Doodle Bugs Checklist

I like Doodle – it’s an online scheduling tool I learned about while living in Germany that people here use quite frequently to schedule pretty much any kind of event with any number of people – parties, parent teacher meetings, workshops, you name it. Doodle requires no accounts – you can log in directly with your gmail or other OpenID account and people can respond to polls without logging in. Integration with Google Calendar and other calendaring systems means that you can see your own free/busy info while answering a poll as well as show your free/busy info when others invite you to a meeting.

This is all quite nifty and we’ve been using it quite actively in the last month at Kabissa to set up interviews on Skype/Google Talk with potential volunteers. We send promising applicants the link to the Doodle Meetme page belonging to the Kabissa Volunteering Coordinator, and they then offer a few dates for the coordinator to choose from. If none of the dates provided work, Doodle offers a feature to request new dates. Notifications are sent by email to all affected parties. Works like a charm.

The difficulty has been that Doodle is in the throes of an ongoing site upgrade, and despite Doodle being a unique and incredibly useful service there are many fairly significant bugs. I have been reporting them regularly to their support team by email, and they are doing an admirable job of responding to my requests. Once I even got on Skype with them to talk them through a weird, hard to explain problem I was having – and they were able to resolve it on their end. However, the lack of an open issue tracker or roadmap for the site means that I don’t have any insight into the status of the bugs I am reporting. I continue to come across them which is frustrating and I then want to report them again – what a waste of my time and theirs.

To address this issue for myself and perhaps for others I am going to keep a checklist here of Doodle bugs and design flaws that I discovered through the process of trial and error during the course of getting to know Doodle and setting it up for Kabissa and personal use. I have had responses to just about all of the issues below from Doodle but I am not satisfied by them. I will maintain this checklist as long as I am using Doodle or until the Doodle team set up their own public tracker (hint hint ).

You are welcome to add comments with your additions/insights/corrections/responses. I’ll maintain the numbering and cross out issues that get resolved. Thanks!

Doodle Bugs Checklist

1. It’s not possible to change your Meetme name once you’ve set it – it’s used in the URL and so should be short, memorable and unique to the purpose of the Meetme account holder. This isn’t entirely clear while setting it so it should be possible to change your mind about it without having to delete your entire account and start over (which is what I had to do because of 2 below).
   1. Reto: This is by design and will not change.
2. The Meetme page cannot have the same name as the subdomain URL you choose for your premium business account, so if some other person completely unrelated to you decides to make their Meetme page name the same as the name for your organization you are out of luck. This is an undocumented problem and should be fixed.
   1. Reto: This is by design and will not change.
3. Meetme page names have to be unique across the entire service, which means that if you’re looking for me and go to http://doodle.com/tobias you will find another Tobias. I should really set up a meeting with the guy to say hello. doodle.com/tobias is unique across all MeetMe pages.
   1. Reto: The first person who reserves the name gets it.
   2. Rolf: And even the infamous del.icio.us doesn’t let you change your name.
4. Meetme page names work across all premium account subdomains. This means that that other Tobias can be reached using the Kabissa theme, without advertising, at http://kabissa.doodle.com/tobias- this is really a major bug, not least because someone might decide to use this “feature” to pretend to be from another organization without them knowing anything about it.
   1. Reto: Will be fixed.
5. When you have a premium account, there is a useless link on the menu to toggle between www.doodle.com and your own subdomain. Meanwhile when you are logged in you see ads when you are at http://www.doodle.com even if you paid for a premium account.
   1. Reto: This is the current design. Your Premium is only active on the subdomain. We may change this as well.
6. Even if you have a premium account, your Meetme page will display ads to people accessing it via the www.doodle.com subdomain. This shouldn’t be – it should never show ads if you are paying for a premium account.
   1. Reto: Will be fixed.
7. Other people (third parties) can access Doodle polls and see their status if they know the URL. This shouldn’t be the default action and poses a potential privacy risk.
   1. Reto: This is by design. Doodle has been working like that since day one and will not change.
8. When creating a Meetme request for a meeting, the person can add a title and description for the meeting. The title the person chooses is then saved in Google Calendar as the title for the event. This is confusing because they typically choose nondescript names. When you’re getting dozens of requests in a week (which is really why we’re using Doodle in the first place) this gets overwhelming.
   1. Reto: I will add this to the wishlist.
9. One you have accepted a Meetme request for a meeting, only the other person who requested it can delete it from your own list of meetings or change it. This is problematic when you have dozens or hundreds of requests and want to clean up your list or understand who you are actually meeting with and when (especially because of 8 above).
   1. Reto: I will add this to the wishlist.
10. Premium subdomains work for accessing Doodle help and about pages, which really shouldn’t be happening – at least they aren’t showing the Premium Subdomain Theme. (e.g. http://kabissa.doodle.com/about/meetMe.html)
    1. Reto: This will remain as is.
11. I can’t see the email address of the person who created the Meetme request, which means that it’s not possible for me to verify 100% that the person making the request is actually the person who applied to Kabissa and that I sent to the Meetme request page.
    1. Reto: You see the email address in the Doodle email under reply-to. We don’t want to expose it anywhere else.
12. Added 25 June: Another feature request that occurs to me now that Rolf is also commenting, in the spirit of open data (http://slashopen.net), is that it should be possible to download a CSV of your meeting requests, complete with names and email addresses, to manage them offline.
1. Reto: Added to wishlist
13. Added 26 June: it is unclear what the subdomains are actually for, since they work across the site (even on doodle faq pages etc) and also don’t always appear on meetme pages or other pages for premium users. I’d rather not use the subdomain than have this functionality – but of course see only my theme when I am logged in and show only my theme on my meetme page.
1. Reto: The subdomain is mostly used for users of the regular Doodle, not MeetMe.
14. Added 26 June: feature request – please let us specify windows when meetings are possible – like google appointments. Even simply specifying a weekly schedule would be fine – eg meeting requests are possible Monday through Friday 10am-noon CET. This way it’s possible to limit when the calls take place, which is helpful in planning your work schedule.
1. Reto: For this we intended the “Good to know” free-text field, which appears in the header of your MeetMe profile. There you should update your current/general availability.
2. Tobias: Yes, but this can still cause confusion and is error prone with multiple time zones and people who don’t pay attention. Having slots directly in the calendar when appointments can be made can prevent the back and forth that we now have when people schedule meetings for the middle of the night in our time zone. I can well imagine this is a huge piece of work to implement but would be nice to have it on the wishlist nonetheless. It would be useful for us!