The other day, I blogged about the most efficient way I’d found to get past the stupider elements of Xbox customer service. This turned out to be a mistake. Allow me to present an object lesson of how internet journalism might (not) work.

Dan, good samaritan that he is, decided to share my discovery with the pissed-off consumers of the world, and so he emailed Consumerist. Meg Marco, good soul that she is, wrote a pleasant little post summarizing what I’d written, linking back to Doombot and crediting both me and Dan by name for the info. That brought in a few hundred hits here, which was pleasant.

Commenters on Consumerist suggested cross-posting this information to other relevant blogs owned by parent company Gawker Media, and so Kotaku picked it up. They kind of mangled the attribution—no link back here, and I was only credited as “Consumerist reader Jason,” which is technically incorrect, but whatever. No biggie.

It only really bothered me when Gizmodo also cross-posted it, linking back to Consumerist, not mentioning Doombot, Dan, or me at all, and mis-categorizing it under the “Red Ring” tag.

I was not irritated about the loss of potential traffic from the linkage. Actually, we had many sites link directly to our post (some briefly noting “via Consumerist” as per web etiquette), and our traffic eventually spiked around 1700 in a day, which I don’t think we’d seen before. But we don’t expect most of those to return, and we’re okay with that. We’re not making money off this, and we’re still pleasantly surprised when something reminds us that it’s not just our personal, real-life friends reading this.

No, I was irritated when I was completely ignored by Gizmodo when I sent them an email two days ago, explaining that they made an error, and that I’d appreciate if they could correct the misattribution. The error, of course, was in that “Red Ring” tag which many other blogs erroneously picked up on as well. As many commenters on Kotaku had already pointed out, Microsoft is actually quite swift about responding to “red ring of death” console failures. But, as I learned in my previous dealings with them and again more recently, that first tier of outsourced customer support with fight tooth and nail to argue that chronic “disc read errors” are the customer’s fault.

The really ironic thing about this from my perspective, though, is that the escalated support number I cited (which I found on the Consumerist, in the first place) always used to pick up really, really quickly, but in the last couple days, I’ve had 15-minute hold times. Oh, what havoc have I helped to wreak?

So, in conclusion, don’t ever bother tipping off Gawker media. The Consumerist is nice, but as a result, Kotaku will kind of mangle this info, and then Gizmodo will further mangle it, give you no credit whatsoever, and then ignore your polite email inquiry. Then, afterward, you will have to wait on the phone for a long time, I guess.

At least the guy I finally got on the phone had a genuinely useful tip unrelated to my problem. But I’ll be posting that later—exclusively on Doombot!