Disappointed by lack of support on forums - Sitefinity - General Discussions

All Replies

Posted by Community Admin on 29-Aug-2012 00:00

Hi,

Sitefinity support used to be so great at responding to new posts but in the last couple of years it seems like it has been dropping off drastically. I have 2 recent forum posts (one is 5 weeks old) and neither have had a single peep from SF.

http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity/developing-with-sitefinity/password-protect-site.aspx
http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity/general-discussions/forum-permissions-bug.aspx

I'm wondering what is going on and why support has decreased so heavily. Has anyone else experienced this?

Ben

Posted by Community Admin on 30-Aug-2012 00:00

I've noticed this as well and I've been considering submitting support tickets rather than posthing on the forums. It's a shame and certainly not in Telerik's best interest if we all start doing that but at least we'll get responses and maybe they'll get the message.

--Steve

Posted by Community Admin on 30-Aug-2012 00:00

I noticed this as well.

The reason I use the forum is

a) more then Telerik can help
b) if someone runs into the same trouble he/she finds a solution here (support is closed)
c) quicker to report bugs. less fields to fill.

However. From a forum standpoint I don't expect Telerik to give support or feedback here. That's why we can open support tickets.

The problem is that at the moment there are still some problems that are not only releated to one person/setup but releated to sitefintiy in the whole.

Alos to me support is not ment to tell me how to solve something I don't know how to do. For this kind of stuff I relay on the forum and personal contact to holland ;-)

But yes. Telerik is noticely less active in forums. And I would wish that in bugs they would pick up faster and respond PITS and solutins quicker.

Other then this there is a bunch off very nice capable programmers that allways helped me in the forum.

Thanks from Switzerland
Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 30-Aug-2012 00:00

@Markus

Yes, so long as there is a formal support option, then I think that the forums being primarily a peer-peer support mechanism is acceptable, particularly if you are find or get a solution quickly, or if it's a low-priority issue.

However, there is obviously a wealth of information available that currently requires opening a support ticket to access, and then waiting the mandatory period for a response - which for most is 48hrs to first reply. It must get tedious answering the same questions over and over.

I've said it before, that Telerik are wasting a valuable resource by not turning their support ticket solutions into generalised KB articles - currently there are only 30 KB's for V5.

Posted by Community Admin on 30-Aug-2012 00:00

Hi Marcus,

Believe me, I'd prefer to use the forums as well for the same reasons you listed. Not to mention that SF has a very helpful user community and I'm personally very grateful for that. But there are occasions when the user community can't provide an answer and it's frustrating to wait endlessly. Particularly when you consider most people post when they're having an issue that affects either development or impacts the live site.

--Steve

Posted by Community Admin on 30-Aug-2012 00:00

@SteveV
If you need an answer quickly, open a support ticket immediately.

@MB
If I had to answer the same questions over and over again I would not make a KB article. I would fix the product. My father used to say products must be primate safe. I say if I can work with a product then you are pretty much safe :-)

To me KB articles are for stuff on how to extend something that goes beyond the core CMS and not workarounds how to fix something that is not working as one would expect.

Like a kb article on how to fix page sorting but. I want a solution. A typical KB article for me would be how to set up SF on Azure for example.

This said. One thing in the past that has always impressed me was Teleriks support. They so often went way out of what I could expect and showed a primate like me how to peal a banana. And very often the provided me with were to buy bananas, what bananas to by and a link to more information on bananas. (switching from cars to apes and fruits)

Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 30-Aug-2012 00:00

@Markus

I understand what you are saying, and perhaps I should have referred to them as "How-To" articles, rather than "KB" articles... although I find that much of a muchness.

As a sample-size of one... I know that the overwhelming majority of my own support tickets end up falling into the "How-To" category, and all too often the solution falls into the "Doh!" category.

It's rare that I discover a problem with the product itself, and more typical that I just can't work out out to use it, and can't find the solution in any of the Documentation, KBs, Blogs or Forums resources - searching all of which is made more difficult by the existing search and filter issues.

Support usually comes back with the correct answer that includes code snippets etc, which suggests to me that they have encountered the same question at least once before.

The problem with forums is that it is so damned difficult to find what you are looking for. This is not so much the fault of the forum itself, but that people often don't know what to ask, or have differing ways to refer to things, and so even if the solution is there, and even if the search/filter options worked properly, finding what "YOU" are looking for is often too frustrating.

More documentation would go some way towards alleviating this, but real-world experience with problems and solutions, turned into generic "How-To" articles, that are correctly indexed and categorized for easy search, could certainly help eliminate many of my own tickets.

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Sep-2012 00:00

Wow, i agree with the original poster.
The response time is terrible.
If it was not for Marcus i would have not received any response at all for all my queries. (thanks Mate)

Granted sitefinity has no responsibility to answer forum posts, however it would definitely make a big difference in the product. I just purchased a licence for a client about two weeks ago, and now i am panicked that i made a huge mistake, since i seam to have to rewrite everything myself. I just hope the client wont' complain about the fact that they first have to pay for the licence and then for a lot of dev cost. When watching the videos everything seams to be so easy. But then i can't find any documentation on how that is actually done.

Oh, and I don't get any response for my tickets either, so not like that is a great choice.

UPDATE

Just checked, it's actually 48 hours for support tickets response time. Wow that is slow. Well hopefully i will get an answer for some of those queries.

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Sep-2012 00:00

Dear Andrew

Let me reassure you you bought the right product.

Again if something is time critical open a ticket. Also not that September 6th is Unificatin DAy in Bulgaria. So The Telerik Headquarters office in Bulgaria will be working with limited capacity on September 6th and September 7th.

The response time is most of the time way faster then the max time the describe and when you get an answer from support it is usually way more then you expect.

Also note that Sitefinity uses RadControls. Since I have licences for them as well I sometimes ask questions related to a PanelBar for example right there.

Also most of the time I use google to search and not the forum search here.

Markus

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Sep-2012 00:00

@Markus
"September 6th is Unificatin DAy in Bulgaria"

Those crazy Bulgarians seem to have a public holiday for everything.

This thread is closed