With the upcoming release of Tasks 2.0 and a steady stream of people buying Tasks Pro™, I’m trying to decide how best to handle beta, support and feature discussions.
The options I’m currently looking at:
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Yahoo Groups
Pros: I already have these in place with people signed up and using them. The e-mail notifications are nice as is the ability for people to subscribe to ‘special notices only’ and just get release announcements. Searchable archives are better than nothing.
Cons: You have to have a Yahoo account to sign up, the archives are not categorized by ‘bugs’, ‘feature requests’, etc.
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Forums (I’m looking at PunBB right now)
Pros: Many people are familiar and comfortable with them. The discussions become a public knowledge base and are gategorized and searchable. The ability to run polls with associated discussion is pretty nice.
Cons: Even with e-mail notifications, people have to go to the forums, the discussions don’t come to them.
If I decided to go with the forums, should I have one big forum with high level categories for each product? Or should I have separate forums? At this point it would be one on taskspro.com and one on alexking.org.
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Discussion Mailing Lists
Pros: Great for beta discussion with an active groups. The conversation comes to the participants.
Cons: Even with public archives, these suffer from the same problems as the Yahoo Groups. Doesn’t work that well for support.
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Announcement Mailing Lists
I plan to create a mailing list for product release announcements for each product. These are really handy, I just need to set them up.
So what do you guys think? Are there some points I’ve missed that I should be thinking about? Are there other options that I’ve overlooked?
This post is part of the project: Tasks Pro™. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
Forums, even though I prefer mailing lists. You get the searchability, and more people will probably use them. My preference for mailing lists is probably because I handle more mail than most people.
And why not phpBB?
The advantage of yahoo groups is that it is free, and they do a reasonable job of search.
The disadvantage is all the ads, the clutter you have to wade through. The various php BB’s are much faster to search for an answer on.
I think that it is a scale question. As your products get more popular, as think they will, there will be a lot more posts daily, and fewer people who want to get the posts every day by email — at that point I think moving over to a BB solution (make sure you find one with really good, really fast search) makes sense. Then you can save email for announce only type stuff – new releases, etc.
My 2 cents, hope it is helpful.
I’ll probably check out phpBB too, but PunBB seems a lot lighter and faster.
I’d agree with Scott on forums. Conceptually I like mailing lists better, but I do a much better job of keeping up with the forums I read than staying active on my mailing lists.
Forums
i like online searchable discussions.
simple to keep organized.
archives are simple to follow.
For Beta discussions I think mailing lists are better, for support you can’t beat searchable forums. PhpBB is quite full-on – I quite like the one on the WordPress site, miniBB though I ‘ve never installed it anywhere.
If you go for mailing lists, I would avoid Yahoo groups and just use a simple list server though.
If I go with mailing lists for betas (I’ll probably add announcement lists regardless) should I require people to sign up for the list to participate in the beta?
I have an internal beta announcement list but I make the betas available to all customers so some of them have started using them on their own and don’t get announcments I send out. I think forums would be handy for them. Also, I think reading through forums is easier than reading through message archives for new people that join the betas.
That said, I really like Brent’s NetNewsWire beta mailing list though, I think it works well.
I am a part of the yahoo group. I dont post to it as it is more of a pain to use than say a forum. I am in favor of you setting up a forum that has the ability to feed RSS for the posts like the WP forums do. This could eliminate the issue of the users having to come to the forums for discussion. Just my two cents.
Hi!
What about Mailgust?
It’s not perfect (and I’m not sure whether it produces valid XHTML), but it combines a BB with a mailing lists…
Alex:
I’m a large fan of fora, and I run a rather large phpBB install. Unless a community develops around Tasks, it’s not going to be an issue for you to run something like phpBB. Fora also allow interested power users to step up and help you do lots of tech support. People need to be needed!
Forum all the way. It’s much easier to use. Some forum programs will include the messages in the notification e-mails as well.
You don’t need a Yahoo account to use Yahoo Groups. Just send and email to the correct sign-on address and your good. Just an FYI.
I agree with the previous votes for forums.. mailing lists are kind of a pain and I get too much mail as is… Forums allow people to participate when they want to..
Alex: To answer one of your secondary questions, I would prefer having one forum for all of your software, with sub-categories for tasks, tasks pro, etc. It would be useful, for instance, to see what the tasks pro people are doing with tasks pro even though I am using tasks. it would likely generate some upgrading or cross-selling for you, too.
i’d have to vote for a phpBB solution as well. not only can people serve themselves (which i am always for), nor would we get tons of email, but you’d get an ever growing knowledgebase archive of problems and solutions that new users could _hopefully_ search prior to asking you about… not to mention a BB solution could allow duly appointed users (if you choose that route) to take on some of adminitrative duties so that you could spend more time working on your killer apps 🙂
Force people into using RSS 🙂
mb
Well, I’ll argue for Web fora for another reason: you want an accessible solution for your users. Tasks is Web-based—it makes sense then that the support function should be Web-based.
While I love email and I love RSS, I have tools that manage those formats well. Most folks don’t. The common tool that people will have to manage content is the Web browswer.
Forums for support with categories etc. Agree that combining 1.x, 2.0 and pro support would be nicer.
Mailing list for announcements would be good – say i find no problems and therfore never need to go to the forum :), how do i know a new version is out…
Fora or Mailing Lists?
Alex asks a good question: should Internet-based software technical support and features discussion be offered via Web-based fora or mailing lists?
My answers to him were:
First:
I’m a large fan of fora, and I run a rather large phpBB install. Unless a community develop…
I definitely like the board option as well. I like being able to self-serve, search and subscribe as you can with phpBB. I like the RSS option within the WordPress boards as well… not sure if you can do that in phpBB…
Sounds like we mostly like boards…
I’d keep a list or rss feed though for announcements.
Forums get my vote. You could do something like they’ve done at DoubleBit (I’m not affiliated) http://doublebit.com/forums/
They’ve setup forums for their different products as the top level. If all the products are in the same forum it makes it easier to search through all of them… there will be some/many issues that will affect both Tasks and TasksPro users alike.
Go with a forum, Alex. The Yahoo groups system is a pain to deal with and frankly, I don’t want any more email than I require.
PHPBB vs. PunBB… go with Pun. It is lighter and (much) faster than PHPBB and simpler to manage. Heck, I am going to give it a try… and I usually use PHPBB.
What about newgroups/maillist? You can have a mailing list server, then have it post to the news server as well (mailman does this I belive).
Ok, Forums AND Mailing Lists
My previous post has gotten a lot of good comments and responses. I’ve also gotten a dozen replies from an e-mail I sent out to my current beta testers asking for their thoughts, and I’ve had several discussions over IM during the day. More throu…
I vote for anything RSS-enabled so i can just subscribe to the feed to keep up with what’s going on. I just started using BlogLines.com and they can turn an email list into an RSS feed for you, so I would prefer the email list if the forum sw you choose cannot do RSS. Luckily yahoo groups can be turned into RSS feeds, but only if you do not require people to “join” before they are allowed to read posts.
Don’t worry, I’m a huge fan of RSS. There will definitely be RSS feeds for any of the solutions – even if I have to write it myself. 🙂
Forums!
We’ve got forums:
https://alexking.org/forums/
The forums are running on the excellent PunBB package. I made a couple of mods (and still plan to do some tweaking to the built in RSS feeds for the forums to include more information), but the…