Thread

If they’re for review/to get help, yes.  It would be much better to post them to GitHub or your own site.  And they’re not to be posted here for distribution - but if you need help, people need to see the add-on to give you that help, then yes of course you can post it, just as people post templates to get assistance.

That’s great. Thank you for the clarification Lisa.

If the thread goes from “getting help” to “distributing” then the attachments may get removed, so please do not consider those permanent.

Absolutely agreed. All makes sense here.

I’ll review the stickies as well and see if we can clarify some of that.

Thanks again.

None of this is going to happen in the next 2 hours by the way, so please be patient and give me some time to make use of the feedback. =)

Thanks guys!

2 hours!! 2 hours!! I was expecting this to be done in less than 2 minutes. You’re slipping with your reaction times lately 😊

All joking aside, thank you very very much for the clarification and no problem on the timescale at all. It’s really nice to have been listened to and to know what we can and can’t do. Hopefully this will help a lot of developers and hopefully bring them back to the forums some more.

Only time will tell I guess.

Thanks Lisa.

Best wishes,

Mark

Just adding on my opinions (which are incredibly biased towards me!!!)

1. When the forums changed i queried the change in order - as often when i was a new user i got quick and instant support from the how to forum. I rarely ventured into the true technical support forum, and at the beginning thought how to was technical support. Even then though i was happy.
The change brought higher load, less community support, less developer interaction, and in short a pressured support team (which has often lead to misinterpreted requests and much longer support periods).
As above, i find this all frustrating now, and to be honest am coming to the forums less and less - just too painful!

2. Premium support - While i understand the logic about this i also find it quite frustrating. I pay for this CMS, and i pay an increased fee since EE1, yet i now receive a slower (not poorer) level of support. I am now being told that i need to pay extra to get back that level of service??? Come on really?

I might not be one of your enterprise users using 100’s of licenses a year, but i am purchasing a fair few and i just get the feeling costs are going to drive me out.
***Note i do not know the policies so i might be proven wrong here - but i am sensing the worst.
I just sense the formula of 30days free premium support (and already i am shaking my head and dreading it).

Add to this new premium cost the amount of addons people are all complaining about… I mean people are even selling CSS overrides now to make the control panel actually work and usable…
I just feel this balloon is swelling and it is going to pop (again) soon.

I have said it before, i do not want to go else where, i like it here, comfy like my sofa. But i find myself flicking through magazines and looking at adverts for a new sofa as something is just not right.

***Edit, perhaps the family mentality could be brought back. Start rewarding people that help out while your systems are stretched. Even if community members occasionaly get that mug, or tshirt, get a few extra premium support days (concept i mentioned above) rewarded back, an extra kick back in discounts.
In short reward those that are trying to help - it will encourage more, bring the community back and bring down the support wait times.

Just an idea.

This has already become quite a long thread, but I would like to add a couple of points which I feel are important, and which I also believe would solve the problem you are currently finding in your business model.

I very rarely participate in the EE forums any more. To be honest I just don’t feel welcome. Anything I post in the technical support usually just gets moved out, and then ignored, and anything I post in the other forums (including feature requests) gets ignored too. This may not be the case, but it sure feels like it.

I think the problem is forums. It’s a pretty nineties concept - they make it way too hard to find answers to questions, so everyone just ends up asking you the same thing over and over again, and wasting your time. Topics come in way too fast to read everything, and important stuff gets lost.

There are plenty of better options out there now days - getsatisfaction etc. But if I was EL (and wanted maximum staff impact for my dollar), I would campaign to get a dedicated ExpressionEngine StackExchange site set up - and don’t try to exclude add-on developers who are usually also the guys helping answer questions. They are free, as long as you prove there is a community of questions and helpful answerers. Anyone who has used StackOverflow will know what I’m talking about.. answers just spring up out of nowhere, and questions are usually answered within seconds by the community.

I very rarely participate in the EE forums any more. To be honest I just don’t feel welcome. Anything I post in the technical support usually just gets moved out, and then ignored, and anything I post in the other forums (including feature requests) gets ignored too. This may not be the case, but it sure feels like it.

Second that feeling. I used to be able to ask concept advice and whats the best approach to do XY and Z - now that just gets kicked elsewhere as it is not “technical support”. Always used to be, or at least the community helped with it more…

In terms of getsatisfaction - personally not a fan, find it hard to find old solutions and answers.
Stackoverflow - i have seen the other side with many questions simply not answered, ever. perhaps my question posing is not right, as often when i need advice it is about a topic i don’t understand rather than a specific answer!
Ticket system - too closed as i could not search other peoples answers
Forums - hard to sort the wheat from the chaff

It is certainly a tough one - the one thing i can understand is why EL have not clicked their fingers and magically a perfect solution is found! Its just not that easy!!!

2. Premium support - While i understand the logic about this i also find it quite frustrating. I pay for this CMS, and i pay an increased fee since EE1, yet i now receive a slower (not poorer) level of support. I am now being told that i need to pay extra to get back that level of service??? Come on really?

Think of it this way. There are people who have purchased a single EE license in 2004 that come here and still receive support. They might be running a personal blog with it or a non-critical project. That person, with a single license, purchased 7 years ago, is taking away support from you & your growing business and is not contributing to the cost of providing on going support. Its not sustainable.

For us, we’ve lost money on those licenses & for you its resulted in slower support. Unlimited free support has gone from being tenable, to break even, to a loss in a growing number of cases. In order to go back to the support levels people need to be successful, that must be reversed. Its not optional.

We always want to have a free level of support available for an extended period of time (probably a year after purchase) that is good. Paying for an upgrade will likely extend the free support. The idea behind Business Class Support is that for licenses that need faster turn around and expanded support services, there is an option that is reasonably priced, and will scale as your business grows.

Look at almost any software, commercial or open source, that is aimed at a professional of some sort and you’ll see it has paid support. There is a reason for that. We’ve avoided that as long as possible and I think while that avoidance was well intentioned it was ultimately the wrong decision.

The usage data we have suggests that the average budget for EE Commercial licenses that would benefit most from biz class support is $10k-$30k. Even if EE + Biz Class Support + Add-ons cost $1k in total, its still dramatically less expensive then WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or just about any other system out there. WordPress VIP is a minimum of $5k per year (extremely basic service, to get the good stuff, its $15k+ per year), Drupal is somewhat less, and Joomla is all over the map depending on what 3rd party you get help from.

Assuming you go with the main 3rd party helpdesk they promote its $275 for 4 hours of support all the way to $500 per month with limited support options.

In other words, I’m confident that we can provide business class support that is still easier on the wallet then anybody else (Commercial or Open Source) and scales with the way you make money (active licenses/clients, sort of Basecamp like approach).

What we’re seeing is that people who need private, business level support want to pay us for it and when we don’t provide it they switch to a cms that does offer those options even though they prefer EE. Their clients require that support as part of the purchasing decision.

This is not a matter of eliminating free, its a matter of recognizing that a significant portion of the EE Community needs this from us and if we don’t deliver it this year, we risk losing them to other solutions despite whatever features we add to EE.

And certainly we agree 100% on your last point. Finding the best way to provide support has proven a difficult challenge, but I think what we’re working on will benefit just about everyone in the EE Community.

Edited to add an important qualifier regarding avg budget on EE Commercial licenses.

I think the problem is forums. It’s a pretty nineties concept - they make it way too hard to find answers to questions, so everyone just ends up asking you the same thing over and over again, and wasting your time. Topics come in way too fast to read everything, and important stuff gets lost.

I agree & I think most of EllisLab would agree with me. Forums, as a concept, are pretty old school when it comes to doing community these days. I don’t necessarily think that is a good thing, but its certainly the reality.

Though there aren’t concrete plans to move support to a different system like StackExchange, Tender, GetSatisfication, or whatever, it wouldn’t surprise me if we can to that conclusion before the year is done.

Please don’t misinterrupt that as me saying we’re considering closing these forums. That won’t happen. I’m talking specifically about the default way we provide support. Certainly business class & enterprise support will be done through a private system and will not be forum based.

My thoughts…

—Commercial licenses get cheaper the more you buy, yet your support needs grow because you have more EE instances to deal with.

—Time is money.  If I have an issue that is holding me back, I don’t care what the support was like in the “good days” it probably still wasn’t fast enough for a development team which might be held back due to x issue.  Whatever I pay for that support issue is less than the losses for downtime.

—No way can community support be relied on, and historically it hasn’t been that great no matter which community we are talking about.  Community support also may not be technically correct.  Commercial support needs to be answered by people who are committed, knowledgeable and most importantly, accountable.

@Leslie Thanks for your response, i get the feeling i must be in the minority with my opinions, especially according to your statistics (which surprise me as i have must have missed your survey on customers use of EE, their projects, etc).

I must admit 90% of my EE projects do not come anywhere near $10-30k. More like $4-8k. At those budgets premium support and addons are a hit. Clearly i must be charging far too little for my projects, although i know i will price myself out of the market if i increase.

I would also suggest (in my opinion as i do not have access to accurate stats) that while you probably do still get age old customers coming for support, these are the exception and not the rule. From looking through your forum posts a significant chunk of the support requests are forum members on low post numbers (might be new employees assigned to an old license i admit), or they are people who are starting a second and more complicated project (i.e. new license) that need support.

So while i admit some old customers do keep coming for support - i get the feeling this is a small, but agreed, ever increasing piece of pie. Is that enough to base your whole support model on? I guess your stats are saying yes to this.

I would query the new upgrade model, and that the payment here is partially for support. However, i do understand that licenses now never expire, but you are restricted to the version number you purchased, so yes these people could come back for support on these versions of the software - which would be confusing in an open forum. So your support model probably does meet these needs.

I guess the situation is simple - i am biased towards my own needs (i freely and often admit!) and you must have far more bog commercial clients purchasing your software than smaller freelance/independent/2 man agencies. My concern and the reason i am voicing these opinions is that i do feel like i am continually being priced out of this product - or at least i am going to suffer because of it.

Thanks again for your detailed response - as much of what you say has surprised me, i guess your stats and facts back them up.

@JohnFuller
—Commercial licenses get cheaper the more you buy, yet your support needs grow because you have more EE instances to deal with.
Might not actually be the case, they get cheaper as support should decrease as people learn more about the system as they use it and so do not need to ask the same question twice. A new license will ask more questions than an agency operating its 5th or 10th license? or is that just me?

—Time is money.  If I have an issue that is holding me back, I don’t care what the support was like in the “good days” it probably still wasn’t fast enough for a development team which might be held back due to x issue.  Whatever I pay for that support issue is less than the losses for downtime.
I probably agree that no matter how long it takes, it is never good enough - valid point.
But if you are paying a premium support fee, and yet on your 5th or 10th license and only asking one very occasional question the cost to incidence ratio is going to increase. And if support then admit to it being a bug that will be fixed in the next version (very often the case), how is faster response going to help you - you still have to wait for that release! Take 2.1.3 was released in 2010 and bugs that have needed fixing that are in the 2.1.4 version have still not been release (perhaps this is a bad example as the filemanager update has clearly extended this period - but an example all the same)

—No way can community support be relied on, and historically it hasn’t been that great no matter which community we are talking about.  Community support also may not be technically correct.  Commercial support needs to be answered by people who are committed, knowledgeable and most importantly, accountable.
Agreed, it cannot be relied upon, nor can it be trusted to be 100% accurate - as you say accountable.
However, it can be used to leverage a wider range of solutions, different opinions, often out of the box solutions in those unique scenarios, and yes answer simple question quickly. In short community support has often in the past pointed me in the right direction - allowing me to research in more detail and get the right solution - i am liable for my project, so it is up to me to research and choose the right path.

Don’t get me wrong, i am not fighting, whinging, moaning or complaining. I am simply trying to get me opinion across as i use this product and now get the feeling that i am either the minority, or that there is a clear separation of two markets here that the commercial banner simply does not cover (i.e. Enterprise vs Small agency).

I’ve given this a bit more thought, and I think it’s also important to distinguish between what different groups need from “support” too. And I don’t just mean standard vs enterprise user support.

Case in point: when doing custom add-on development, I often have queries about why something internal to EE is structured the way it is, what the most recommended method of doing things (development) is, etc. It’s pretty far removed from simple user questions about templating. However, whenever I’ve asked questions of this nature, they usually get ignored by EL, and receive a few dunno’s if anything from the community.

While you may not consider this part of your standard service level, you ignore the flow on effects. When advanced EE users and developers feel listened to, they feel like part of the community, and would be happy to help out half a dozen newbies with questions about templating, or which add-on to use for a particular need. I believe that the current structure of the forums, whereby EL have taken on responsibility to support beginners, while classifying the real curly advanced questions as out of scope, has alienated the advanced EE users and developer community. This actually increases the level of support you must provide, because the community is not around to help you.

Here’s a thought - an experiment. Assign a full-time staff member to the Development & Programming forum for one month. Blog about it and let the community know. At the end of the month compare the level of community involvement in the Technical Support and other forums. I think you would start to see changes even in such a short time period - remember the community loves EE, and we want to come back! Call me old fashioned, but generally for every question I get a helpful answer to in any form of support forum, I try to contribute back and help out at least a couple of other people. As nevsie just pointed out, often community support can point users quickly in the right direction. And I have plenty of technical questions I would love to pose to EL staff, and actually receive an answer.

By the way, I really appreciate the fact Leslie that you have taken the time to contribute to and follow this thread. It is good to feel listened to! So thank you.

I will second the comment above about technical support for addon development. I am no programming genius, but often find myself needing something custom to meet my needs. I have tried asking support and they have not been able to help.

So to who and where do i turn?
The community has all but gone, so there is no one out there to help. I often find myself seeking out people on twitter for advice (and seeing as i am not a twitter fan this is painful!)

As a result i end up hacking something together, it works, but somehow i feel it should be better. And more to the point, if it was better i would freely release it - but there is no way i am releasing code i am not convinced about!

…When advanced EE users and developers feel listened to, they feel like part of the community, and would be happy to help out half a dozen newbies with questions about templating, or which add-on to use for a particular need. I believe that the current structure of the forums, whereby EL have taken on responsibility to support beginners, while classifying the real curly advanced questions as out of scope, has alienated the advanced EE users and developer community. This actually increases the level of support you must provide, because the community is not around to help you.

Yep this is something that I believe to be true also and something that I touched on earlier. I come in here myself to help out as often as I can as I love helping people wherever I can but there used to be a lot more of us that did that and that seems to have now all but disappeared.

Admitted nothing will ever beat the moderators for true technical support but when it comes to more development questions or even just quick questions that a new user might not have the answer to and where a simple add-on might fix their worries then it’s great to have that kind of peer support in here which has definitely dropped a quite considerable amount I’m afraid to say.

Here’s a thought - an experiment. Assign a full-time staff member to the Development & Programming forum for one month. Blog about it and let the community know. At the end of the month compare the level of community involvement in the Technical Support and other forums. I think you would start to see changes even in such a short time period - remember the community loves EE, and we want to come back!

This is something I’ve always wanted to see. There are loads of developers (myself definitely included in that bracket) who would love to be able to get their coding chops up to better standards and understand more about the system. Myself I haven’t created a single module yet as I just don’t understand it all. I’d love to do so though but just can’t at the moment. I know that Greg has a great tutorial series going at the moment but I’ll admit that I’m finding that a little harder to follow as I learn things in probably a quite different way to others so being able to ask what a specific line of code means / does would really help out in those situations.

I know that developers and development questions are obviously never going to be the first important thing for the moderators to consider here, Tech Support always will be and obviously should be but having an area where we (developers) can get help to better understand the development and coding side of things will definitely help out everyone in the long run.

It will bring back more of the community spirit. Help developers to code better, faster, cleaner code and they will in turn then help back out in the forums again which is a definite win-win situation for everyone.

Call me old fashioned, but generally for every question I get a helpful answer to in any form of support forum, I try to contribute back and help out at least a couple of other people.

That’s what I like to do also except with me I think it’s like an addiction as I love to help out even though a lot of my posts go unanswered for a very long time 😉 I just love to help out wherever I can. That’s just me though.

As nevsie just pointed out, often community support can point users quickly in the right direction. And I have plenty of technical questions I would love to pose to EL staff, and actually receive an answer.

Same here.

By the way, I really appreciate the fact Leslie that you have taken the time to contribute to and follow this thread. It is good to feel listened to! So thank you.

Yes to have actual management members listen to a community on any product is absolutely fantastic and for them to post in the forums openly like this is even better. Try getting that anywhere else, good luck with that! 😉

Many thanks Lisa, Leslie and all the other great moderators who listen to us.

Best wishes,

Mark

One other thing I meant to post also was that I really wish I was getting clients at the £6k-£18k ($10k-$30k) range! 😊

I use ExpressionEngine as it’s my preferred system of choice but I’ve only ever had one client that even came close to the lower end of that range. That’s probably because of the way things are over here in the UK at the moment though :-(

I think the problem is forums. It’s a pretty nineties concept - they make it way too hard to find answers to questions, so everyone just ends up asking you the same thing over and over again, and wasting your time. Topics come in way too fast to read everything, and important stuff gets lost.

I agree & I think most of EllisLab would agree with me. Forums, as a concept, are pretty old school when it comes to doing community these days. I don’t necessarily think that is a good thing, but its certainly the reality.
.

I think these are both misguided opinions!

Nineties? Hmm, we had single thread forums back then…......if any at all….and that was generally late 90’s.
This particular forum software is circa 2003….the start of it.

VBB 3 was released in 2004 - which was really the mature version of that application. Add a couple years to those dates for populating the forums, and you could say that Forums are very “2000’s”........

However, it is telling that EL has that opinion.

Important stuff gets lost? Compared to what? If so, that means a forum has a poor search function. Or, that means a particular web site needs multiple systems- for instance we use:
1. Articles
2. Wiki
3. Forum
4. Knowledge base (QA)
to answer our users questions.

So, if Forums as 90’s - then the other things listed above are also (some predate forums)......pray tell, what do people use for deep information in this decade?

I must be missing something here. Please don’t say Facebook or Twitter or anything like that. Please.
Let’s hear what the current model is, and see sites with big traffic which use these modern methods…...

Meantime, I’ll tell Apple, AT&T and the tens of thousands of other companies which use forums that they can move on….
( a joke, my friends - forgive me, I’m from Philly! )

I must admit 90% of my EE projects do not come anywhere near $10-30k. More like $4-8k. At those budgets premium support and addons are a hit. Clearly i must be charging far too little for my projects, although i know i will price myself out of the market if i increase.

Sorry, I left out an important qualifier. The $10k-$30k range is the budget shops who want biz class support from us have. Its not the avg across all commercial license holders. The lowest budgets are people who purchase EE for someone else and do the initial work for free just to save that person from some other system. They work at a loss.

The highest budget I personally know of for an EE site is in the millions. But I don’t know the actual average across all users, just the avg of those that need the biz class support we’re working on & enterprise. My assumption is that everyone else needs “free” for a reasonable amount of time per license and a low cost way (such as an upgrade to the product) to renew that.

Either way, my thinking is that we can’t continue free unlimited support forever.

If we wanted to continue to do that we’d have to either increase the price of EE or reduce what we consider support (make it less helpful on purpose). Neither of those options seem good to me. We don’t want to increase EE’s price for exactly the reason stated. EE is the bread & butter of thousands of freelancers and the price point makes it an easy choice. Most of us at EllisLab come from that background (I do).

If we introduce support options aimed at the different types of customers we have instead of a “one size fits all for everybody forever” I think we improve support for everybody. That’s my primary point.

So while i admit some old customers do keep coming for support - i get the feeling this is a small, but agreed, ever increasing piece of pie. Is that enough to base your whole support model on? I guess your stats are saying yes to this.

Its not small. ExpressionEngine has about a 75% retention rate. That means that the the majority of licenses sold in 2004 are still in use today. Take 7 years of 75% retention combined with the continued significant growth and you have the problem in a nutshell.

This is the kind of problem we are blessed to have & I’m very thankful we have it. People stick with us for years because what we do helps them succeed. And the number of people coming in is awesome as well. But at the same time, its still a problem because our original support model didn’t take into account the diverse needs and long term usage. In 2004 we were not savvy business people, we were 4 guys hell bent on making a new breed of CMS. We had no idea what we were getting into.

Seven years later and we’re a company of 14 serving hundreds of thousands of web professionals in some way, shape, or form. For the type of product EE is, regardless of what you’re budget is, you need Grade A support to be the most successful possible. For the small group that we are, if we want to grow our support to meet those needs, the model must change.

The leeway I hope you & the other thousands of freelancers allow us is that we’ve always been fair & reasonable when it comes to pricing. I have no doubt that if you find what we do to be unfair and unreasonable you’ll let us know, as well you should.