Blair
All good stuff... But we say there "only report a fault after you have completed basic troubleshooting or contacted your ISP". We also say "Reporting a fault on Geekzone serves only as a warning mechanism to other users, with no guarantees ISPs will use the reported data for fault investigation"
Now, I understand some people "can't read English good" (Zoolander reference), but we can't babysit everyone.
Since yesterday I've added a link to each ISP's own status page in our report page. Also added to our database the ability to load up current known issues/maintenance. Check the TelstraClear page for example: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/FaultByISP.asp?ISPId=19
As for a single page - that's how it was yesterday. We since changed it because it was an information overload. Consumers may have the need of smaller doses of information in some cases.
As for operators providing network status so we could keep this on... I tried before. Contacted a few people around (Telecom, TelstraClear, Orcon, Vodafone). This would be great to reduce those "I can't get to YouTube today" discussions... But I never got past their first reply of "That's great, let's do it".
So I took thinks to the users.
Mauricio Freitas
http://www.geekzone.co.nzhttp://www.geekzone.co.nz/
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/freitasm
http://www.twitter.com/freitasm
From: jediblair(a)gmail.com [mailto:jediblair(a)gmail.com] On Behalf Of Blair Harrison
Sent: Tuesday, 7 December 2010 11:06 a.m.
To: Mauricio Freitas
Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz
Subject: Re: [nznog] Crowdsourcing a network status page
Hi Mauricio,
Great idea for the map/page, but I have a few concerns.
At present the way your site is worded, you're almost suggesting the information submitted on this form is going to be fed back to the ISP in question, when that's almost certainly not going to be the case. It is probably worthwhile including a list of ISP Helpdesk numbers on your submission page which users should be encouraged to call/email in the first instance. These are the only people who can help actually resolve faults.
Encouraging users to not report their faults to the ISP is not helpful to anyone, especially not the users.
You might also look to try and aggregate the fault status pages of various ISPs and network operators into a single page. Perhaps discussions could be had with the operators in question if they can provide their network status and planned outage events in RSS or similar form, which could be easily aggregated onto a single page. I think this would probably be far more useful than a few sporadic reports from people who "can't get to youtube today" :)
Cheers,
Blair
On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 8:51 AM, Mauricio Freitas