Ranting on Service Part III

Well everyone, you know the drill, Pottermore still needs to fix things, and here comes one of my usual rants. Please, if you read it, pass it on to Pottermore, as they really, really need to see this: 

On behalf of Pottermore’s users, I would like to thank Pottermore, especially it’s corporate official Ben, for the new efforts in fixing the account deletions that have been plaguing users, among which were Slytherin’s #4 on the leaderboard, prompting a rather large fall in points, which were re-instated. Pottermore continues to grow to serve it’s users and Potter fans worldwide. Potions have been improved, we’ve gotten nearly daily updates with the Daily Prophet and Quidditch World Cup, and action has been taken in how to enable games and features for HTML5.

However, even with these improvements, Pottermore has been slow in enacting all of these changes, and after three years, users deserve better. Users have let Pottermore know of the deletion problem for months prior to the June posts on the Insider that they knew a problem was there since MAY. This is a clear sign that the communication system between Pottermore and the users is horribly ineffective. While users continued messaging about the problem, they received the same automated replies promising that Pottermore is looking into things from to the outsourced messaging Pottermore appears to be using. This feeds into a vicious cycle that continues to grow. Upset users, talk to the middlemen, the middlemen gives automatic responses, and presumably send the complaints to Pottermore. Pottermore, in response, works on the problem quietly, with no admission of the problem, and appears to give no progress to the middlemen involved. So the problem persists, the user continues to complain to the middlemen, all while Pottermore works quietly and user frustration grows. Does this mean that collectively, users are wrong to continue calling attention to things? No. Even if a few users are suffering a problem, if not addressed, the problem could spread and other users could suffer as well as seen with this deletion glitch.

I used to think Pottermore was a gift to the fans from Rowling, and the sad matter is, this site is most likely nowhere near what she would have wanted for us, and it is nothing close to what a die-hard or even casual fan would enjoy for any prolonged period of time due to the poor management, lack of communication and dearth of content that has plagued the site for so long. But the real gift isn’t one that Rowling gave directly. Yes, Pottermore’s existence is her gift, but the real gift, the real draw to Pottermore four years in is not content, is not games or the ability to FEEL like you stepped into Harry’s world. If you wanted that, you’d go to Diagon Alley in Florida. What makes Pottermore FEEL like a Hogwarts, and feel like it draws you into the magical world is the camaraderie between users across the globe. It’s drawn in people, and provided bonds that were previously just on fan sites. It gave people group goals and prompted more fan sites to connect and talk more, to decode what is on the site and to aid one another when the site’s limitations became burdensome.

Because we are the real gift Pottermore has at the moment, we wish that in the future, Pottermore listens to our suggestions, as we still need to work more on preventing wrongful reports, improving potions and duels further, and ensuring that users have better interaction with the site and its moderators.