Can we have better notificatioins of site changes? Please?

NWMtnGuy

Hi SmugTeam,

You guys are great. I love SmugMug and appreciate the hard work and passion you guys put into the site. Your support is second to none and I recommend you all the time.

However...

I really wish you could be more proactive about notifying users of changes that will affect their sites. The approach seems to be that users will find out about changes by checking Dgrin or one of your blogs, but this is a hit or miss approach at best. My own participation on Dgrin varies a lot depending on how much time I have available. Sometimes I catch threads about site changes, sometimes I don't.

I know it's not as trivial as a lot of people think to send out large batches of email, especially when the subject of the message is sometimes a moving target. But it would be REALLY HELPFUL to just get an email a few days before changes occur so that I know something is about to happen instead of having someone send me an email that says "I visited your site and xxxxxxx isn't working right..."

Keep up the good work, but please be a bit more proactive on communicating changes to us.

Dale

Andy

What change affected you, curious?

AnneMcBean

NWMtnGuy wrote:

Hi SmugTeam,

You guys are great. I love SmugMug and appreciate the hard work and passion you guys put into the site. Your support is second to none and I recommend you all the time.

However...

I really wish you could be more proactive about notifying users of changes that will affect their sites. The approach seems to be that users will find out about changes by checking Dgrin or one of your blogs, but this is a hit or miss approach at best. My own participation on Dgrin varies a lot depending on how much time I have available. Sometimes I catch threads about site changes, sometimes I don't.

I know it's not as trivial as a lot of people think to send out large batches of email, especially when the subject of the message is sometimes a moving target. But it would be REALLY HELPFUL to just get an email a few days before changes occur so that I know something is about to happen instead of having someone send me an email that says "I visited your site and xxxxxxx isn't working right..."

Keep up the good work, but please be a bit more proactive on communicating changes to us.

Dale

Hi Dale,

Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry the recent changes caught you off-guard. We try to be as transparent as possible with our subscribers, but we're far from perfect regarding advance notification.

Just so we're on the same page, I'll give an overview of the three ways (as I see it) that we notify about changes:

1) Release notes blog.

Every bug fix, feature enhancement, nitty gritty detail is ideally included. These are published AFTER a release and typically within 24 hours. You can add the blog to your feed reader very easily so you don't have to keep checking.

http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes

2) SmugNews.

This is a box on your SmugMug homepage and it's easy to subscribe via email as well. This is updated less frequently, and only for big releases. New products, video, smugvault, etc. Updates usually coincide with the release.

3) Digital Grin.

This is the place where we pre-announce and gather feedback for upcoming changes that we feel will most affect our subscribers. Lots of SmugMuggers typically jump in and offer opinions and these discussions almost always change the way we design new features.

The downside, as you pointed out, is that not everyone hangs out on Dgrin. We absolutely know that, but it's a tough balance for us because we feel like the vast majority of our subscribers won't care to know in advance whenever we change a button. Some do, however, and our strategy right now is to hope that those who are that passionate about SmugMug do check in on Dgrin to weigh in on upcoming changes.

At this point, I'm not sure what a better way would be.

-Anne
Support Hero

Andy

Dale, your site was affected only b/c you had a stray ; in your javascript, dunno why it worked fine before

I fixed it and all is well for you now, holler if otherwise!

jfriend

AnneMcBean wrote:

At this point, I'm not sure what a better way would be.

An opt-in email list for announcing upcoming site changes is what everyone is asking for. This would be an email that would have gone out on Tue or Wed and would have said something like this:

If everything goes according to plan (sometimes these things get delayed), we are anticipating some site changes on Thursday evening or Friday morning that could affect some forms of customization. Here are some of the things to look for:

• The Buy buttons will be changing functionality as described in this dgrin thread.
• If you have custom styled your buy buttons, they will now be YUI buttons and are styled completely differently than the older buttons.
• Other buttons in the interface like Share and Slideshow are changing over to YUI buttons too.
• If you are hiding buttons for your viewers, but showing them when you are logged in (like some folks do with the Share button), you will need to change your CSS to do that without messing up the formatting.
• If you have done any customization on the breadcrumb, you need to make sure that your CSS refers to breadCrumbTrail (an inner object), not breadCrumb (the outer object) because the layout is changing a bit.
• If your site somehow relies on buy buttons at both the top and bottom of your main image, the new design will only have it available on the top.
• You will now see Buy options for cards and books in the new Buy drop-down, but these are only visible for the logged in user so your viewers won't see them.
• If you have made a custom theme and styled the buttons to match, you will have to modify that styling for the new button format.
• If you have inserted any of your own buttons to match the look of the older buttons, you may want to modify them to match the newer design.

Andy

jfriend wrote:

[*]If you are hiding buttons for your viewers, but showing them when you are logged in (like some folks do with the Share button), you will need to change your CSS to do that without messing up the formatting.

this one's a bug and will be fixed as soon as {JT} comes back from his daughter's bday celebration. The rest - good stuff and we'll see what might be able to be done. I fired off a discussion email, internally.

OffTopic

I've got to add my vote to the idea of an opt-in list or some other solution, since I did spend a lot of time on the forum the past week and still missed seeing the thread about the changes until jfriend pointed it out to me.

I think a big factor in that is that, unless you are one of the knowledgeable people who kindly help out the rest of us, the only time the majority of us peruse the customization threads are when we need some help or want to figure out how to do something. Every once in a while I may check through there to see if there are any new ideas that catch my eye, but it is not a place I check on a regular basis since I am not able to provide any help.

It wouldn't be as much of a problem if it were posted here somewhere in a way that we wouldn't miss it. Maybe a new section just for this type of change/upgrade where it wouldn't get lost in the clutter (not that the other customization threads are clutter...you know what I'm saying).

Then it would be great if it would flash red whenever a new announcement is made!

NWMtnGuy

Andy wrote:

What change affected you, curious?

Hi Andy,

It's not what affected me this time in particular, it's just the general frustration that I often don't find out about site changes until after they happen, and sometimes they break something. If I don't go to my own site for a few days I don't even know it's broken until somebody tells me. At least if I know in advance that something is about to be changed I at least know to check right away after the update to make sure everything works.

By the way, thanks for finding the stray code that caught my buttons to not work!

Dale

Andy

NWMtnGuy wrote:

Hi Andy,

It's not what affected me this time in particular, it's just the general frustration that I often don't find out about site changes until after they happen, and sometimes they break something. If I don't go to my own site for a few days I don't even know it's broken until somebody tells me. At least if I know in advance that something is about to be changed I at least know to check right away after the update to make sure everything works.

By the way, thanks for finding the stray code that caught my buttons to not work!

Dale

Are you subscribing to our release notes?
http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes

Cameron

Andy wrote:

Are you subscribing to our release notes?
http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes

Subscribing to release notes won't give people a heads-up any more than the other methods do currently - it's annoying to have to react to a change rather than being able to plan for it. If you're talking about subscribing via RSS, I'd imagine a huge number of your customers don't subscribe to any RSS feeds - people rely on email for notification and someone who doesn't use RSS feeds already won't be likely to check them daily just for smugmug notifications.

I agree that an opt-in email notification would be ideal. It does seem to be the norm amongst online services. I get frequent email from all sorts of other online services that I find quite helpful: my bank notifies me when my statement is available, I get email notification when new releases are available for lots of software I use, my webhost notifies me in advance if any maintenance is to be performed on a server that may affect me, etc..

The fact is, every time there is a major (or even minor) change in smugmug, we see various threads with people who are bothered that they didn't get notification. I agree, it would be ideal if people subscribed to the blog, but I'd bet that only a fraction of your users do. If you go about trying to solve the problem by trying to change the behavior of all of your users, you'll keep hitting your head against a wall. Why not give users what they're asking for? You won't have to read as many threads like this one and have more time to play with your new 50D.

Andy

CSwinton wrote:

Subscribing to release notes won't give people a heads-up any more than the other methods do currently -

Yes, I'm aware. I like to remind folks that it's important to subscribe, anyhow.

You can read above how I've circulated this thread around the company. Thanks

Andy

CSwinton wrote:

The fact is, every time there is a major (or even minor) change in smugmug, we see various threads with people who are bothered that they didn't get notification.

Our goal with most releases is no affect - in this case, it's a tiny tiny few # of people, we're pretty certain!

Still, optin would be good! I'm seeing what can be done.

hyachts

Andy wrote:

Our goal with most releases is no affect - in this case, it's a tiny tiny few # of people, we're pretty certain!

Still, optin would be good! I'm seeing what can be done.

Since you already use SmugNews for big releases, why not use it for any site change that will be apparent to customers, visitors or users? Is the fear that giving too much information will drive a lot of unnecessary support requests? I think something like

We're making a few changes to the user interface this week. See this (thread on dgrin/page on smugmug.com/etc) for more information. If you haven't customized your (site/buttons/Java/etc), no need to worry, you won't need to take any action

Seems like that would give people the visibility they're looking for, no?