I'm not really suggesting hiring 8 hours a day, 5 days a week support staff. I think that's probably too ambitious for a site that has a lot of free accounts. But I don't see it as all or nothing. If Squeaky can only afford to pay a technician for a few hours consult a week, that's better than nothing. A lot of these technical bugs seem (to me) to be things that require sitting down and working out, time that he doesn't always personally have. I think he said that the quickreply issue needed to be "rebuilt" from the ground up. Why not hire a few hours of an expert's time to rebuild that page? They wouldn't be multi-tasking, they'd be paid to focus completely on that a short time. The same goes for a lot of these issues, I'd think. What bothers me is that Squeaky says "I have to deal with business right now." If you're letting people spend $70 on a permanent account, you need to have a better system in place than "business now, bugs later." You need to have somebody working on bugs, even if it's only part-time.

I think that's a good point, but as far as I remember (and this could be a misremembrance), the permanent sales that have been held most recently were held to raise X amount of dollars needed to complete repairs/buy a server/move etc. I don't know that there's a wild profit being made off of people's accounts that do any more than contribute to the basic maintenance of the site. I'm not saying I know what the financial situation is, nor do I think your points are invalid, I just don't know how feasible it is to set aside a budget when we have so few users over all (compared to LJ, for example), and the number of paid accounts is probably very small.

I don't think there's a wild profit either, but I find it difficult to believe that there's no money at all. Even if he has $200 to spare for tech support, that's something. My main problem is that a lot of us bought those accounts when the site was a lot more stable, under the impression that it would continue to be. Now after the code change, using the console clears filters and there's no quickreply. I don't know that I'd have bought an account without quickreply. There are unanswered support requests from three weeks back, some people who haven't been able to post to their journal for weeks. Squeaky was offering to "compensate" people for downtime at one point, why not put that money into hiring part-time tech support? Why not have another account sale or sell more userpics and put that money toward tech support? I don't think anything evil or sneaky is going on here, but there has to be some accountability here if you're going to sell a service. It feels like some of what was paid for at a more stable time is now missing.