We are never ever, ever getting back together in The sky is falling!

Or: Open Note to Bruce (or whomever)

To: Kate

Hello!

I hope this email finds you well.

You may have already heard the news - but if you haven’t, Open Diary has been re-launched! We have had over 5,000 ex-members re-join us in the last few weeks - if you’re not one of them, we’d love to have you back!

Your diary is still in the system, but cannot be accessed or seen by anybody unless you reclaim it. If you would like to re-join the OD community, it’s easy! Just go to the front page of the site, and click the Reclaim Diary button - then follow the directions to reclaim by email using the email address where you received this message.

Open Diary will be a subscription service going forward, but you will have access to your previous diary regardless of whether you choose to subscribe. Lifetime memberships from the old site will be honored on re-activated diaries.

If you have any questions, please click the Contact Support link in the Questions section of the front page.

Thanks!

Reply to Whomever

Is this Bruce?

If so, why would anyone trust you again? If not (your note is not signed) then the content you have was sold or transferred illegally.

I will assume this is Bruce.

I am sorry things didn’t work out for you. I do hope you have someone else running the day-to-day as customer service and honest communication are vital to nurturing customer loyalty. It became far more than a programming experiment–it was a business. You didn’t treat it as such.

I tried to help you. I offered my services as a business consultant more than once and free of charge as I believed in OD and wanted it to thrive. You never accepted.

I wish you the best, but I have moved on. There is no way I would trust you with my business or my content. I did try to reclaim my diary. Thankfully, it appears it did actually delete when I deleted it before the fall.

One thing you did right, and I commend and thank you for it: you provided a download option in XML. This saved me, and many others, countless hours reconstructing our content.

On the other hand, you never told your users you planned to keep their content in any form, much less for an eventual recovery. This is further evidence to me communication is not high on your list of priorities.

Medium, ProseBox and other far-more-professionally managed sites have stepped in to fill the gap you left. Transparency and available management are two of the things they are doing right.

This note is harsh, yet I am sure no harsher than some you received after the lights went out at OD. Nevertheless, I really do wish you the best and bear no grudge. Only a healthy skepticism and a self-protective stance.

Kate

To be clear, I will NEVER go back to OD. So if you are looking for a Kate-free safe space. Buh-bye.

Last updated March 30, 2018