I have two versions of a model (slight differences as well as detail information) that have been stuck in processing for over an two hour. They are relatively small. My questions are. If you are not a customer (yes technically we are all customers) how do you contact technical support? If there are issues system or country or region wide, is that information published somewhere?
First, uploads are currently down. Second, there are several ways. We have the customer support section, bugs, and suggestion sections on the forums. You can also email service directly at service @ shapeways.com
I know you have internal information, but how would I as a designer know that uploads are down, other than it being stuck? Just curious.
More often than not, it's the designers who first detect that there is a problem with the uploads. We designers outnumber the tech support team by something like 10,000 to 1. For many possible issues, we're going to see outages first. Also, the Shapeways website, thru a service called Cloudflare, is distributed across MANY countries, and often across more than one server within the same country. If an upload fails due to some Cloudflare outage, there's almost zero way for Shapeways to know that someone attempted an upload. If you don't know that someone attempted an upload, you can't detect that it failed. Right this minute it's 13:30 in NYC, but "it's 5am somewhere"... there may be no uploads going on a specific Cloudflare node.. simply because everyone in that country is asleep. Lack of uploads doesn't mean that it's an outage.
I understand how the internet works, but your response although informative did not really address the issue here. How to contact technical support as opposed to customer service. Also once a issue has been identified, what information is available and where it that information.
Hi @bud_hammerton, Apologies for the issues we had earlier. In this type of situation customer support would be our technical support, as they will elevate issues to the dev team. I agree it would be nice to have some site-wide status notifications in the case of events like this, but when these types of issues occur our top priority is to fix them.
As Carson said, service@shapeways.com is the "main point of contact' - they will take a first look at any issue, and then alert the proper team, regardless of whether the issue is Internet related, financial, printing, shipping, or even just random compliments.
Understood and thank you for the reply. It would be nice if a system wide status page had information when things are awry. I know first priority is fixing broken stuff, but could something like that be discussed at an upcoming planning meeting? You already do something like this for print times. It will help answer a lot of questions and may prevent multiple threads notifying you of the issue. Just so you know, I use the print status page all the time when people ask me 'How long will it take?'