I was happy to provide feedback. Why not just post it here instead of hunting down a support channel? Pretty much every forum has this kind of back-and-forth going on.
I've helped on these forums when I've had a similar problem and finally managed to get it working on my own. In that case, sharing what worked for me takes 2 mins but can help make someone's day. Same reason people post on Usetnet, StackOverflow and even here on HN I guess. It's not about giving free support to a company's customers. It's about helping out someone in trouble.
In the opening paragraphs I stated it was my hope that this gives me a gateway to communicate with someone that isn't support and isn't the void that is their robot response issue tracker.
That said, they generously reached out to me and appear to genuinely be concerned by my experience. I plan to keep posting as I run into issues and also as they correct my mistakes and also solve my problems.
Without a doubt, some people have issues, but I don't think you can gage the overall reliability of a product based solely on a support forum. No one is going there just to post that their system is running properly.
Just wondering: How long have you been working at this and are you personally happy with the state of things? Do you even use the site? Vendors always ask for feedback but a) when you submit feedback, it usually disappears in a black hole b) if they actually used the stuff themselves they would already know about most problems.
I don't want to attack you personally but MS support always has been a black hole and when I look at the feedback forums there are always these generic messages ("We are sorry,. Pleas help us to understand") that either are written by robots or certainly feel like that. But nothing ever gets resolved, there never is a direct answer to clear problems.
The problem has been fixed by a software update or some change I did not perform. If a company wants me to use a chat service or forum to solve my problem, they should direct me there and/or maintain that service. I contacted them directly to their support service, which should be trained to deal with questions, not push them into the abyss. While I appreciate your feedback I think it's a band-aid to the problem.
There's nothing wrong with saying:
"We have found that your problem is common and are working on a solution. We will reach out in a few weeks once this has been resolved."
Then the company can gather like problems and triage for later resolution.
I mean really sometimes it seems like companies act like support is a mystery and they have the first buggy product ever on the market.
Is there a point of having support forums if you're not going to have official replies to the questions posted.
To me that just shows that no one cares about the product.
little side question, whats with these support forums that almost never have real employees answering but have community 'support specialists' that never answer the question and only tell you to use the feedback forms but beg for props on their answers. I don't get it.
To my reading the guidelines didn't apply given what I knew at the time. As far as I knew the problem might have been purely local, in which case I didn't want to hassle YC/PG with what would amount to a support issue. I thought it prudent to try to discover if it was wider than just my situation. So I posted.
If you honestly can't see the difference between posting to tell YC/PG about a problem, or to ask them a question, as opposed to posting to ask if other people are having the same problem, then I'm at a loss.
You'd get farther if you asked those users for feedback. Why didn't they use their credit? You may find out that they all had the same concern or issue, and it'll be an obvious fix.
The mod in this situation isn't an employee, it looks like. Just a user doing their best to help other users, so directing to the feedback tool sounds reasonable to me...
Maybe an employee could chime in. The problem I've seen with responding "I'll work with the dev team" is that some users at least will then have some timeframe expectations on the order of weeks based on what they imagine a fix to look like. But they don't really have a good idea of the system complexity, and realistically, these kinds of issues can linger for years because either it turns out most users actually care about other issues more, or the business needs to focus on making money, or some other complication shows up; and people end up being disappointed more often than not. I think it's unfortunately better, in this realm, not to say anything until you have the fix implemented, tested, and ready to roll out.
All the free online services that I can think of have this kind of annoying issue that advanced users run into. (And unfortunately the paid ones often have that kind of issue too, but at least they have much more reason to be responsive to support calls.)
You are assuming the parent poster actually attempted to go through support and work through the issue. I don't see indication of that. If anything, this thread indicates to me that many people form an opinion of a product and never seek support or never seek to revisit the issue and see if it has been fixed.
> Can you elaborate on the best way to ask for help in the VLC support forums? I've tried a couple of times over the years and literally got told to "stop asking for someone to do my work for me" and essentially go away..
It's hard and some devs are not very patient, tbh...
> I really want to improve the quality of our implementation but have no idea how to without some pointers from experienced devs.
What the? This is your support channel; Even if your inquiry is unrelated to feedback (or any of these), it would be the place to start.
The fact that you 'don't feel like' contacting them and instead come here to moan is absolutely incomprehensible. It shows that you are simply trying to throw dirt on them!
There's nothing worse than having a problem with a product, finding 250 other people on the feedback tracker that have had the same problem over the last three years, and the only official response is some support person on the first page who's saying your feedback is very important to us, and have you tried [troubleshooting that won't work]?
I did worry that people might feel I was trying to get free tech support. It's not really a problem I need to fix - I bought another adapter. I posted because though the behaviour seemed illogical to me I figured that there were people who could make sense of it.
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