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When having an issue with a theme, when should we use direct assistance (get help forms) -vs- when do we use community forums?
I would say that if the issue has to do with getting the theme set up per the demo then use the help desk otherwise, if the issue has to do with a third party plugin or customization then post here in the forums.
John “Nicolas Flamel” Wright | SoZo’s design| John Wright Photography
Thanks - Just wasn't certain how you were approaching the new system based on the marketing emails..
I haven't received any marketing emails so I can't speak to what is mentioned in them
John “Nicolas Flamel” Wright | SoZo’s design| John Wright Photography
I use marketing to mean getting the message out, not necessarily selling something. I just meant the emails talking about all the great new stuff and the one on one help.
John is right. Technical issues and usage are handled in the new ticket system. That is what the "how do I" and "technical" options are for. Customization is handled in the forums so the community can help out and benefit as usual.
Hi Nick, Is there an area we can see submitted tickets and the answers? This was an excellent way (in the old forum) of finding answers to questions that someone had already asked and learing how to add some new functionality. I'm thinking it may also have helped you by not having to answer the same question many times as people found the answer without having to bother a moderator.
I'm kinda hoping the development team won't rush to shut down the old forums for that very reason. Until the new forums really get going, there are a lot of answers that can be found in the old forums (for example: Yesterday I used a link from the old forums to answer a question in the new forums - because the answer was already written out).
Yep, but I would go the one step further and be able to view all the ticket questions with answers in the new forum. Your example and experience I think would be echoed by most people. They were an excellent resource for learning.
Tickets form others are not likely to be available for search. We are looking at a way to have your tickets available in my.studiopress. We are also working on a Knowledge Base which will be pulling from information in the old forums as well as common questions we get in help desk. Since help desk is for technical and usage support we do not expect to have a huge variety of questions. All other questions can be placed in the forums so they will be searchable. We will be working on better searching. One thing that will really help this is making good use of the tags.
Not that anyone will care, but I do not like the new system. It was easier to just be able to look in the old forums for the themes I was using, read to see if anyone else had that problem and go on my merry way.
I will probably be phasing out the use of all the Studiopress themes I am using because of this issue. I feel like this is not a step in the right direction.
Like I said.... not that anyone will care since this was all done without any feedback or input from existing users.
Roar - I understand that change is not always easy, and you have the right to feel the way you do, but have you had a question since the new forum started that wasn't answered? Currently, the old forums are still open, so you can still search for answers in the old forum - nothing has changed there (yet). I think people just need to give this forum a chance before dismissing it out of hand.
Just my opinion, for what it's worth - I'm not a StudioPress employee or moderator - I'm just a user who understands that change is inevitable, and I'm prepared to embrace the change.
That's okay, Susan. I understand and appreciate that. I am more of a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as well as a person who appreciates the sort of grass roots approach to being able to get assistance from other people who really use it. The forums where we could talk with other real users of the themes was a big reason I went with these.
I cannot imagine why StudioPress wants to answer 99999 questions one on one with users vs. having forums where resourceful people could find what they are looking for and continue working without having to stop and wait for a reply.
It would be nice to know how long the old forums will remain available for reference.
One other thing I noticed, unless you login to the old forums, only the General Discussion forum is openly readable. I understand making the Themes forums for members only, but shouldn't the Plugins forums also be open, since most of those are also freely available to the WordPress community at large?
That said, I'm also not a fan of a system where the same question could potentially be submitted ten times a week and repeatedly answering it takes valuable time away from the support team. It also handcuffs the more savvy folks in the community when they could spend a few minutes finding a solution in the forums instead and figure out the problem on their own, rather than submitting the question themselves to be handled a twentieth time 🙂
Believe it or not, I used to also belong to one of the Woo clubs, but finally I dropped them last month. I know, I know... take your shots 🙂
I could probably have eventually stomached their massive changes in pricing & licensing for WooCommerce extensions, but with their jump off the cliff in terms of QA prior to releasing a theme, on top of their getting rid of the support forums in favor of UserVoice, plus their "take it or leave it good riddance" attitude in responses to the majority of their customer base who were not happy with the new ticketing system (4 days to 2 weeks to answer a question, dozens of complaints of lost clients and projects because of the longer turnaround to resolve even the simplest questions), it was just too much and I canceled.
Probably should have canceled sooner, but I have clients now using WooCommerce premium extensions and one still using a WooTheme (I actually lost money on that project because of their QA problems). I don't know that I can switch that site over to a Genesis theme any time soon, but I am looking at the feasability of moving my WooCommerce people who aren't using premium extensions to another e-commerce platform (no, haven't decided which yet, but the only other decent WP community out there seems to be WPMU and I'll be playing with Marketpress soon, and I may see if it's even worth the trouble to replace extensions with options available at CodeCanyon).
Apparently, I haven't been the only one who's left Woo, because after only 3 months or so, they are finally listening to their community concerns, leaving UserVoice and going to another trouble ticketing system that's more open. Too little, too late from my opinion, but their experiment with one-on-one closed system trouble tickets didn't work... I think their biggest problem was when they also got rid of the old forums completely in exchange for a read-only Knowledge Base, they didn't provide anything new to allow their community to continue to BE a community, outside of leaving comments on blog posts. The lack of communication had become so bad, a couple of folks who had been really active in their old forums even suggested creating a new forum on a new domain they'd manage on their own.
Since the plan and the direction is a little different here, I truly hope the end result works out better here, too.
And for the record, after my time this year wrangling Woo products (I truly only decided to jump in with WooCommerce because of the appearance of the Genesis Connect plugin), I have become painfully appreciative of the time StudioPress puts in to making sure a theme is ready before it's made available. If I haven't said it enough before, let me say it now: ten thousand times Thank You, StudioPress!
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkWe don't have an exact time frame on when the old forums will be closed. We have a LOT we want to get out of there as we built out Knowledge Base. I'll look into the plugin forum to see why it isn't open. It use to be.
Speaking of the KB. This is the third leg of support that isn't available. We understand that a lot of questions get asked repeatedly and now we have a good way to monitor that. We will be using this to track what is being asked regularly and use that to build up a KB. I"m not developing it so I get to dream big impossible dreams about what I want it to do. Then hope the dev team can make it a reality. Basically we want to see a system where the question will be scanned for key words before submitting then potentially relevant KB articles will be suggested. This makes for a much better system for helping users find answers before hitting the help desk.
And of course, we will continue to keep the forums as a super important part of the support system. If everything goes according to plan the KB and community forums actually become the primary means of support with the ticket system handling important issues more like a free "priority" support for technical and usage issues.
Good to know they'll be hanging around more than 30 days 🙂
I've actually seen that type of "hints" behavior in a couple of places, bringing up KB articles as certain keywords are being entered into a ticket, and I'm pretty sure Media Temple is using something like that as part of their support ticketing system, too.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkPlease note also for the questions that people ask time and again - in the new http://my.studiopress.com/ members area are SETUP links on how to set up each tehme like the demo.
On the right are "Tutorials" and "Code Snippets"
These generally answer about 80% of the theme questions we get.
**forum signature**
If you need technical support for your theme please file a ticket.The forums are community based. Staff only monitors the forum for issues relating to the forum itself and to redirect users to where they need to go.
- The forum ‘General Discussion’ is closed to new topics and replies.