Who listens to the customer?
Written: Jul 29 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It's free, sort of.
Cons: Incessant ads, meant to annoy. Servers up and down. Plenty bugs.
The Bottom Line: Many hate it. But many use it from force of habit.
Much discontent. Users hoping Paltalk will go under
so groups will be forced to move to another vendor.
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| richard_'s Full Review: PalTalk |
Having used a number of voice chat facilities over the past several
years, Paltalk is unfortunately the best remaining one. Most of the
others have disappeared for one reason or another.
When it works Paltalk is a useful service which allows vastly separated
people to meet and discuss. The new video features are interesting but
not very useful to most users. The ability to exchange voice and text
in groups is what's important.
Paltalk supports voice and text reasonably well, though the quality and
support have been successively worse over the past year or so. Other
than the help rooms, which are good but rudimentary, there's no way
to communicate with Paltalk about problems or bugs.
They have a bug reporting feature via email that is accessible from
their web page. But it's an unhappy process run by very unhappy people.
The problem that you took your own time to describe and report to them is
apparently *not* a bug. And why are you bothering them with this anyway?!
Very nasty.
Paltalk has simple microphone volume controls setable by each user.
So you often find the need to continually adjust your speaker volume
to accommodate participants with widely varying volume settings.
And periodically someone will have things set so high it will wake your
neighbors two blocks away! Other services have been smart enough to
provide the necessary automatic volume controls.
The service is free. But if you don't pay the $25 or so to have the
incessant ads and popups removed you may not want to use Paltalk long.
It can be very annoying. And their fast flashing ads can slow your
computer way down, making it hard to run anything else. Especially
maddening is that some ads continue even after a user pays for `premium'
service. False advertising it seems.
Most vendors tend to listen to their customers so they can continue to
provide them with what they want. Paltalk seems to go out of their way to
discourage such input and to make it impossible to communicate with them.
Many bugs and misfeatures have collected since back when they added
video and have yet to be fixed. The text channel which can be a very
valuable tool for sharing links and important data has a Save function
which hasn't worked in a long time. It will save, but the text buffer
is periodically cleared at random times so there is often nothing left
by the time you remember to save. To make matters worse their servers
are often going down at the most inopportune times which also causes
loss of information.
They do provide frequent upgrades, usually with nothing new that users
care about. Just new bugs. And updates are manadatory now, so you're
forced to install in order to reconnect. Mandatory new bugs.
To say that Paltalk is out of touch with their clientele would be
an understatement.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
richard_
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 1 member
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