Thread

nevsie -

I specifically said that I am not trying to shut you down; I was hoping that you would start a dialogue in a new thread so that we could discuss your topic specifically.  I think this makes sense - it allows each thread to stay on point and get the dedicated attention that it deserves.  This would make it easier for both of us to follow, as well as other members to contribute.

This particular forum thread started as a discussion of how to improve first-party support.  You want to discuss third-party addon support and community involvement around those addons.  That is an excellent discussion, one I want to encourage and participate in - just in its own dedicated thread.  It could even be linked to from this thread.

In any case, we recommend add-ons fairly frequently that can help users achieve their goals: if those addons exist.  If not we guide them to the development docs if they want to build their own.

I am sorry that you are frustrated by my responses.  But we can help each other here, and I was simply hoping that you would work with me on that.

I want to hear your voice, but I also want to hear the voices of those in this thread that want to discuss something different.  I’m simply hoping to guide this into a way to handle both.  I want to hear all of this feedback, we can’t improve without it. =)

The potential problem with removing third party add-ons from the forums is that only larger/more commercial add-ons will get developed and shared.

The small plugin that someone developed for a specific purpose and then put up on these forums for free will disappear. They may not want to get involved with setting up a whole support framework for an occasional free plugin. If they don’t reply to support questions there may be another user that can help out. There are many instances of threads with pages and pages of posts that don’t have much or any involvement from the developer but contain loads of useful info about the use of the add-on.

This sort of community sharing and helping others out is what attracted me to EE in the first place.

Alright, you guys want to discuss this in this thread, we’ll discuss it here.  If you do have feedback about first party support, please feel free to throw it in here, or email it to me.  Please do not let the change in topic in this thread turn you off from sharing any of that feedback.

Paul—

We are still seeing free add-ons put together and shared with the community, either via GitHub, or via our Community Partner, Devot:ee.  There is still a lot of idea exchange in the Developer and Programmer forums, and the CodeShare Corner.  It is unfortunate that some that may have used to contribute have chosen to no longer contribute, but that is the natural evolution of the forum; and the community participants have always changed over the years as people got busy or moved on. 

What kind of solution would you propose? I welcome the community’s ideas on this.

Alright, you guys want to discuss this in this thread, we’ll discuss it here.  If you do have feedback about first party support, please feel free to throw it in here, or email it to me.  Please do not let the change in topic in this thread turn you off from sharing any of that feedback.

It might be that I am tired working late and reading too much into this. (I apologise if so)
But this kind of frosty, dry, sarcastic response when people are actively trying to help your company by supplying you feedback based on issues or opinions we have really is not necessary. There is no doubting you and the company have your/their opinions as we have our own and i am not to say i am correct but please at least give us the chance! I feel like i have now been pushed a little harder than necessary and i will now limit my forum use to pure and simple technical requests.

nevsie -

I do not intend it that way.  It appears that I’m struggling to portray a concept that I really feel is important in forums - not just these forums, but everywhere.  Perhaps it is a personal issue, but I find it much easier when every thread has conversation around one-topic and does not drift very much off course.  I find it easier to follow the conversation that way. 

However, I should not have tried to force this thread into that model; I should have let it run its natural course.  I apologize for that.  I do want to make sure that people know that they are still welcome to offer feedback on the original topic.

Please forgive me for any bad tone in here, I assure you that it is not intentional; if we were talking over coffee then this would have gone much differently - please try to imagine it as two peers having a good, solid discussion.

I hope that you will rethink offering feedback in the forum.  What you are saying is important to me and to the community; it is valued feedback.  I hope that you will continue to share.

Unfortunately my last post took me a while to compose so repeated a bit on the previous ones and missed your suggestion to move to another thread, so I wasn’t ignoring it.

I don’t want to shut you down, nevsie - but I’d like to keep this thread focused on the support experience as opposed to how addon support is handled.

I didn’t read the original comment as only referring to 1st party support and it is posted in ‘General Discussion’, so understood that to mean support in general.

We are still seeing free add-ons put together and shared with the community, either via GitHub, or via our Community Partner, Devot:ee.

But that’s not here, on the ExpressionEngine forums.
You don’t go and surf GitHub, and there is no support mechanism there.
Devot:ee is probably going to implement some sort of support forum for add-ons, but that is only in response to it being dropped here.

Add-ons are used in every site I develop, so I think of them as part of EE.

It’s probably easier for those of us that have been here for a while to know where to go and look for things as we know the names of developers and their websites, but newer users will not have that knowledge.

I understand that the forums needed to be re-arranged following the release of EE2 and the confusion over which version the topic/thread applied to, but personally I don’t find the structure and grouping very intuitive. I will think about how I think they should be grouped and email you or start a separate thread rather than take this one off-topic.

Nah, let’s keep it all here.  Forum architecture/ordering affecting support is certainly relevant to the support discussion.

When we rethought the forum structure, one of the reasons that we set it up this way is that we had a big problem before.  Users - both new and veteran - would come to the forums and dump all of their issues into the General Forum and How to.  This included important, even urgent, technical support questions. However, sometimes those would not get seen, or would be delayed, simply because they went to the wrong forum.

Now in an ideal world we wouldn’t miss posts like that - but it does happen.  We’re all human here, after all.  Something that is abundantly clear in my earlier faux pas.

By changing the order of the forums we help to encourage people to try technical support first.  Yes - we might move the thread as appropriate,  but we would much rather move more posts than miss important technical support posts. First and foremost, these forums are to get support to those needing support with the software.  I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. 

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As for add-on support, we are watching the changes closely, and if we feel that it is not working for the community, then we’ll investigate changing this. So please do continue to share feedback about all areas of support and these forums.  I promise you, we are paying attention.