As my first step to making sure the BubbleTimer community gets the great support it deserves after the email SNAFU, I've implemented a live chat support based on technology from a brand new startup, olark.

So far, I've found it to be pretty simple to use on both ends of the conversation. Next time you have any trouble or questions, try it out and let me know what you think (chances are, I will ask!)

The link to use it is down in the footer next to the 866 support number (feel free to use that too):

Once you click it, here is what the start of a chat session looks like:

And then here is what it looks like when we are chatting:

There is a little glitch where if you click the live chat and then close it down you can't open it back up without refreshing the page. I'm going to work with olark to resolve that.

I'm still working through the backlog of support emails. It might take me into the first part of the week to get through them so if you are stil waiting for a response from me, please be patient. I will get through them all.

I owe the BubbleTimer user community a gigantic apology. I got an email from a user this morning following up on a how to question that we'd emailed about earlier in the week. She was thanking me for the answer I provided, but also mentioned she'd wished I'd been able to help when she first asked about it a month ago. I thought this was odd because I didn't remember having heard from her before, so I followed up with her, and to cut my long story short, after forwarding some emails to me that she'd sent, I figured out she'd sent them properly, I just hadn't got her emails.

In researching this, I discovered the mail queue on the mail server that handles the BubbleTimer support email had over 300 messages queued up from as long ago as June and July that show on the server but not in my inbox.

I'm able to get to the emails through the server's mail interface, and it turns out, just over 50% of them were spam that got past the spam filters, but that still leaves about 150 support and information requests (about 1/5 of those were notifications of new discussions/questions in the support forum) in the past 3 months that never got a reply or acknowledgement. I'm very sorry about this. I'm working through them as quickly as possible. I got through the first 25 or so this morning and I expect to get the rest answered this weekend.

If the support emails had dropped to 0 overnight, I'd notice within a day or two, but I'd guess that 150 messages represents roughly half of the overall support emails in that period, so I never really noticed anything fishy until I was taken to task by a user this morning. I was vaguely aware of less support volume for BubbleTimer but I just figured people take it easy more over the summer months. There is a fairly high percentage of students and academics that use BubbleTimer for instance.

I don't know yet what the problem is or what makes some messages make it to the inbox and others not. As soon as I get through the backlog I'm going to rework the mail handling for the bubbletimer.com domain to avoid the potential of this happening to new emails.

So in summary: I'm very sorry if you didn't get a response from me recently. You will within the next couple of days. No email was lost, so no need to resend. I'm reworking the setup to avoid even the potential for this problem. Thanks for your patience as I get caught up.