In October-ish last year we decided to trial using dedicated external support software to try and improve the way that we logged and reacted to user suggestions and issues, as we found that it was becoming very overwhelming to keep on top of the support side of things. After much thought, we have decided to ditch the external software as of the end of Jan and bring all support and issue logging back in house.

What we found from the experiment was:

• Many of our members were confused about where to find help on the site (we had moved all of our FAQs into a “Knowledge Base” that essentially no one could find on the external support site!)
• Suggestions were now split between the old system and the new – so there was a bit of duplication happening.
• The login systems were different between the support site and folia, so people were having issues trying to log issues (which is not a great situation!)
• Some members were confusing the “Questions” area of the Support site for the Questions area of Folia (e.g. asking gardening questions in the support area) – for some new members, this was just too disorienting.
• There was a monthly fee in using the Support software, which was making it harder for us to break even every month.
• We realized that 80% of the features we need to support the site are already in the groups, and the 20% that we were missing we figured would be good features for the groups anyway – I’ve been busy building in quite a few of these features (email alerts for topic updates, splitting topics, moving topics etc) and I’ll continue to keep adding what’s missing over the coming months.

So, from this week on you’ll find that the Help link now goes to our brand new Help Articles section that I am trying to fill with help questions & answers (any help with this would be much appreciated!) I’m also in the process of moving all the outstanding issues and suggestions back into the site, so there might be quite a few new suggestion topics flying about over the next week or so.

On the groups home page you’ll find that the Bugs & Issues and Suggestions & Feedback group links now link to the old (now new!) groups again. You should be able to post to these groups just as before.

Remember: it’s pretty much just me (and sometimes Nath) responding to all requests and posts in these groups, so please try to be patient with us – we read all feedback and suggestions and try to factor them into future plans for the site as much as possible.

If we haven’t yet commented on your suggestion, it doesn’t mean that we are ignoring it, it’s mainly due to the fact that we don’t yet have a definitive answer for you just yet :)