stoopid google

[ritaxis]

So for the last two and a half years my main communication with the young doctor is through gmail chat.

For the last week I get the error message that the network administrator (me) has disabled chat, or possibly I am experiencing connectivity problems. I have not disabled chat, and there are no connectivity problems currently manifesting themselves in any other way.

There is a help dialog for this error message. It is hilarious. You go clicky clicky on several radio buttons to indicate your operating system, your browser, your firewall program, to arrive at a link to the laughable help forums and a question as to whether this was helpful. Notice the distinct lack of suggestions or information on this "help" page.

The help forum for chat is a lively place. Many, many people are asking why their chat has been disabled, or why their contact list has disappeared, or some variation of these. The replies are with one exception all peope saying "I have this problem too." The exception is a post containing a link to the help dialog page which is the entry point to the help forums. The one I describe in the paragraph above which provides a series of radio buttons to go clicky on and a link to the forums and no information or suggestions for action.

There is apparently no other avenue to contact Google. So if, at it appears, they don't read their help forums, they don't have any way of knowing that a growing portion of their users can't use their product anymore.

Frank got Skype, which means he can call me. Email still works. But I miss chat: it was convenient and flexible.

Comments

[ellarien]

I have no specific knowledge of this issue, but on general principles I'd suspect that either your ISP or your internet security program has decided that chat is Evil and must be blocked, possibly at the port. Maybe you could look at the logs for the security program? They sometimes decide that the most innocuous things are suddenly deadly threats, with no appeal allowed.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to follow up on that angle. It's not my ISP. It doesn't appear to be AVG, though Firefox is mad at AVG linkscanner for other reasons that seem trivial to me (if you have linkscanner you apparently have to use the search arrow instead of pushing the enter key on the keyboard). And I haven't exhausted the ways of looking at AVG.

And, as I said, it's not just me, it's at least twenty people in the last couple of weeks experiencing the same problem. All seem to be xp users but not all are firefox users.

[ellarien]

A major antivirus company mess-up can cause problems to a lot of people all at once. I remember the time McAfee broke Thunderbird -- the Thunderbird boards were full of people screaming about that and getting gently pointed over to the McAfee support. So it's still possible; it's also possible that it's a recent XP "security fix," I suppose.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I suspect one of those things, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to get the evidence for it.

[ellarien]

If you have a restore point from when things were working properly, you could try going back to that. As an evidence-gathering technique it lacks something, because as far as I know you can't reverse the process. But I see from your later post that you have things sort-of working again, so it probably isn't worth doing anything that drastic.

(Googling on the numbers of particular Windows updates sometimes turns up interesting things, but you have to be careful, because if it's a widespread problem about half the pages that turn up will be spam/malware traps.)