BayouBill
Bill joined the Quirm.net support forum on Feb 1 2012. Within two weeks, the mere sight of one of his posts was enough to cause an outbreak of whimpering and a mad dash for the nearest dark place to hide in.
Bill is “a software developer with 30 years experience”. He’s also one of those people who doesn’t understand the word “No” and kept demanding that we provide him with details of inner workings of eShop’s scripts (at last count, there are 86 separate, very complex scripts in the plugin) so that he could hack the plugin. This was despite being told — initially very politely — that we cannot support hacks or customisations. Despite being a “software developer with 30 years experience”, he apparently couldn’t follow the code himself.
He then switched to complaining about non-existent bugs — some of which were undoubtedly due to his hacks — and trying to push for new features that suited his specific needs. Having been told — firmly but still politely — that we wouldn’t be adding his “enhancements”, he tried to start a poll on our forum to try & get his changes/needs added to the core plugin.
In the meantime, Bill also developed the nasty habit of interrupting other people’s support topics to try and push his ideas for “enhancements” & changes. He also started questioning our replies to other people’s posts.
Finally, Bill started no less than 3 separate topics all claiming that the tax rate calculations were useless for all US users (ie him). The duplicate topics were deleted & he was politely reminded (yet again) that eShop was NOT designed to suit his specific needs.
At this point, Bill decided to complain by email — abusing the person who had tried so hard to deal with his demands in 16 topics over 3 weeks. Unfortunately for Bill, his email reached that very same (now totally worn out) person. We suggested that that he either fork the plugin or use another one — resulting in more and, finally, one threatening email when he discovered that he had now been banned from the free support forum.
If you ever have the misfortune to see Bill in your support forum… run.
