Gday Mario,
This plugin is a passion of mine and a side project to my full time job. So balancing support response and development is becoming harder as the plugin becomes more popular.
I get many new emails, forum posts and issues each day and find that if I focus on support 100% of the time I will never be able to find the time to develop the features and fix the issues that people want.
Here are the reasons I do not answer some posts:
1. If the issue relates to something that can be easily Googled for or read in the FAQ, I will leave it for a couple of days to see if the community or the persion or raised it can answer it themselves. If not, I will post an answer.
2. If the new topic is an issue that I am currently working on or have fixed in a future release I usually leave it until I can confidently say its done and update it after release.
3. If I honestly dont have an answer yet I will leave it until I do.
So, in short, I check this forum, my emails and GitHub pretty much every day and read every single support request made. Most of which I am silently acting on.
Also, I apologise to anyone I have forgotten to respond to. 🙂
Cheers,
Mikey
Oh and you words have motivated me to get into action and post some updates!! 🙂
Hi Michael,
yes I know, but the thing here is that being one man orchestra is not always easy and definitely not the best way to attend everything correctly and the problem with this concept is that at the end of the day no one is really happy.
If you don’t want to charge for your plugin and only for the extras which are not, let’s say “strictly needed” to run the plugin, maybe you should think about a more productive way to give support (on you own) and show your product as a really trusting one. Think that most users do not know that you just “let it go” some, for you, obvious questions, for users which come here for the first time and face this way of passive support which you do know and they don’t 🙂
Maybe you should think about implementing a kind of helpdesk which generates a knowledge base as you go, features prewritten answers, work from mobile phone and so on. A good contender could be a service like tenderapp.com which features a forum, helpdesk and knowledge base which can be run mostly on email as well, it is free for open source projects (and just $9 month for single users) and there is also an app for iphone, and works together with lighthouseapp which is a developer oriented helpdesk (I do not work for this guys).
Another thing would be to set a sticky post at the beginning of this forum explaining your “modus operandi” for new comers (like me) about the way you give support here and another announcing the latest version.
Thanks for taking my comments into account.
My 2¢
Cheers
Mario
