I stumbled across digstock today, which appears to be a digg clone with a stock market theme. Not overly exciting, but I looked around. I saw that they appear to automatically index lots of stock market blogs so users can browse and digg them (oops, I mean “tagg” them, in digstock parlance–come on, if you’re calling it digstock, just call it “digg”ing).
Anyway, I noticed my blog did not appear to be indexed. I thought, okay, I’ll register and maybe I can find a way to get it listed. So, I registered, and they sent me a confirmation email, after which I was unable to log on. Hmmm. Well, some sites (like fxpansion) choke on special characters in passwords, and I like to make strong passwords. Maybe that’s it. Their confirmation email said to contact “support@digstock.com” with any problems. So, I sent them an email, and their mailhost bounced it:
This address no longer accepts mail.
So, on their site, I click their “contact” link, which is a mailto:admin@digstock.com. I explain the login issue, and also point out that their own email pointed me to a bad contact address.
This address no longer accepts mail.
I see. Well, that’s not promising. Clicking around some more, I see that a few of their internal hyperlinks are malformed. In other words, NOT a good user experience so far. I would still like to try their site out, but I apparently have no way of contacting them to work out the login issue.
As a last ditch attempt, I made a second account with a different username, and I made sure I used the extremely simple password “blahblah” just in case the special characters were the issue. Same result–could not log in.
In contrast, a good experience with stocktickr
I don’t just sit around complaining about things, though. I am also capable of praise, when sites are run well. A good recent example is stocktickr. I was so pleased with the way they addressed my feedback that I signed up for their paid “pro” service. They continue to make enhancements and add features (sometimes it seems like something new arrives daily). Plus, they are a bit more imaginative than a digg-derivative. :-)