[jessedhillon]

I'm not convinced a public forum is the best place for customer support ...

I think a great heuristic here is this: your customers can be publicly negative, but you cannot.

If you publicly flame a customer then, no matter how deserving the customer was, some future potential customers will look at that and say "That could be me." Most businesses, I think, can't afford to risk that.

There are some notable counterexamples, in my opinion they are the exceptions which prove the rule, i.e. when the business wants to fire the customer and make an example of him/her for others.

The best example of this is the Drafthouse movie theater in Austin, who created a great PSA wherein they ridicule a customer for insisting she had the right to use her cell phone during a movie: http://adland.tv/content/drafthouse-movie-theatre-makes-keep...

[grey-area]

I think a great heuristic here is this: your customers can be publicly negative, but you cannot.

I agree 100%, the tweets are not helpful, but I disagree with the "disgusting" description and felt it was a little over the top.

[ryanwaggoner]

Sorry, it's just my personal opinion as a WPEngine customer, and I stand by it. I don't want to see the CEO of a service that I pay money to publicly behaving this way towards those customers and others who have had issues. It's the opposite of good customer service, and a great example of biting the hand that feeds you.