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Marketing

I really, really don't share the decision of putting 1.1 live, if it is so damn broken - the bug reports section is literally on fire and Be Social is terribly broken as well.
I don't want to sound like an @$$, but why did you put it on if you had so much to iron out yet? Potential users may come to the site and see bugged stuff all over the place. what would you do? Personally, I'd leave the site, if that was the case, the ugly borders on top would already chop off my "like" feeling - first thing someone sees is *design*, then you try out features and they're broken as well (random one - the cannot delete attachments thingy).
Don't take it as a personal attack, it really isn't (would have worded a lot differently otherwise), but to me it's really, really, a very poor marketing choice.

Polish your product and use test boards to test it, not the live site that should be your "mascotte" thingy.
~ SimplePortal Support Team ~

 

Re: Marketing

Reply #1

You are free not to share decisions, I don't care. :P
It has been off line way too much, it should have been live waaay before, I'd dare to say in September/October at maximum.

This is not a place about marketing, this is a place about development.
Bugs creator.
Features destroyer.
Template killer.

Re: Marketing

Reply #2

Hmm, that's developer mind, and you admitted you are bad at marketing, I honestly see why now ;) No, main site is where you SHOW your product to potential users, not where you DEVELOP it. You can use elkarte.it for that, import the members table and you will have a lot of users helping you out, but really, me (and most likely a lot of other users and guests) do not want to experience loads of bugs while browsing the site, I'd rather take a peek at what you are offering and decide whether it worths to download it or not.
Pretty sure I am not the only one who feels this way, though.
~ SimplePortal Support Team ~

Re: Marketing

Reply #3

And your reasoning is one of the parts of the SMF mentality that made me flee from there. ;)

Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – No, main site is where you SHOW your product to potential users, not where you DEVELOP it.
And to think that we did exactly that for the whole development phase that lead to 1.0... what a bummer! To think we were terribly wrong and should have used a rock solid software like SMF instead...
 emanuele regrets not having a Tardis handy
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – Hmm, that's developer mind, and you admitted you are bad at marketing, I honestly see why now ;) No, main site is where you SHOW your product to potential users, not where you DEVELOP it. You can use ElkArte.it for that, import the members table and you will have a lot of users helping you out, but really,
It's pointless to have a backup site for testing if nobody is going to use it[1].
You develop where you use the product, ideally, we should really always have only something ahead of HEAD here and nothing else.
And if anything is broken it's just a matter of fixing it.

And, to be honest, this is not part of my being bad at marketing, but the part of me wanting to ship something instead of grumbling years on semi-private testing and rolling out broken stuff. <= Do you see a pattern here?

Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – me (and most likely a lot of other users and guests) do not want to experience loads of bugs while browsing the site,
And to think a while ago people were asking "I'm not good at coding, how could I help?".
So browsing the site with bugs is too much to be considered fair help? Bummer, I'll take a look at freelancer.com if my budget allows me to hire some beta testers.

Yes, I'm not in a good mood these days, so for the time being, deal with it.
5 people registered and only a handful of bugs reported in one month in comparison to the 10s reported (and fixed) here in just 4 days, (and I thanks the people that registered at the test site, I'm not saying they didn't do their homework, because there is no homework to do and any help is greatly appreciated!), it simply doesn't work, because you (and I) all have other things to do
Bugs creator.
Features destroyer.
Template killer.

Re: Marketing

Reply #4

Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – Polish your product and use test boards to test it, not the live site that should be your "mascotte" thingy.

I don't know that I agree, honestly. The only software I've seen successfully use a testing board was phpBB back in the pre-3.0 days, and that's because they copied their whole database over from a certain point. So there was lots to play with to see how edge cases fell apart.

I've seen vBulletin, SMF, Flarum and Elkarte use their official sites for development testing once the product got far enough a long. A few days of bugs isn't much of a hardship in return for rooting out a few that wouldn't come up through normal testing routines (but will for random production actions).

Re: Marketing

Reply #5

Hm... I kind of think like Flavio does.  :-[

Re: Marketing

Reply #6

This is why I hate marketing.
LiveGallery - Simple gallery addon for ElkArte

Re: Marketing

Reply #7

I think it's great marketing. Booyah. :P

Re: Marketing

Reply #8

Quote from: emanuele – And your reasoning is one of the parts of the SMF mentality that made me flee from there. ;)
Can I call bs on this one? I've never seen it done anywhere other than here, you may tell me there's always a first time, but I guess it's for good reason people don't do it that much (I know only those instances Eliana mentioned, not aware of any other forum software doing that).
I don't like being called "smf mentality" - if/when I share a thought that was somehow "created" over there, it doesn't mean I am stuck with all of those thoughts nor that I share them and so on.
Quote from: emanuele –
Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – No, main site is where you SHOW your product to potential users, not where you DEVELOP it.
And to think that we did exactly that for the whole development phase that lead to 1.0... what a bummer! To think we were terribly wrong and should have used a rock solid software like SMF instead...
 emanuele regrets not having a Tardis handy
Meh, actually the live site was always one version behind, at least footer-wise. If you don't update the footer because you don't like it (and I know you don't, that's why I'm saying it), that's a totally different story :P
Quote from: emanuele – Spoiler (click to show/hide)
I see, didn't quite like it, tbh. Sounds like "screw it, this is smf-mentality", no, not really, I did not think about smf while posting the topic.
Quote from: emanuele – And, to be honest, this is not part of my being bad at marketing, but the part of me wanting to ship something instead of grumbling years on semi-private testing and rolling out broken stuff. <= Do you see a pattern here?
Oh come on we aren't boy-scouts, the bugs there are in BeSocial and others are utterly impossible not to notice within 5 minutes (actually, first glance). Didn't ask you to keep it private for months, but I wonder if you actually tried to install it somewhere before installing it here?
Quote from: emanuele –
Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – me (and most likely a lot of other users and guests) do not want to experience loads of bugs while browsing the site,
And to think a while ago people were asking "I'm not good at coding, how could I help?".
So browsing the site with bugs is too much to be considered fair help? Bummer, I'll take a look at freelancer.com if my budget allows me to hire some beta testers.
I always do that, but I'd also like not to see step backwards and completely broken things on a live site.
Quote from: emanuele – Yes, I'm not in a good mood these days, so for the time being, deal with it.
Kind of having a not exactly nice day as well, so deal with it you too ;)
Quote from: emanuele – 5 people registered and only a handful of bugs reported in one month in comparison to the 10s reported (and fixed) here in just 4 days, (and I thanks the people that registered at the test site, I'm not saying they didn't do their homework, because there is no homework to do and any help is greatly appreciated!), it simply doesn't work, because you (and I) all have other things to do
Already pre-answered this one.
Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – You can use ElkArte.it for that, import the members table and you will have a lot of users helping you out
Registering on a site is annoying already, having to register twice on the "same" site is more than annoying. There is a workaround, and Eliana mentioned it has been done in the past, so yeah, do it and I'll throw in some topics myself, report posts and stuff like that. Help us to help you as well?
I don't like it either, but without wise marketing stuff goes absolutely nowhere.
Quote from: Eliana Tamerin – I've seen vBulletin, SMF, Flarum and ElkArte use their official sites for development testing once the product got far enough a long.
I'd underline that "got far enough" part. If there are bugs at first glance or within a minute or two of testing, I'd say it's not quite ready? :P
Hope it doesn't sound aggressive, but just blunt, instead.
~ SimplePortal Support Team ~

Re: Marketing

Reply #9

Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – I'd underline that "got far enough" part. If there are bugs at first glance or within a minute or two of testing, I'd say it's not quite ready? :P
Hope it doesn't sound aggressive, but just blunt, instead.

Bugs are part of software. So long as pages load (you're not seeing 503 server errors or gaping holes likes missing stylesheets or big things like that), you can do most functions without issue and the bugs you see are just annoyances rather than showstoppers, I don't think it's really a problem for an in-development software. Dealing with a few bugs on a site for in-development software is par for the course.

To be extra blunt, I don't see a huge swath of people clamoring for support here. So I don't think image is really something to be overly concerned about here.

Re: Marketing

Reply #10

Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) –
Quote from: emanuele – And your reasoning is one of the parts of the SMF mentality that made me flee from there. ;)
Can I call bs on this one?
No, that's not BS, look at it how you want:
1) SMF has always run a development version until "someone" started to think that using development was bad marketing and a security risk (except it is no more unsafe than running a stable version),
2) people complaining over and over, over little things [1] is The SMF Way,
I could go on more, but I guess you get the grasp.

Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – Meh, actually the live site was always one version behind, at least footer-wise. If you don't update the footer because you don't like it (and I know you don't, that's why I'm saying it), that's a totally different story :P
If you arrived when the show was finished, you can hardly say you know what was going on.
You registered on June 2014, just before the release of RC1: http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?board=10.0;sort=first_post <= do you see all the "site update" topics? Each one of them was a dev update while the software was in development.
So, either you believe I'm stupid not knowing the code the site is running, or you think I'm a liar. I know that's not your intention, but that's the message I get.

Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – Oh come on we aren't boy-scouts, the bugs there are in BeSocial and others are utterly impossible not to notice within 5 minutes (actually, first glance). Didn't ask you to keep it private for months, but I wonder if you actually tried to install it somewhere before installing it here?
http://www.elkarte.it/elk1.1/
Do you see any topic mentioning the besocial variant being broken?
So, don't throw at me the BS testing on another site is the way to go.
People (I'm in the first position) are lazy, and will not test unless they are forced to. And I'm the same: testing is boring and takes tons of time to be done properly, I don't want to ask anyone to come to another website and use it da

Either way: https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte/issues/2483 it was a known issue and it is tracked since April the 3rd.

Not really, you just provided your opinion even if the facts demonstrate the opposite.

Quote from: Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis) – Registering on a site is annoying already, having to register twice on the "same" site is more than annoying. There is a workaround, and Eliana mentioned it has been done in the past, so yeah, do it and I'll throw in some topics myself, report posts and stuff like that. Help us to help you as well?
Okay, should I come to your home and type the address in the address bar as well?
You are telling me you are not going to do testing because put in the efforts to register to a forum (that by itself is testing of the registration procedure, one of the most important steps) is way too annoying for you? Honestly is becoming a bit ridiculous.
You may be offended by this, but I'm being offended by your requests. So we are even.

I guess we won't go anywhere, between me defending my position and you defending yours.
So I'll just go and wait for Bleach scans to pop out.
yes, the borders in BeSocial are a little thing, a border:none takes few seconds to add, but since there are more important things to take care (including answer topics) it's on the bottom of the todo list
Bugs creator.
Features destroyer.
Template killer.

Re: Marketing

Reply #11

All I can see is, this site works fine with 1.1 beta 1. So I'd say 'good work' for that to the development team.

Marketing? We need more than this site to make a good marketing for ElkArte.

Re: Marketing

Reply #12

And just so @emanuele is not alone on this (not that he needs any help, he is on a roll) He asked my thoughts before putting 1.1 live on this site and I basically said that's what this site is for, to help us develop.  So I'm all for having 1.1 on line. 

Sure some things are broken, thats all part of development, but at some point the software has to undergo more strenuous testing then can be done in our VM's or developer test sites, it has to go live.  In a couple of weeks I'm betting that the number of forward facing issues  will be minimal.  Thats the same way 1.0 got done, and TBH it was fun to get the bugs found and worked out on a live site.

Re: Marketing

Reply #13

I would like to say some more here, but my english is not good enough...

So I just say, that I like your (or the "ElkArte-Way") of thinking and working very much. There is no reason to hide the further development, if you can be proud of what you have reached already and if you have some self-confidence.

As a user like me it is very interresting to see, how you deal with problems and how you work together as a team.

For example, if I can read about bugs and their extermination, it helps me a lot by understanding and learning a little more about all this "technical stuff", which ist very complicated to me.

The "open atmosphere" in this community (don't know, if this is a correct idiom in english) gives me a warm feeling of welcome and a possibility to  participate, if I want to and if I can.

I always get help here, if I need it and I need a lot of help. ;) I am very thankful for that.

So I think - beside the software itself - they way, the ElkArte-Team ist working in their community with an "open development", is the best marketing at all.
Last Edit: April 21, 2016, 12:30:16 pm by Ruth

Re: Marketing

Reply #14

(ema) I guess we have to disagree somewhen, in 2 years that I've known you online, at least once :P. Locking, as the topic just pi$$es me off, but thanks for the replies.
EDIT: added name to clarify.
Last Edit: April 21, 2016, 04:41:41 pm by Flavio93Zena (#OpIsis)
~ SimplePortal Support Team ~