people on this thread. Fine through the day, but every evening for the last couple of months, about the same time each night, it suddenly drops down to ridiculously-slow. Am with TalkTalk.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2295374540.png

And yes, my router is password-protected, have done virus scans, and this is a consistently slow speed every evening, boohoo. And every daytime, it returns to normal, hooray.

Hi, I tried sending Ian an email, but it bounced back undelivered.

"The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 Invalid email address (state 14)."

Is there a mistake in the email address published?

Ah trooter, dy (very kindly by da wye) shared misery maks me feel slightly better.

Not posted here for a while, but a funny thing happened to me today, I thought deserved sharing. Probably one of those "you had to be there" moments, but here goes anyway.

Spent two hours staring at the (cripplingly slow) internet today, looking for industrial springs (please don't ask why), with a work colleague. With a bamboozling range of various (very dull) technical specifications of rather expensive springs, and a serious need to choose the right ones, we finally plumped for what we needed. Being the one holding the purse strings, I got the company credit card at the ready, and made the call.

Girl at sales desk: "Hello, you've reached Springmaster, you're through to **** this afternoon, how can I help you."

What I intended to say at this point was "Hi, do you sell small volumes of springs" (I thought they maybe only did bulk orders).

What came out was. "Hi, do you smell....". Then realising my mistake, I paused, which didn't help things. Then tried to backtrack and explain myself, but now instantly helplessly screaming hysterical laughter at her, whilst desperately trying to convey that I am NOT a prank caller and I really DO seriously want to order springs... But that just made me sound even more like a prank caller

Had to pass the phone and my bank card to my horrified colleague so that he could take over placing the order, but despite that wir Stewart managed several seconds of being very serious and conveying part numbers in his very best "knepping" voice, this seemed to send the girl from Springmaster completely over the edge into dissolved hysterics as well.

And that set off all her colleagues...

The next ten minutes found me, the Springmaster sales team, and wir Stewart, all desperately fighting very tearful eruptions of hysterics whilst trying to conclude the order. Never in all my days have my bank card details and delivery address seemed so ridiculous.

Besides the well-publicised outages last week, my broadband was fine, until late yesterday evening. In the middle of watching iplayer, which had been behaving perfectly, then boomf, connection still there but barely.

Spent this afternoon on the phone to my ISP, they were of zero help and made me do all the things I had explained to them I had done already (foreign call centre - grrrrr - don't think they could understand english and the line quality was dreadful), this of course took up almost the entire afternoon, and the call was NOT free...

Is anyone else having trouble like this?

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1023457542.png

Still, a funny thing happened to me today to more than make up for this.... I will post in another thread