Thread

Folks, what with EllisLab’s changes to their support policies and lack of presence in these forums, it sure would be nice if long time EE users and excited newcomers would continue to participate. A lot of first time EE users and novices are not getting their questions answered, and aren’t making use of EE’s paid support (or 90 day free support). And when their questions go unanswered by either the community, or EllisLab folks, well nothing good comes out of it for all.

I know that a lot of energy has gone towards making the EE StackExchange site viable, but that is not a place that works for all of the questions that folks may have. Regular forums still have a good place for product support, in my estimation.

So basically I’m making a plea to long time EE users to continue to occasionally stop in here and answer some questions, and keep this forum alive. Secondly, I’d ask that EllisLab pitch in and do their part keeping the spammers away, and answering some basic customer service questions. And thanks to those that have been doing so (Boyink! and Bashkar, I’m looking at you 😉 )!

Otherwise, this place will just turn into a relic— a ghost town, and that doesn’t do EllisLab or EE users any good. Can we all let bygones be bygones, and try and make the best of what tools EllisLab has left us with? And hope that they bring back, or develop some good new ones that are publicly available?

Thanks, -jim

The whole new support set-up is crazy and ridiculous, so much so I’ve decided to compete directly against EllisLabs myself with “Pay what you want” support: http://www.totalserve.net.au/services/ee-support

If you, or anyone can think of a model that would pay for our time (we’ve got 2 PHP devs here that know CI/EE) then I’m open to figuring out a way how us here at TotalServe can be on these forums 24/7 providing support.

We’re a 24/7 support organisation already, so we have lots of idle resources. One of the ideas I’ve been thinking about is a “For the good of the community” type plan were say we publicly announce how much it would cost us to staff these forums 24/7 with a 2-hour response time guarantee, which my back of the hand calculations would cost us around $1,500 AUD-ish per month for a 40% engineering loading. (I.e. We spend 40% of our days performing EE community work).

Then, to make it viable for us we offer a capped-or-cheaper plan based on those costings. So, out of the blocks we offer a $40/month capped plan for 2-hour response time guaranteed. Then, once we get 38 clients on this plan (38 * $40 = $1,500) we start dropping prices, so if we get 80 customers, we’ll charge $1500 / 80 = $19/month per paying customer.

Obviously a lot of people won’t want to pay, but by us offering better support in these forums then even EllisLabs can perform it’ll work to entice people to flick a bit of money our way.

Any ideas?