Brains working towards machine consciousness

 First of all, I want to say I like Lulu.  It provides good quality printed books, which seem to be at a perfectly reasonable price, to me.  The process of creating a project, uploading a 'manuscript' and designing the cover is all pretty straightforward - usually.  The books arrive quickly when ordered.

However, recently I have run into two different problems with the site.  That in itself is not all that annoying, these things happen.  The quality of the customer support, however, is getting beyond a joke.

I submitted a report for a problem with the cover design wizard.  Basically, the system would not (and still will not) let me use their old cover designer.  That would not be too much of a problem, as the new one is better, but I needed to be able to have a new book with the same style of cover as an old one we had published, and the new designer did not make that possible.  Fortunately, they have a link to the old design wizard.  Unfortunately, the link does nothing.

I pointed this out, and the response was that I should click on the link, with a lovely patronising screen shot to show me where the link was.  At least this let me know that I was clicking the right thing, so I sent back a screen shot of the result of clicking on it (basically, the links just disappear, and the same wizard stays on the screen).

I heard nothing back.

But never mind, I used the advanced cover design instead (which lets you upload your own design), and re-covered the old books.  Irritating, but not a deal breaker.

Along comes error number 2.  I wanted to revise one of our books, to correct a small issue with the layout of the contents.  The project listing has a 'revise' link - which I have used successfully on other projects on other occasions - indeed I have used it successfully with this project before.

But now, when I click on Create New Revision, I get an error "Invalid character(s) in input. Please use UTF-8 characters."  So, as there is no other way to create a new revision, I submitted another support request:

Customer Comments:

I click revise on the My Lulu page next to the project I want to revise, then click on Create New Revision and get this error (using FireFox, and Chrome on Mac, so probably browser independent)

The report includes details of the project, the error message, etc., so I thought this was clear enough.  It explains what I did, and the error I got, and the fact that I tried on different browsers, on different platforms.

The response?:

Thank you for contacting Lulu.

I would like to inform you that, I looked into your account to find the resolution for the problem you had while publishing your project and found that your project has been published.

If you require further assistance or still have some concerns, please contact us and we will be happy to assist you.

Obviously, as my problem wasn't with publishing it, this did not thrill me entirely as a response, so I replied and attached a screen shot of the error.

Hi,

 Obviously, as I had never had a response to the previous attempt to communicate with them via email, I also sent the same thing via their 'email us' web interface.  I got a reply!

Thank you for contacting Lulu.

I would like to inform you that in order to revise your project,  go to your Project List.  
Click the Revise icon to the right of a project.
  Click the Create New Revision or Unpublish button  at the bottom of the page. 
 Then you should be able to revise your project.  

Erm... yeah, of course.  So, just to check they hadn't fixed something, I tried New Revision, as instructed - obviously it gave the same error as before.  So I looked for the magical Unpublish button to try that.  It doesn't exist.  Nothing on the page starts with 'Unp' or even 'unp'.  There is no unpublish option.  I can 'retire' the book - but then the only option I have for it is to 'unretire' it - so that is not much help.

So, I am a little less enchanted than I was before.  I have replied and asked them where the fabled Unpublish button is, and pointed out that the Create New Revision button still gives the error.  I have suggested that they might like to pass the problem on to someone who has a clue what they are talking about.

I wonder if it will ever be resolved?