I’m going to rant a little on evite.com. 

But first I’ll recognize - it’s a free service.  You get what you pay for.  I understand that.  So I’m not really *bitching*, I’m ranting.  There’s a difference.  To me, “bitching” is when you’re griping and you don’t have a reason, a say, or a place to have the opinion or be vocal about the feedback.  “Ranting” is having an opinion, but not having the delusion that one is owed something.  When you “bitch” about something, you actually expect something to change and if it doesn’t, heaven help the bitchee. 

For the past two (2) weeks, Evite hasn’t been sending my recurring evitation reminders.  The invites are now set up as “drafts” for some reason… it started over 4th of July weekend and I just went through the 2nd week of my weekly Pool League evite reminders not being sent out.

Our event is for Wednesday nights.  The reminders are supposed to go out three (3) days before.  When I go check, the event shows up as a “draft”.  In fact, when I go back and check on previous weeks, I can see when it messed up

You can see in yellow that these invitations were sent 2-3 days before the event.  The last two, however, were sent on the day of the event because everyone was asking “what the heck is up with the emails” and I manually sent them out.

The second thing that’s screwed up with evite is all of it’s scripting, cookies, or processing that just makes it not work sometimes.  If you open up a case with them, their pat answer is “clear your cache, erase all your cookies, blahblahblah”.  Even so, the forms, editing fields, and various pieces just don’t seem to be stable.  It doesn’t matter if I’m on IE7, IE6, firefox or what computer I’m on… I seem to spend a lot more time than I should trying to get stuff to work.

Take this for example: When resending today’s evite, I tried to write in a little sumfin sumfin to say I’m sorry it’s late, yadda yadda, and look at the feedback I get on the screen.

I have 76 Characters remaining, but I’ve exceeded maximum text length.  Brilliant.

Well you know what?  I *did* exceed the maximum text length. I piped my text into wc (Unix tool that counts characters, lines, paragraphs, etc) and I have 57 words and 288 characters.

So I remove ~40 characters or so.  It still bombs.  I remove more.  It still complains.  I end up clicking “Save for Later” and it SENDS THE EVITE instead of saving for later.

And I still don’t know why it’s not sending my evites each week.

I hate how the invites seem to come from the person inviting you directly (the email will have their name on it as the sender). So twice, I have sent a reply to two different people who invited me to something, thanking them for inviting me and explaining why I couldn’t make whatever it was. And both times, it went to Evite without me realizing it (until weeks later when I either talked to the person or wondered why they hadn’t responded). Did any of that make sense?

Oh! One other thing I didn’t like…..we didn’t realize that the host can see when you’ve read the invitation. So when my husband and I used the excuse that we never got the invitation when we wanted to get out of going to a party (I know, we are awful), I found out later on when I set up a party through Evite that you can see that sort of thing. So they had to know we were lying. Ugh!

I’ve used evite a few times for parties and haven’t had any real problems with it, but all I do is create an evite, send it, and send one reminder manually when it gets closer. I don’t do much else with it.

Avitables last blog post..Being guarded

Oh, Wayne, remember. It couldn’t possibly be the service. It must be you. I mean, technology doesn’t break or anything. You did it. There’s no way that evite could have messed up that way.

(end sarcasm not intended directly at Wayne)

I’ve had a lot of problems with it, the setup of that site is awful.

I get an eVite from friends every so often. It’s not the best site, but I haven’t had any real problems.

martymankinss last blog post..Unlimited Movies, No Time

BTW, cool name for your pool group… Steely Duran

I’m so glad you cleared up the whole Ranting vs Bitching confusion. Turns out I’ve been ranting when I should have been bitching. I feel foolish now. What would I ever do with out, Whall?

By the way, I totally clicked ‘Wayne’s Button’. I’m a rebel that way. Sadly it wasn’t what I was expecting.
Dragons last blog post..Calde Verde (Portuguese Creamy Potato and Kale Soup)

grossly off topic:
you still doing the pepsi points promo?
i got a story to tell, on my blog.

Ginos last blog post..Pepsi Points Scandal

BlondeBlogger, yes, it all made sense. And it looks like you were bussssssTED!

Avi, yeah, and mostly it works for me too, but it’s just these recent problems that are getting under my skin

Abs YES! YOU GET IT!

Robin, YES! YOU GET IT! (nice new gravatar, btw)

martymankins, thanx for noticing the name - we have big Durannies on the team and of course I’m a huge ‘Danfan.

Dragon, glad to be able to provide a service!

Gino, yes, I’m taking Pepsistuff points, and no I hadn’t heard about your scandal but I’m reading up on it now. For Shame!