Regarding the delay in replying, I alerted them to the necessity of having an active member (if they do not have time,) these things will not cost them much (less than 200 dollars per month) but their effect will be better.
In addition to that, hiring an active person here to answer frequently asked questions and send problems directly to them if they do not have time to keep this ANN updated. After all, the service is still new and the support team’s delay in responding is not an act of a service that wants to gain trust and needs trust.
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https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/bc1qf8h5k6sash8007vpesymxkw2xsg5d0r3j4l5vmcrwpz2pqu66fjstzgd3rI don't think it's an issue of money, anyone running a mixing service or any other service should be able to afford a few thousand dollars a month for a good support team, the problem is the training itself, anyone who works as a support member in Whirlwind needs to understand it inside out, or else, their job would be a matter of relaying messages to an actual person who has the answers, and that won't help much.
My guess is that given that Whirlwind is still new, it's probably only a couple devs on the team, and the resources are pretty limited if they focus on building, they can't respond to support messages or be active on form, and the opposite is correct, but good projects need good management, it's not enough to have the best software technical wise while lacking customer support.
The problem with most projects is that they grow faster than anticipated, you start a small project by yourself or with one or two friends, you write the code, test it, publish it, and then it turns out that in order to keep this live and running, you actually need 10 more people, but those are not ready, so now you and your one or two friends have even more things to do.
You go from just "develop and test" to develop, test, maintain, support, and train and find those 10 people, so overall, things get worse at the second phase of most projects.
This being a custodial service where trust is the code of it all, customer support is arguably the most important element of the whole project, If I send my coins and something goes wrong, I would want answers ASAP, it doesn't matter if my coins are stuck because of a small bug that the result of a huge improvement you added to the system, or because you migrated to a better and stronger server, as a customer I will panic and think my funds are lost forever, and it will be very hard for me to trust the service again.
Auto-Response emails are good, at least you get a confirmation that your email got there.
Hello, we got your request, your support ticket number is 1234, and we will get back to you ASAP, thanks.
This buys you 1-2 days, right after that, a human response is a must, even if it doesn't solve the issue when it's complicated
Hello, we looked at your problem, and this needs to be checked by our tech team, I forwarded the issue to them, and will get back to you ASAP
As long as there is active communication, it would be fine if the problem takes a whole week to resolve, it's MUCH better than getting no response at all and the problem is resolved in 3 days for instance.
My take on Whirlwind is that at least the person who uses the bitcointalk account is indeed very intelligent, the concept and the idea of the mixer are pretty unique and interesting and have great potential, however, the overall management is pretty bad, lack of support, slow Email response, being inactive on the forum -- all fall under "bad management".
My advice to Whirlwind is to start seriously working on the support aspect ASAP.
