SmugMug Needs Your Help!
Andy
Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
SmugMug fans, we need your help to make our Heroic Service and the SmugMug community even better! Please click 'Commit!' here and don't forget to click the link in the email they send you after you hit 'Commit!' Thanks!
This isn't going to replace Dgrin, we love the healthy discussions and community here at Dgrin.
But we do have a problem, particularly for new SmugMug customers, with finding good answers to tough questions. Currently, they have to wade through pages of threads, and often pages of posts on a given thread, to find a decent answer to a question. Message forums are great for discussion - but they're not great for providing a definitive answer to a tough question.
StackExchange solves this problem for us - the best answer will always be highest, and there's plenty of discussion around the question and the answer to clarify both. Further, the reputation system allows people to know they're getting a great answer from someone with a history of great answers - whether it be a SmugMug employee, long-time SmugMug customer, or a resident CSS or JavaScript wizard.
But to get StackExchange off the ground, we need to show them that SmugMug (and Dgrin) have a strong, vibrant community that will actually use the service. That's why we need you to go show your commitment to the project so we can be moved into the Beta phase and get this puppy humming.
There are some other great aspects of StackExchange, too, not the least of which is a sister site for Photography: http://photo.stackexchange.com/ We're pretty sure Dgrinners and SmugMuggers will like that, too.
We think Dgrin and StackExchange will work very well together and expect the combination to be incredibly helpful and fun.
Thanks!
This isn't going to replace Dgrin, we love the healthy discussions and community here at Dgrin.
But we do have a problem, particularly for new SmugMug customers, with finding good answers to tough questions. Currently, they have to wade through pages of threads, and often pages of posts on a given thread, to find a decent answer to a question. Message forums are great for discussion - but they're not great for providing a definitive answer to a tough question.
StackExchange solves this problem for us - the best answer will always be highest, and there's plenty of discussion around the question and the answer to clarify both. Further, the reputation system allows people to know they're getting a great answer from someone with a history of great answers - whether it be a SmugMug employee, long-time SmugMug customer, or a resident CSS or JavaScript wizard.
But to get StackExchange off the ground, we need to show them that SmugMug (and Dgrin) have a strong, vibrant community that will actually use the service. That's why we need you to go show your commitment to the project so we can be moved into the Beta phase and get this puppy humming.
There are some other great aspects of StackExchange, too, not the least of which is a sister site for Photography: http://photo.stackexchange.com/ We're pretty sure Dgrinners and SmugMuggers will like that, too.
We think Dgrin and StackExchange will work very well together and expect the combination to be incredibly helpful and fun.
Thanks!
0
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No, rather to complement and enhance things
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I don't think this will work for customizing sites. It takes a series of questions
and answers, piece by piece, to get to the final goal. Rarely have I even seen
a complete answer in one post. One of the worst things a poster does is ask
many questions in their initial post. It's much easier to get to their final goal
one step at a time.
The new site sounds like it would be a FAQ type site which is fine for
answering single items.
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Yep, certainly not a replacement for detailed and varied items like customization.
But a great resource for answering a single question.
One way to help the clutter is to allow users to delete a thread they made that was a mistake and it doesn't add anything to the community. For some odd reason that isn't allowed here.
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We don't allow it but our moderators happily do it anytime, if you just request so, in the 'request to moderators thread' in Dgrin Forum Support
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Here's my other two cents: for the obvious questions that keep getting asked (such as "how do I get rid of the black box around my slideshow?"), and only have one good answer anyhow, simply put it in the FAQs on the Smug site, and keep all the info on the Smug site updated & consolidated much more frequently than it is now (i.e. every single time there is a change-- any change). I just saw this with keyword info-- it's simply not updated on the site, and therefore that's the only reason someone needs to even go off-site to find an answer. That's just silly & time-wasting for everyone. There are already too many places to go for info, so that even us old-timers around here get lost & don't know which spot is best. So I say, please stop inventing other solutions, other places. Just fix up & keep up the first one-- Smug itself!! Keep that info. thorough, sharp, consolidated & updated & we won't need to go elsewhere, or create big long threads here so much!
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
We're working on that. In fact we have a solution for uservoice that's working on the backend, but we've not had time to wrap it up and make it pretty. Once you're logged into SmugMug, hit this url and we'll send you over to uservoice with a login bound to your SmugMug account. I'm sure we'll do something similar for Stack Exchange since they support a couple different forms of single signon as well.
Single Sign On FTW.
I think that's a pretty unfair generalization to make. There are several ideas that have come from uservoice, not to mention a few others that are in flight and I can't talk about. We really DO listen to users, we just have to balance a billion different inputs and our resources.
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
We read and digest the many requests on uservoice every single day. It's hugely important to us. And so is the input we get from Dgrin, Facebook, and our help desk.
Thanks for your passionate post, don't ever hold back, it's really important.
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But oddly enough, at LG we had the same problem--common issues without a quick way for the user to get to them. So we would be getting calls for these issues.
There is (was?) an internal vbulletin-based forum for LG Electronics Alabama, Inc. (LGEAI). I set it up. It was my initial experience with vbulletin. It started out as being a great resource for communication, like dgrin here. But somewhere along the way, the massive amount of data just becomes a massive amount of data. The task of data mining started to fall upon the users, just as it has here on dgrin. And vbulletin's meager search feature has never been the best at helping with finding something particular.
And that's where someone had to step in and organize the data--me. I would copy the relevant threads with the problem/solution posts to a new category with a link to the original discussions if further research was required. It was a bit tedious, but not bad. Plus, the category was searchable so that users could find solutions on their own. A lot of the solutions started to become posts to these new threads. On a regular basis, this wasn't too hard to keep up with because a company doesn't really have that many new issues on a daily basis with their products.
But the downside is that it is yet another system to watch to stay on top of SM. All of these piecemeal solutions shouldn't be apparent to us, the customer. We should just have another tab in our control panel for help tickets we've submitted, a link to FAQs that have forum-like subscriptions, as well as what's new in suggested features, API updates, and whatever else that's out there that notifies us individually.
I get emails from the blogs so I can stay updated, ones from dgrin so I can stay updated, nothing from the status, so I have to come here and then go there, and nothing from uservoice to let me know what the status of FTP uploading is (had to plug it
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You know, after thinking about this some more, I realize it's not just the hassle & problem of logging into several sites and/or having to follow threads and help sections on several different sites that bugs me, even though that does bug me a lot. The other big issue, and where you really lose people is the whole hurdle of learning another site's functioning details. I absolutely HATE that part & resist it like the dickens. I'm simply not cut out to be website-savvy like some people. I mean, I miss stuff all over the place. Here's an example: Here on DGrin I never could keep track of different threads I'd read or commented in, and therefore often missed answers to my questions, etc. I finally after being here a couple yrs. or so, found the handy little "you" button. Maybe something like that seems intuitive to some of you who are on different sites hours a day. But there's still plenty of stuff I haven't noticed on these huge forums, and parts of it I've not learned how to use or whatever. And yet, even with all that, I can still say confidently that I'm much more tuned into all the stuff I can learn here about SmugMug than a lot of Smuggers. I know that gazillions of them haven't even discovered DGrin yet or have a clue how much they can learn here.
I don't think you Smug gurus realize how long it takes a lot of SMuggers to even find DGrin. I've never understood whether DGrin is purposely buried deep within SmugMug or what... if so, I don't see why. If not, I don't see why! Even if I'm on my own homepage, I've gotta click on my Control Panel first, then "Contact". Then if I've noticed the scroll bar, I scroll down to DGrin & click that. Then click again on Digital Grin. Now, after 5 steps I'm finally on DGrin!!! Yikes! If you actually want people to find it, that's ridiculous-- and I've said this for yrs. Yes, I finally have it bookmarked now (once I finally found out what bookmarking was & how to do it). But why, as owner of a Smug site, should it really take people all those steps to find this, your major help forums? So the thought of your adding yet another external site where we've gotta go to get the basic stuff, even if it's not as deeply buried as DGrin, just seems like nonsense to me.
I just don't think we need another site to decipher, more etiquette & workings to figure out, more layers to go through, another site to check on a daily/weekly basis, more people trailing off in frustration & disinterest, & more confused people. It would be better to just have a person who does something like what Samir describes, right here, and/or have some spot here for the very basics, & make the "You" button much clearer (as far as what it is!) & have an obvious DGrin button on all of our pages when logged in. For the basics section, you could keep it pared down by having someone move irrelevant threads or un-helpful answers to another spot.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
I think you missed the part about how we're gonna try and make all this easier, Anna Lisa, not harder
Change is never easy but we hope you know we do this sort of stuff with the idea that we can improve things.
All the best,
Andy
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Hi Shawn, what's not working right for you? Here to help, if you can give specifics, thanks.
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Shawn - please write our Support Heroes with these same details so that a dedicated Support hero can help you. We're standing by. This is not the normal case with the uploader and I'm sure we can sort you out, thanks!
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we are actively working on more improvements to sitemaps.
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Shawn, please write our Support Heroes with the details so we can assist.
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Shawn, got nothing new from you at the help desk
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I've got FF on a usb drive setup like this. It will always work no matter which one of my systems I connect it to.
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Actually I think this needs to be added to USERVOICE just like if we (the Clients) want to suggest a new.......then let the voting decide.........
... while typing a cogent response to this thread, I turn off my internet access and periodically make text-clippings of the text that I am composing since a frequent frustration occurs when I hit a key that performs a function other than what is expected, and I lose all of my composition.
I hit the 'tab'-key, and suddenly it seemed as though I had hit some sort of transmit-key (like 'enter' does outside of text-composition), and I was left with a message indicating that I was not connected to the internet, and, not having yet hit "Preview Post", I lost all of my text (I'm glad that I clipped it).
At a basic-level, there is nothing obvious that indicates non-standard (as in offline typing) functions for certain keys, as in: the 'tab'-key does a 'transmit'; either something else must be done to effect a tab, or it's not allowed in a composition window, or going offline changes the behavior of the composition window, or it might be browser-specific(?) ...
... and this behavior varies from blog to blog ...
As a former self-employed computer technical architect, I know that it is often the little things that get overlooked
(due to the overhead of spending time (like this) writing about them) that setup a client to become really frustrated when a site-specific barrier is encountered.
I hit "Preview Post", and OpenDNS, upon response-timeout, informed me: "You tried to visit www.dgrin.com, which is not loading". I feared that I had lost the post (again), but back-paging 2-pages and re-transmitting brought it back.
... and even though I've used the lower-right-corner of this window to expand it to display all of my text without scrolling, when I preview-post, it doesn't save this setting, and I must re-expand this window every time ...
... 'little' things, like no help-button for this blog-text-composition-window. "Help" should be blatantly available so one does not need to spend time searching for it. Better to be excessive than force the client to search for an answer, which easily leads the client to forgetting what was trying to be accomplished in the first place.
... original reply soon ...