SmugMug, you need to talk to us!
beardedgit
Registered Users Posts: 854 Major grins
When you change stuff, you need to tell us. Elsewhere if you like, but definitely here on this support forum. And promptly.
Recent changes are causing issues. Some folk will have found some of them and may or may not have found ways to address them, but other folk may be blissfully unaware that their sites may now be looking "ugly". That's not good, especially for the pros whose shop-windows may be adversely affected.
Examples? Try http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=241865 and http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=241837
Be fair with us. We're finding the bugs and troubleshooting them for you, so we're doing you a favour.
Why don't you show us the same courtesy?
Keep us informed of what you've changed, in detail rather than in layman's terms, and we can look for any unforeseen side-effects of your changes and advise you accordingly. Keeping us in the dark will lead to resentment.
Recent changes are causing issues. Some folk will have found some of them and may or may not have found ways to address them, but other folk may be blissfully unaware that their sites may now be looking "ugly". That's not good, especially for the pros whose shop-windows may be adversely affected.
Examples? Try http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=241865 and http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=241837
Be fair with us. We're finding the bugs and troubleshooting them for you, so we're doing you a favour.
Why don't you show us the same courtesy?
Keep us informed of what you've changed, in detail rather than in layman's terms, and we can look for any unforeseen side-effects of your changes and advise you accordingly. Keeping us in the dark will lead to resentment.
Yippee ki-yay, footer-muckers!
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We also have our news blog where we post our release notes for new features, changes and bug fixes.
SmugMug Support Hero
The News Blog is way out of date, there have been many changes since the latest Release Notes entry there (September 23, 2013). Besides, it's all in layman's terms. Some more meat on the bones would be better. Tell us what and where the code-changes are.
I'm grateful for your prompt reply, but none of what you suggest addresses in any way the matters in my OP. If SM (and it doesn't have to be Michael) would tell us ASAP what is in a code-push we can be alert to the effects, if we find out by trial-and-error it's not so good. But then again, SM seems to favour the trial-and-error approach to many things these days.
in my gallery descriptions to start new lines. Then one day there were double spaces where the
tags were, so SM had apparently started recognizing "enter" as a line break. Cool. So I went through my 100+ galleries and edited every... single... description to fix it. A week or so ago, I noticed all my gallery descriptions were run together again. So now, when I have time, I have to go back and add the
tags again, to hundreds of galleries. This is why products are generally refiined *before* release.
You guys really are just doing things carelessly with no regard for the effect. Don't even get me started on this case sensitive URLs, which is easily the most short-sighted and blind design decision I've ever seen. It didn't affect me, thank God, but it's amazing anyone could have thought that was a good idea, especially for the silly reason it was done.
You have such a good product going here, but a lot of the decisions, and the haphazard changes, are making SM look bad. It really isn't a very hard problem to fix. As the OP says, communication is all it takes. If you're going to make a change that might break sites, then give a couple of days warning or something.
Bearded,
We make alot of changes. No, I personally cannot keep up with them all. As much as you and I wish I could be on Dgrin 24 hours a day it is simply not possible. If you find an issue and want quick eyes on it, please email help@Smugmug.com.
If I am offline on the weekend (like yesterday) I simply can't keep updating on every code push. I apologize, I wish I could, but I simply cannot. Please, if you see an issue, email help@smugmug.com first, and post to dgrin second.
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I remember, when the whole Javascript thing was being talked about, one of the major reasons SM gave was that if they continued allowing JS customizations, then they could never update anything without breaking someone's site or making it look ugly. Well, now you are doing that anyway, except you are harming people's sites that have done nothing other than use the supported tools to design their site.
If something comes up where it needs to be changed, fine. But if the change is going to make some/everyone's site look bad, whether it's suddenly huge text, broken menus, changing description formatting... you need to give warning so people can fix things first. My own site isn't hugely affected by this, since it's basically just for looking at pictures. However, if I was a working pro, I would be livid when a site that looked great yesterday suddenly is looking terrible, and I haven't made a single change. I still have to go back and fix all my gallery descriptions (after already doing it twice now), and I'm really not happy about that.
Think before you change things, make sure it's not going to break stuff, and if it is, give us time to fix it first.
Michael, FFS chill out! Nobody's expecting you to be here anything like 24 hrs a day, we're not expecting miracles, we're not expecting you to pull rabbits from hats.
I've already said that it doesn't have to be you that keeps us informed (see post #3). I'd have thought that anybody with the technical capacity to perform a code-push would find no difficulty whatsoever in posting an advisory note on this forum. They've done the hard work, all we want is a bit of easy communication from them.
Don't take it so personally, it's not pointed at you, it's pointed at SM (hence the thread title).
Anyway, I thought that your dawg was your deputy when you're otherwise engaged
Michael . . you're not the problem . . you're part of the solution !
SM has a communications problem that is NOT you. This thread focuses on slipstreamed changes that are not documented to the user community . . this is a serious problem and is bad enough. But unfortunately, there is more, and it is highlighted by your suggestion to email first. My own experience, and that of others from what I've seen here, is that the Heroes, for whatever reason, are not always current (and are in fact often weeks behind) in keeping up on documented bugs, and I'm personally not confident that they are any better with new issues, even those created iatrogenically by SM itself. Hero Management is aware of the problem, and indicates that they are trying to fix it . . . but isn't it part of the bigger issue highlighted by the OP?
It sometimes seems like the development, and the addressing (or non-addressing) of bugs is taking place in a vacuum, and that keeping users advised is very, very, low priority. The traditional SM philosophy (we don't tell you what we're working on until its rolled out) does not work in the present context, which is, as I see it, the entire customer base being forced to use beta code.
So . . thanks for all of your own good work . . and we need more of it, institutionally, in every segment of information flow to and from users.
Mitch
Which would allow SmugMug to operate more efficiently and effectively (and happily), taking literally a minute to communicate upfront with your customers about changes that affect them, or taking time to respond to hundreds of angry e-mails and forum posts from your customers?
Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees...
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Michael . . Perhaps I'm naive, but I don't understand.
In my opinion, dgrin is operating great ! I don't see it as the place for instant official smugmug response; that's supposed to be the email inbox. That's been working so unevenly that I've come to rely more on dgrin. After a rock-bottom Hero experience recently, if there hadn't been a dgrin, I might well have thrown in the smugmug towel.
If dgrin is now supposed to be the location for all problems to be reported and fixed (rather than the email), then it needs far more Hero coverage.
If, on the other hand, the measure of dgrin's sucess is the absence of criticism and/or complaints about smugmug, then it becomes far less useful to the community, not to mention a pretty weird political statement. I hope that this is not the case.
Thanks again for your work.