Comment 76 for bug 585530

I have to add my voice of frustration with this. I have been trying to figure out why syncing contacts isn't working for months, thinking that the problem was a bug. I even generated a bug report 2+ months ago (bug #590697), but no one has responded or marked it as a duplicate of this bug. If I hadn't stumbled upon the status page, I never would have known it was a global problem. Maybe this was stupid on my part, but I just didn't have time to search all over the place to find the problem. And who would expect that this was a 3+ month global outage when contact syncing is still listed as a major feature on the ubuntu web page (http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop) - it just has to be working. I was planning on paying for a ubuntuone account upgrade once it stabilized, but I can't imagine doing that now - who knows if and when ubuntuone will be fully functional and how long after that until the next outage.

Some constructive suggestions to help users understand what is going on:

1) Temporarily disable the contact syncing part of the ubuntu one management utility in System->Preferences so people understand the service is not functional yet.
2) When you log in to the ubuntuone website and particularly when you go to the contacts tab, make it clear this is broken - the cryptic status announcements in the sidebar don't indicate this is the case (at least not today they don't).
3) Update the ubuntuone debugging page to indicate that contacts aren't working with a reference to this bug (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/Bugs). I have edited this page to add a comment, but more could be done to make this clearer.