Upgrade StorageA plea to the dev team on forum responses.
Hi, first I want to commend you guys for your hard work on what's shaping up to be a truly fantastic research tool.
Second, I want to commend you for all the times you've been incredibly responsive and helpful on the forums here - I can't tell you how important it is for those of us who want to evangelize about your product to believe that our ideas and concerns are listened to and to know when the bugs and problems we raise will be fixed.
Now for the complaint: That fabulous responsiveness on the forums is totally inconsistent. Very often, concerns raised (and site translator concerns in particular) go without reply, and therefore seem to be totally ignored. Whether this is actually the case or not , it's really hard to believe in a product if you think it's going to not work, or work on and off, or you have no idea when it will work, with a site that's really important to your research and that of your colleagues.
Please, please, put in a consistent system (and if necessary, hire a new staff member) to make sure that *all* forum concerns are responded to quickly and , wherever possible, that a fix date is promised too. Is this possible?
Second, I want to commend you for all the times you've been incredibly responsive and helpful on the forums here - I can't tell you how important it is for those of us who want to evangelize about your product to believe that our ideas and concerns are listened to and to know when the bugs and problems we raise will be fixed.
Now for the complaint: That fabulous responsiveness on the forums is totally inconsistent. Very often, concerns raised (and site translator concerns in particular) go without reply, and therefore seem to be totally ignored. Whether this is actually the case or not , it's really hard to believe in a product if you think it's going to not work, or work on and off, or you have no idea when it will work, with a site that's really important to your research and that of your colleagues.
Please, please, put in a consistent system (and if necessary, hire a new staff member) to make sure that *all* forum concerns are responded to quickly and , wherever possible, that a fix date is promised too. Is this possible?
We are very much aware of the importance of being responsive on the forums and really want to do as good a job as we can (despite our hectic schedules). I am hopeful that we'll have another staff member soon who will also participate regularly in the forums. Moreover, I should mention that behind the scenes we are actually keeping careful track of the posts that need answering. A lot of times we need to research the problem, and so don't have a quick answer. This is particularly true of more esoteric things like translator problems (which Sean and Simon have been terrific at getting to when they have the chance). For high-volume posting areas we are thinking that we need to add some other public tracking measures. For instance, we will probably move the translator problems to a Known Translator Issues page so that everyone can see the current bugs (and hopefully, in the future, pitch in to help). We probably also need some better intro-to-the-forums text on the forums home page so that we can head off some repetitive posts on issues we've already answered and also to reassure people that we have tracked their issues for future resolution (so we can avoid a lot of the bumping that has gone on recently).
We have a meeting next week to discuss this process and possible revisions to the support area of the site, and will try to implement changes that will make all of this more transparent and responsive in the near future.
Thanks again.