I think they were attacked by army of spambots by the look of it. Check the number of registered users (>40k)
I’m thinking MacRabbit wishes there were that many people lining up to find out when to purchase Espresso 2. Thanks for the heads up, perhaps I’ll do some investigation myself next time.
Our server nearly caught fire, so we switched to a static version of the blog. Right now we need to respond to the flood of Espresso 2 related email, so fewer communication channels also helps us manage the situation!
As to Espresso 2 pre-release. Wow! I’m already impressed. It feels (and looks) slick. Also it seems to have, so far, addressed many of the issues discussed in the now deceased discussion forum. Well done guys. I’ll be purchasing 2 copies as soon you ready with a final release.
It would be most useful, if we could either have the forum back (perhaps a temporary espresso 2 one) or a list of reported issues/tickets.
Although you say fewer communication channels helps you manage, but, if you get 50 emails reporting the same issue, you are effectively doing 50 times the work for 1 item.
It’s really rather shady that you wiped out the Espresso forum, locked out blog comments, etc just as you’re ramping up to release a long-awaited update to Espresso.
It appears (to a past and present customer) as though you’re trying to hide the last few years of problems. You can’t sweep that under the rug and expect it to stay gone forever. Attack the problem head on, admit to your mistakes, and move on. I tried Espresso 2 and it’s BEAUTIFUL. The CSSEdit features that are creeping into it are wonderful! BUT removing community support, and removing all history of your mistakes by deleting and/or hiding the forums and locking out blog comments is ridiculous.
I sincerely hope Espresso 2 is a successful product, and I really hope it is completed and maintained/updated, so I can actually _use_ this version (the last one has collected dust in my Apps folder for a few years, because of how neglected it was by MacRabbit).
Best of luck… but PLEASE don’t try to hide the past by deleting old forum posts, locking out access to the wiki, and closing comments on the blog. In this day and age, the conversation will take place SOMEWHERE (twitter, blogs, etc) so you might as well let it happen in your backyard, and participate. If you’ve learned ANYTHING from all the customer feedback over the last few years, some level of transparency and communication is DESPERATELY needed.
Cheers!
Jackson
P.S. Should I cross-post this to my blog, in case it’s deleted too
Jackson, this is what’s going on. We used to have 4 different two-way communication channels: email, Twitter, forum and blog comments.
Blog comments were the absolute worst way of communicating with our users: nobody ever saw replies there, and snide remarks remained there forever even though matters were resolved during more constructive email conversations. For our latest blog post, we went static because our server’s CPU usage was reaching 40+ (normal load under attention is around 1-2) and was bringing down the entire site. Turns out this also made the announcement a much smoother experience, with anyone who wanted to comment on it using Twitter and other mediums. Everyone has been demanding blog updates over the years and that’s exactly what we’re gonna do; use the blog to inform our users about major new developments.
The forum is still here for its original purpose: discussing Sugar development (there’s a reason this subdomain is wiki.macrabbit.com). What is gone is the Discussion forum, which was originally added because a single forum seemed very minimal. That 10 second decision resulted in years of moderating and deleting dozens of spammers every week. We’re in the business of making good apps and providing good support and the main discussion forum was taking away precious time for no upside.
Next, Twitter. Better than blogs and forums, but still not ideal for support due to the message length restrictions and lack of organizational tools. So we’re using it to either help our users out quickly or to say new things that don’t merit a full-fledged blog announcement.
Finally, email. All the credit here goes to Ian, who has been helping everyone out promptly and with great dedication. This is still the support medium that works best for both our users and us. Users want help when something goes wrong, and funneling user feedback to email exclusively allows us to do that in the best way possible.
Spreading ourselves too thin was the root cause of our past problems, both with regards to getting releases out the door and communicating with our users. Among other things, we’re aggressively reducing our product line (unfortunately discontinuing standalone CSSEdit) so that we can make sure the quality of everything we do is back up to our own high standards. Removing the Discussion forum is not an attempt to wish away past mistakes, but part of a more streamlined approach to customer support that hopefully results in happier users, more productive time to spend on development, and faster release cycles.
While I appreciate the reply, it doesn’t seems like one-on-one email is the end all solution here. Twitter is mostly for marketing, and one-off support (where you might direct a user to a specific forum post or knowledge base article). I agree that blog comments often just compound existing problems, where people chime in with a bunch of “me too” type comments or snide remarks about release dates). However your solution (email) helps one person at a time, and no one else benefits from the knowledge imparted on that user. I can’t search past user questions, or jump in on a conversation where I may be able to help another user. YES, you do need consistent email replies to any direct inquiries, but I can’t think of very many modern desktop applications (or web apps) that don’t have a user forum or knowledge base that’s sponsored or moderated by the company that created the software. Where else can users help each other, find solutions to common problems, etc? If the information is stored in a guarded silo, with one-way access via email only, then you’re going to appear even less open then before. Moreover it doesn’t help the majority of your users who are quite happy helping themselves, if there’s a source of information (like a wiki or forum) that’s sponsored by MacRabbit. Be honest, you’re a user too… and the first thing you probably do when you experience a problem is google it (or search with another search engine). Without a forum, users splinter off into separate groups, like the neglected Get Satisfaction group, or a new Google Group, or random questions and answers will be posted to sites like stackexchange, etc.
I strongly urge you to reconsider. I think some kind of forum or support “community” is needed. Personally I don’t think a self-hosted expression engine forum is the best way to do it either. Maybe make it easier on yourself (and your host/server) and leverage another company’s hard work, and use something like Get Satisfaction or TenderApp, or something like that if you don’t want to continue using a self-hosted app.
BTW, congrats on Espresso 2. It’s a beautiful app! I can’t wait to see it mature.
Based on our experience, the majority doesn’t use forums the way you describe. The more support channels we maintain, the more confused our users get about where to go for help. The very existence of the Get Satisfaction group proves this.
Our new approach is simple: you select Send Feedback in the app or email us directly, we reply with what we believe to be the best solution at any given time for a particular user. No outdated suggestions, no duplicate topics, no working to get exactly what you need, and none of our time wasted on moderating spammers.
The “silo” approach helps us stay on top of problems by offering the best temporary solutions and making the quickest fixes. As a result, any user with a problem indirectly helps a much larger number of other users with no effort required on their part. Everyone is still part of the community, just not one with post counts and ranked titles.
Glad you like the Espresso 2 Kaboom; we’ll be happy to read your feedback emails!
I’m not even a fan, or frequent forum user (and personally I loathe the stupid titles and features that old forum software have dragged along over the years)... but at times I will leverage them… just like any internet user or especially a software/web developer. I might need to look something up on a Tuesday night at 2 in the morning while I’m on a deadline, and there’s no way “email support” is going to provide a timely answer. I think you’re highly underestimating your audience, considering that you’re writing software for technical and creative people. They support themselves professionally by using forums and wikis all over the internet. This is how we learn…. and this is what communities are for. You’re confusing one-on-one technical support (which is RARE and EXPENSIVE these days) with community support (possibly moderated, and using modern social technologies, not outdated forum software like this).
I think you missed the point about Get Satisfaction. Free user groups like that will pop up even more often now, thanks to the fact that you’ve eliminated any sense of community support or public knowledge base. Yes there are instances where I might need your direct email support, but more often than not I want to look something up and answer it myself. What are you going to do? Answer the same question 100 times? Copy and paste from an internal knowledge base that only you have access to? What does this accomplish? What happens when Ian goes on vacation? What happens if the application gets more popular? What happens if there’s an issue that thousands of people need to resolve? Are you going to post answers in 128 character bursts on Twitter? Put it on your blog? It seems like there’s a missing link here, and email isn’t the ONLY solution. If we were discussing an application for less savvy users, then all of this would be pointless… but we’re not. Espresso is a development application for web technologies. If all software like this was supported via email only, with no public facing side, all of our jobs would be much, much harder because we’d have to rely on a single person to answer all of our needs, and no one would be able to help each other. That’s not practical (and again, it doesn’t scale very well).
Only time will tell… but I think you’re making a big mistake. You can’t scale one-on-one email efficiently, and expect to always be able to answer your user’s questions in a timely fashion. It simply can’t serve everyone’s needs all the time. Your customers are already the kind of people that want to help themselves first…. and often the scope of questions that arise with software like this are in a gray area and may not fall directly inside Ian’s area of expertise. That’s where communities come into play. But it sounds like “controlling the message” is more important to you than ensuring your technically savvy users are able to help themselves the way they’re already used to doing.
I’m repeating myself over and over, so I’ll just stop. Once the twitter buzz dies down, and people have had time to play with 2-beta, I suspect there will be a swarm of users clamoring for a place to discuss your app. I just can’t see how that’s bad thing.
Same here, +1 for a forum that is actually usable (and reachable - can’t find a single link on your “burning” website). It’s not that difficult to keep spammers away, I could offer you guys help in case you don’t have the needed web-expertise .
Another +1 for a forum. As Jackson pointed out I’d much rather try to find an answer on a forum myself than have to email support each time. Also exclusively 1-on-1 email support doesn’t benefit the wider community at all.
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