- This topic has 27 replies, 16 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 11 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
I understand "growth" and "change" but this was to the extreme and in the email was made to sound like this was going to be *better* than what we had and that we as a community would benefit more. Over here - we cannot even privately email each other like the old forum. At least if we wanted to help someone - we had a private way of communicating that information to them without exposing our contact information in a comment box. This is like the "bottom of the barrel." We went from "fine wine" to Boone's Farm over night. That's why I started the Group on LinkedIn.
Need help with customization or troubleshooting? Reach out to me.
Well I am glad to see I am not alone. I think we all want the best for Genesis and this seems like a step in the wrong direction.
I became a WooThemes customer almost two years ago, and a big reason for doing so was their excellent support forum. I learned a ton about WordPress, both on the design and development sides, by reading through the forums and occasionally asking a question when I couldn't find an answer. Woo recently did away with their forum and switched to a ticket system, which was not well received by their more loyal and vocal clients. They've since backpedaled on that decision and are still trying to figure out what they're doing and how they're going to do it.
They also made some other big changes which caused me to look elsewhere for a more stable primary theme provider, and I rediscovered StudioPress / Genesis and decided that this was a framework and theme provider that I could build a better business on. Shortly after I switched the announcement came out about big support changes, and I thought, "Here we go again!"
Fortunately I'm on a part of the WordPress learning curve that isn't so steep anymore, and I don't rely on support as much as in the beginning, but if I was just getting started I would "probably" look for a provider that had an active support forum where I could search for solutions and not have to wait on a ticket system.
For what it's worth...
John Sundberg | blackhillswebworks.com
A WordPress developer’s toolbox: Firebug | WordPress Codex | Google 😉hey folks, I'm reading through all of these issues and wanted to chime in on some key points.
First, Thank you Susan for pointing out where we have explained the reason for change.
Saving money was not the point. In all actuality the move to our own system costs more and it will be a while before we could even think to recover the upfront costs. Staying with the status quo doesn't cost anything extra.
In all honesty, the reason for the change is the problems new customers experienced. Pretty much everyone that is complaining is an existing user who learned to work around the problems on the old system. If someone posted on your thread you would contact a mod/manager to let us know or even just start a new thread or whatever to get around that. New users have no idea why their threads aren't getting answered when they reply to their own thread. We literally missed hundreds of new threads each week and that is pretty much all from new users. The threads tended to be entry level questions on theme usage or "omg my site with a big white screen I have no idea what to do" type of stuff. That is huge and important. You cannot leave that unanswered and it cost us quite a bit of customers.
Now, a lot of people think, "ok so add on the new support portal and keep the old forums ... problem solved." I fought for this till I ended up in help desk and started helping field the problems with users even logging into the old forums. Again, this didn't affect anyone already in the system, but a huge number of new customers weren't able to access the forums, which was because of problems merging with vBulletin. We even looked into merging Premise (which is the underlying framework with the new system) with vBulletin but it just didn't work well for our needs.
Again, you might think, "well forget the new customers, focus on the loyal customers not new customers." I think you can all see where this falls short of any kind of reality. We love our loyal customers from all the way back to Revolution, but our pricing model says we need new customers to keep providing support and upgrades. If we didn't have new customers there would be no money and then there would be no StudioPress. To keep moving forward we need to make things more usable to the new customers. Yes, things have changed but we needed change for these reasons and other reasons you have probably read if you follow the other threads. We spent over a year planing this and I spent about 10 months trying to prove we needed to keep the old forums instead of the new forums. Eventually I saw that the old forums really weren't going to work for new customers under the new system any more than it did under the old system.
That said, things aren't perfect. They probably never will be, but I think that they can get a lot better, but that depends on our users, especially our loyal customers. We really need you all to start giving back.
I'm going to warn you, I'm a preacher and I'm about to have an altar call. I have probably helped everyone complaining in this thread and every other thread about the change. I have probably written hundreds of lines of free code for each person that is upset about this change in the forums and those complaining in help desk. I started as a user like everyone else. I had to manage my clients with coming to the forums to find useful bits of code. I didn't get paid a dime for the first year that I gave away code because I found the forums to be invaluable to me as a resource so I could give back.
Yes, there are threads sitting unanswered right now but that is because Andrea and myself use to field 150-200 threads a day ourselves. Right now I am fielding about that much in helpdesk every single day, roughly half is sending people to the forum because it is customization. Until things settle down and everyone understands customization comes here we don't have time to answer much in these forums.
If you found the old forums to be a great resource then stop being a consumer only and start giving back. You might have a question that is more difficult but there are going to be questions you know the answer to. Take time to answer a few questions instead of just posting more of your own questions. Make this into a community effort so everyone benefits. When you do that it frees up the moderators and staff to tackle some of the more challenging questions. If everyone who regularly visited the old forums just answered 2-5 questions a day in things they felt comfortable in helping with there would never be an unanswered thread and people would start with the community before coming to help desk only to be sent back to the community. This resource will grow and users will be able to search and find the answers they need without even asking. I will have more time to come here and answer customization questions instead of spending all my time here reading complaints and trying to convince everyone that the real answer is for the community to step up. The community is always what made the old forums better. It wasn't the staff.
So in short, if you want to see things become better, then please help make it better. Do your part to give back instead of being a consumer. If you want to see the moderators and staff have more time to answer your questions, take time to field a few questions yourself. The only way this works is if you all rise to the challenge because a small support staff cannot ever provide the customization support you desire, but an amazing community can.
I know you all can. Prove me right.
Nick,
Amen to the community aspect - that's what I appreciated about WooThemes' forums at first, but then they disabled that so you could only comment on your own forum threads. Bad move in my opinion, but it did keep newbies from posting questions in other user's threads. No perfect solution, I guess.
Do you think we can get RSS feeds turned on for the forums? I don't mind helping out, but (I think) it would be easier for me to keep an eye on the forums if I could add them to my feedreader.
John
John Sundberg | blackhillswebworks.com
A WordPress developer’s toolbox: Firebug | WordPress Codex | Google 😉I apologize to everyone for my bad English, but I had to add something.
Obviously, keeping the support having with a single payment that gives lifetime access to the support issues is obvious that is not profitable by StudioPress.But I would be willing to pay an amount of money per month, for obtain the themes support one by one, without I have to pay a very high amount to a programmer.
Some idea could be 2 packages, with support (with a month fee) or without it.
We offer unlimited theme support but even with fees we cannot really provide the best support for unlimited customization. That would literally cost thousands of dollars per theme per site, effectively making StudioPress a custom theme shop. This is a good thing to be but not what StudioPress is. Instead we rely on community to help with customization while we focus on support. That model worked great but the community grew so much that the ones giving back just couldn't keep up so more people need to start giving back.
John, That is a good idea. I checked and the RSS feed is actually enabled. You need to access it on a per forum basis. This is an example URL for the general forum (this one)
http://www.studiopress.community/forum/general-discussion/feed
Basically you put /feed after the forum URL. I'll check and see if there is a nice way to make this easier to find for other users.
I apologize in advance if this was covered elsewhere. I just sent my first support ticket today and got midway through an email exchange when I was told it would be better for me to have opened this discussion in the community forums since it involves customization and would be relevant to others.
Here's the thing. I would have been happy to do that. I did that in the old forums. I just didn't realize that's what you wanted us to do.
I'd recommend adding a sentence to your Get Help page (http://my.studiopress.com/help/) that tells people that they should keep theme customization queries in the forums. Ditto for anything else you want us to direct here.
Especially given the paragraph you have at the top of the forums - "These forums are for general discussion on WordPress, CSS and design and site feedback. Official support for StudioPress themes is offered exclusively through the My StudioPress member area. Responses in this forum are not guaranteed." I would assume the overwhelming majority of people are going to immediately jump over to a support ticket out of fear they won't get a response here.
So then you get more support requests. And have less time to answer questions in the forums. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Again, I apologize if this was covered elsewhere and if there's a good reason for it, but it seems like it might be able to help.
- The topic ‘Studiopress Support – new vs. old’ is closed to new replies.