Hi Matt,


Thanks for your note.  We don’t have specific stated response time goals in the Community today.  Our technical support team members balance their time between responding to customers that have Premium and Essential support contracts, and fielding questions from the Community.  In some cases the content in conversations is best responded to by team members in other roles such as product management, documentation, and engineering.  We have had an influx of support inquiries of recent that has resulted in the team needing to prioritize which Community conversations they are able to respond to.  We are making some adjustments to address this where possible, but there will continue to be some ebb and flow.  Let me know if it would be helpful to discuss on the phone in more detail.  Thank you, Dave

Dave,

Thanks for your response.

This community is a major part of what has made Skuid what it is today. For me, and for many others, the community has consistently saved us valuable time and made the experience of app building in Skuid more fun than frustrating. In the last few months, the fun and frustration balance has reversed for me.

I understand that Skuid has grown considerably since I first joined this community in 2014. Skuid is certainly a better product in many ways in 2018 than it was 4 years ago. But In some ways (particularly the release process and community support) the Skuid experience has gotten worse.

An experience like this leaves me longing for days not so long ago when a simple question would get a quick and knowledgeable answer from Rob or Ben or J. or Zach within a few hours.

Should it be my expectation moving forward that I will need to wait a month or more to have any new problem engaged by someone at Skuid (not to mention solved)? Setting reasonable expectations will allow me to temper my natural frustration.

I would be happy to have a conversation about this on the phone (585-232-3894 x307), but I think the community also deserves a public answer.

Thanks!

Matt

Thanks Matt.  I will try to connect with you on Monday, between 10 a.m. to noon pacific if that works with your schedule, and then will provide further details on this thread.  

That works for me. Thanks.

I want to echo Matt’s comments as perfectly aligning my thoughts over the past 4 years, and the more recent shift.

The community is great for generating ideas, solving problems and learning about Skuid.  I understand that those types of questions may take some time to get a response.

But we’re also using the community to report issues within the releases, and those are the frustrating ones when they sit unresolved.  I don’t think I should have to pay for a premium support plan to report bugs in the product.  And has been mentioned several times in the past, we need some transparency on existing issues in releases, so we know eyes open what we are installing before we do it, and can assess the risk it may have on our existing work.

As long as the community is the method to report issues in the product, then the support should align to respond quickly.

Yup. Known issues with work arounds and notifications of fix.

Thank you for the additional feedback.  I’m sorry that we have created a frustrating experience in the community lately.  For clarity, product defects that are reported in the community are logged with our engineering team.  They prioritize and schedule fixes, then the support team provides updates in the community when the fixes have been released.  I agree that more transparency around known issues in releases would be very helpful. We have had some early discussions around creating a known issues board, that would provide visibility into defects that are being worked on, along with potential work arounds.  Would that help address the concerns you have raised?

Would these known issues list which versions they affect. Could we filter known issues by version? Could subscribe to known issues or versions to get notifications?

A known issues board would definitely be a value add. And Pat’s right on about filtering and subscribing.

A features roadmap might also be helpful. I was just looking at a product yesterday where they publicly communicated a list of features that were upcoming in the next release, some that were definitely coming at some point (with no indication when), and some that were under consideration.