Hi Mikeinnc

Rest assured Mike, I send a detailed letter re the 0844 scam to:
Paul Tyler PM, BBC You and Yours (2 reporters and the producer), The Department of Health, Head of Primary Care at DH, my own MP, the Minister of Health, and The Daily Mail and Telegraph reporters who had previous articles on the subject.  Plus a few others. 

No reply as yet.

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Thought I had, last night? It is on the forum.

juby

I posted it on what I thought was the most appropriate thread - You & Yours No 14 - not because I started it, I had forgotten that, but because they have worked tirelessly on our behalf from the outset.

I am rather fed up with people on this forum knocking the programme just because they have an (occasional) 0870 number. We all know, if we follow these forums, that it is not the producers of the show who decided that.

With our help they have been instrumental in finally killing this scam, if the programme yesterday did not do it, it certainly threw enough sh1t at the fan to finally tip the balance.

Credit where credit is due, and yes I recorded the whole programme.

Have you noticed the weekend advertising pages recently? Last Saturday there was not one 087X number to be seen in the Daily Telegraph bargain basement page. The very first time.

0870 is not our problem now, it is everybody elses. Our job is now to hit the rest of the NGNs.

Sorry I didn't post it in the right thread, no hard feelings?

juby

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Graham,

I agree with you especially about the possible expensive 0871 threat in the event that 0870 is banned.  And let us not forget that the most ruthless scamsters like Easyjet and TopUpTv have already not been afraid to tread that route whilst telling their dimwitted call centre staff that it is only the BT National Rate or even the BT Local Rate.  And because the number does not begin 09 nobody can touch them or stop them from doing this, at least not without a very expensive private prosecution under one of the consumer trading acts.

There must be a reason why BT wants to ban revenue share on 0870 but retain it on 0871 and of course their other own longstanding con in allowing 0844 and 0845 to be used for both perfectly legitimate PAYG dial up internet traffic and completely illegitimate voice traffic misleadingly claiming to be at the BT Local Rate has further muddied the waters in the way that BT clearly intended all the way along.  And Ofcom pretend they are sorry now because their (or more especially OFCOM's) longstanding deliberate connivance with the telecoms companies over this issue has finally been rumbled but the fact that they ever set up an 0845 number for their Contact Centre and still insist, even now, on retaining that number surely says it all.

By the way what brings you to the saynoto0870.com web forum so late in the day when it seems clear that you are pretty knowledgeable on these issues.

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I have just called BBC Information (more like BBC Disinformation) at the call centre in Belfast run on their behalf by Capita Moneybags 0870 Ltd.  Fortunately I was on this occasion able to call via the geographic BBC Belfast number that I recently added to this website.

In response to my query as to why this program was not available as an MP3 download for use on my MP3 player etc, as promoted regularly by BBC Radio 4, the young lady concerned did not know why and after keeping me on hold for 3 minutes (although on this occasion not at additional cost to my bank account) said she thought "it probably had something to do with copyright" (this was said very agressively in the strongest and least educated possible form of regional Belfast accent).

I said that this seemed odd since Your & Yours was clearly one of the BBC's own shows and not outsourced so there should be no copyright issues involved here .  I then asked to be put through to a supervisor but the young lady refused and said I had to put my complaint in writing by letter (a means of communication I for some reason rarely use these days).  I not unnaturally refused to do this knowing it would be a total waste of time.

I then called back the geographic BBC Belfast switchboard number and said I wanted to make a complaint about the Capita BBC Information call centre and was on this occasion connected to a lady with a much more educated voice in a management capacity at BBC Information in Glasgow (still a Capita worker though).  She also did not know the answer to my question but seemed much more sympathethic to my point and promised to look into it and to call me back.

This only clearly confirms one point to me which is that BBC Information never ever does what it says on the tin which should be to answer all normal likely standard questions and comments from members of the general public about the BBC's products and services.  And up until my recent addition to the www.saynoto0870.com database it also limited accessibility to this largely useless service through call pricing, especially for overseas listeners on the internet.

I think Dave or DaveM has a way to extract these RAM broadcasts for posterity and containing just the bit of the program that you want but I was unfortunately unable to get the thing outside the confines of Real Audio Player which is an almost totally hopeless and inflexible product.  In fact I would go so far as to say that Real Audio and Adobe Acrobat must surely be natural blood brothers in that respect!

Sorry to harp on about this but I find it annoying that in this day and age the only way to keep the broadcast for posterity is to record it live at the time using either non BBC software or an old fashioned tape recorder.

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Thanks Juby,

I was hoping for a free prog but I suppose that would be Real Player V8 or whatever it is.

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I suppose the BBC deal with the highly commercial Real Player is like the BBC 0870 deal with Cable & Wireless.

Namely that in return for thrusting their viewers into the hands of a highly exploitative commercial company the Beeb get some kind of huge financial kickback?

Is it possible to get rid of Adobe Acrobat for good too?  Version 6 seems to be its slowest and most useless incarnation yet!

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You mean to say that in Version 7 Adobe have debloatified it and instead concentrated on trying to stop their product freezing up the whole of IE6 quite regularly?

I will believe it when I see it and hang on but isn't it only about 5 minutes since they launched Adobe Version 6?