Commodore Remix

Could anyone email this guy and put him right with facts and testimonials? Even after over 10 years I still have to defend myself against this sort of crap

Subject: Hey

CHARGING MONEY for C64 tunes? Boy times MUST be hard. And how did these tunes ever become your property so that you may charge for them?

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Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:52:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: Sid Davis <gerpsnot@yahoo.com>
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Just a bit of unrelated trivia...

"On 9 November 2006, the New York Times reported that Sid Davis died on 16 October 2006 in Palm Desert, California of lung cancer."

Maybe you can make some kind of FAQ and answer some of the repeated questions and simply forward them to the FAQ.

Vosla wrote:Just a bit of unrelated trivia...

"On 9 November 2006, the New York Times reported that Sid Davis died on 16 October 2006 in Palm Desert, California of lung cancer."

Was his last word "gerpsnot"?

Chris Abbott wrote:Was his last word "gerpsnot"?

I bet...

A FAQ sounds like a good idea but I guess that type of people don't read FAQs...
If he was a scener he would have already known...

But hey, I got some hatemail because you can get redirected to spamsites if you mispell my companies homepage. Even after explaining that it's out of our reach to ban all possible combinations of wrong spelled URLs, they still hold us responsible for themselves being too stupid to properly type our URL... that's life, huh?!
(If I decide to become a serial killer later on, I have an impressing list of people to choose from )

My guess is that people that send that kind of emails will not read FAQs nor will they spend time reading a proper answer. You already spent too much time on the matter.

Sadly ignorance is not something we can stop or prevent.

If it was me, I would have a standard reply ready to copy and paste, putting them straight, links to faq and pointing out how retarded they are.

On the cpczone.net forums we had a similar idiot actually threatening legal action against the site owner, that he was advertising an illegal game. An old 8 bit game which had a similar title to his christian religious book which was written 20 years after the game! He told us to remove the game details from the site due to copyright laws.

Mate, so am I.

*hug*

Yeah, you need an FAQ, Chris. Dunno why people are saying there's almost no point in doing that. Once you have a FAQ in place, you can always link to it in response to ignorant emails. I would make a preliminary list, post it in a thread, then get feedback as to what else to add.

I think the nay sayers are probably right, though: the FAQ wouldn't prevent the visceral emotional reaction they might get from the site: and once they'd decided that way, mere facts might not put a dent in their armour of self-righteousness.... positive confirmation bias rules, OKOKOKOKOKOKOK! But thanks for the thoughts everybody... and Bog, did you get that link???

Chris Abbott wrote:I think the nay sayers are probably right, though: the FAQ wouldn't prevent the visceral emotional reaction they might get from the site: and once they'd decided that way, mere facts might not put a dent in their armour of self-righteousness.... positive confirmation bias rules, OKOKOKOKOKOKOK! But thanks for the thoughts everybody... and Bog, did you get that link???

No, they're wrong, and I really don't know why they'd encourage you not to when there are good benefits to having an FAQ. They're being short-sighted and flippant when they need to step back and think about how to help C64Audio.com become stronger.

I mean, you can't help some people being ignorant and mailing you thinking C64Audio.com is illegal, but some end up very apologetic when you reply and they realized they flamed you for no reason. If anything, you should have an FAQ there, because you never know if you've actually lost a sale, lost word of mouth, or received negative word of mouth because someone thinks you're profiting off unlicensed arrangements. On the flip side, I don't think anyone would decide they don't want to buy because you're doing things on the up-and-up.

No musicians who sell grey market, unlicensed arrange albums trumpet that they don't pay the copyright holders. They generally keep it quiet, and the ones that actually pay licensing fees promote that as a important selling point. So by C64Audio.com having 0 legal information, you inadvertently give off the impression that the music is unlicensed, and the logical assumption is that you're in the same boat with 95% of the other fan-made albums being sold.

Think beyond the fact that angry emails are annoying. That guy who wrote you, he was passionate enough to bitch at you when he thought the products were illegal. Passionate enough that he might have bought an album or two (or more), or at least mailed you positive comments on you doing the right thing had he known the site was doing things legally. That mail should be setting off a red flag of "why didn't he see that while looking at the site?" "If he was a scener he would have already known...," is exactly the kind of problem that needs to be fixed, because your customer base is not just the scene. You can't fault the guy who emailed you for ignoring "mere facts." You've ignored those facts by not properly promoting them on the actual website.

An FAQ wouldn't be there to answer just one question; any common questions about C64Audio's history, store interface, products, professionalism, and legality could be addressed, further defining the site's identity and making that info more readily available to potential customers, even media. You should even integrate comments from C64 composers endorsing the site and the work you do for the scene. These are things a lot of causal visitors don't know about that you're taking for granted.

I'm not seeing the downside of adding an FAQ link to the bundle in the top right of the site. You've put in too much work having the rest of the site look polished and organized to just be comfy having potential customers (in a niche market, no less) walk away due to lack of info. If writing an FAQ is a time thing, that's also where the help and support of the community comes in.

I think I used to make a big deal of it, actually. It kind of got lost when the shop got more automated...

Anyway, I'll think about it: you're right in that there's no practical downside.

Chris