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Please stop telling us to re-report problems via black-hole webforms


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I'm sure VW support could autofilter the forum for 'bug' and auto-email themselves daily/weekly.

It wouldn't be hard to sift through the results to identify relevant bugs.

&/or

Provide a bug icon🐛 in the 'Like' popup and if >7 people click it in 7 days run the auto-email routine.

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2 hours ago, E|FA said:

See also: 

Flagging @jblock @JuanP @Neil Barman who have participated in related threads, and whose involvement in the forum is greatly appreciated.

 

Yes, adding a proper ticketing system for support would definitely be welcome.

 

And, for bug submits, not just a confirmation that your submission has been received but a follow-up that tells you whether it's been acknowledged as a bug, and if so, gives you a reference number that you can use to complain about it still not being fixed 6 months/years later. And in the ideal world, periodic updates that might give you an estimate for which release it will be fixed in, that sort of thing.

 

However - while all that would be good, I quite firmly believe that the forum being the first stop (for those who want to use it) is something to be encouraged, because firstly it's a quick way of identifying via other users when it's not a bug, just something you're doing wrong (which must save some admin time for VW) but secondly because it's all on public record - everyone can see when something is first noted, everyone can benefit from any discussion around it which might include temporary workarounds, and anyone can chase it up when no updates on progress are forthcoming. And, a quick idea can be formed about whether it's something that everyone can replicate and if not, it can often be pinned down to a certain set of conditions. Again, doesn't this actually save VW people some work behind the scenes?

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@line-weight I think the points you raised are good.  I wonder if filing a bug report with a link to the thread(s) detailing the problem would work.  Better would be to have a flag on the forum for reporting these threads to the bug reporting system.  In the past, I have sent email to tech support with links to threads detailing problems.  Sometimes that has helped.  More typically, the emails stop and a solution is never provided 😞

 

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5 minutes ago, jeff prince said:

@line-weight I think the points you raised are good.  I wonder if filing a bug report with a link to the thread(s) detailing the problem would work. 

 

yeah. It's still a drag to have to fill out all the compulsory bits of the form though. I'm already signed in under a forum username. I can already be contacted here. But I have to go and type out my name and email address and look up my VW serial number and choose an operating system from the dropdown that doesn't include my operating system because it hasn't been updated since macos 11. And then if I want to upload anything I have to go to a whole different form which gives no indication of being linked to what I submit in the main one.

 

The whole tone of the process is not "sorry the software you have paid us quite a lot of money for is not working. Let us try and sort it out for you", it's "follow the correct procedures and we might consider being so generous as to cast a glance over your issue. Don't push your luck. Please do not send emails asking if your bug is fixed"

 

 

 

 

673614374_Screenshot2023-01-21at00_26_52.jpg.f55d3f1cc012c82301b82d1ad4dd1482.jpg

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2 hours ago, jeff prince said:

Better would be to have a flag on the forum for reporting these threads to the bug reporting system.  In the past, I have sent email to tech support with links to threads detailing problems.  Sometimes that has helped.  More typically, the emails stop and a solution is never provided 😞

 

2 hours ago, line-weight said:

It's still a drag to have to fill out all the compulsory bits of the form though. I'm already signed in under a forum username. I can already be contacted here. But I have to go and type out my name and email address and look up my VW serial number and choose an operating system from the dropdown that doesn't include my operating system because it hasn't been updated since macos 11. And then if I want to upload anything I have to go to a whole different form which gives no indication of being linked to what I submit in the main one.

 

Absolutely.

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Ok, now some complaints about the Help System's feedback form.

 

- I click on "was this page helpful" on the relevant help page. It takes me to the feedback form but without remembering where I've come from. I have to manually copy&paste the URL of the help page. Why isn't this automatically registered? Surely this doesn't require genius level web coding.

- Again I have to fill in my name and email address and everything, even if I'm already signed in to the forums, or already have vectorworks open and attached to my specific licence number and so on

- And then I have to do a Captcha, selecting boxes with motorbikes or traffic lights or whatever.

 

These maybe are small things individually but it's all friction against swiftly submitting feedback, making the user do work to help VW fix something that is wrong.

 

 

 

292861898_Screenshot2023-01-28at19_20_22.jpg.06253f2e25e6860883046b7a477d493d.jpg

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A reasonable person might start to thing they are not interested in customers input, feedback, or criticism.

 

My tech support issues have gone ignored for years, but when I changed my avatar to “certified critic” with a graphic play on their Vectorworks certification program logo, I was contacted within hours and asked to remove it.  I had that Canadian architect they hired publicly try to shame me here for daring to criticize something, actually telling me how to behave here.  Both situations were simultaneously amusing and worrisome.

 

Priorities, they have them and they are not aligned with ours ….

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14 hours ago, JuanP said:

 

 team members from tech support, R&D, and QA are constantly monitoring the forums and taking your feedback seriously.

 

I don't dispute this, and am grateful to any team members who do respond or take action ... however, there was previously a system which appeared to users to work much better, which was that there was a specific person who proactively looked after the forums, and always made users feel like their concerns had been noted and followed up on. When he left, there were lots of requests that someone else take on the same role, but these were ignored. It's now a more common experience, to raise some issue on the forums, have it confirmed by other users as a probable bug, and then see no follow-up or acknowledgement by anyone representing VW. Alternatively, there is a response, but a request to go and file it as a bug submit, and such requests are of course the subject of this thread.

 

14 hours ago, JuanP said:

 

We have a public Roadmap where you can see what is coming, the development, and what is in research.

 

 

This is nice to have, but I find it of limited benefit as it has no timescale attached - all that can be known from it is that a certain thing is planned to happen at an unknown time in the future. But it gives no information on the progress of fixing of bugs, which tends to be the more critical information.

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@line-weight The platform that tracks bugs is internal, and we can't expose it to the public. In every Service Pack, you can track all fixed bugs as part of the release notes. I will work with the R&D to see if there is another way we can share this data. We have shared some of the tracking numbers from our database in some of the threads in the past. We can keep doing the same, and you can request updates based on that information for now.

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Here's an example of a user not knowing how to do a bug submit even though they are willing to do so:

 

https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/106643-undo-causing-crashing-vectorworks-2023-sp4/#comment-464429

 

How, in fact, is anyone able to easily find the bug submit page? Me, I type "vectorworks bug submit" into Google.

 

There could be an obvious button somewhere in these forums, at least in the "troubleshooting" section, but there isn't.

 

There could be an obvious way to get to it from the new "home page" of the Vectorworks application but there isn't.

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I'm commenting here because I'm becoming more and more frustrated with the customer service vis-a-vis tech support and this thread is somewhat recent with users and VW staff who have been helpful on the forum over the 3-4 years I have been using Vectorworks. I agree with most of the commentary that reporting issues with the software could be better, but I also think having friction in reporting helps weed out lots of user-error issues that tech support doesn't necessarily need to be flooded with. 

 

My issue is that once I've opened a ticket and heard back from tech support, I have zero knowledge of what is happening with the ticket beyond the initial exchange. If I'm asked to double-check settings, I'm not replied to when I report back. If I'm asked to send a screen recording, I'm not replied to when after I send it. If an issue is resolved, I'm not informed the ticket is closed. If an issue is resolved and I bring up another one, I'm not told to file it in a separate ticket. In short, there is a basic standard of opening, engaging in, and closing a conversation that tech support fails to follow through on. While I'm not keen on the Substack method of being told I'm an idiot and to stop wasting someone's time, I prefer that to hearing nothing at all.

 

The notion of entification has been coined for social networks, that 

 

"When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left."

 

While abuse is very far from how I would categorize my VW experience, I would absolutely categorize it as software and a community that demands a significant time and financial investment. And that requires a reciprocal investment on the part of its staff, and I do not get that sense whenever I engage with tech support. My suspicion is that they have very long queues and do not have the tools to do basic relationship management efficiently. But the lack of comms has reached the point for me that I no longer see it as a reliable service, therefore I occasionally reconsider the value of my investment.

 

PWF

 

EDIT: Entification is not the word I typed in the link but it seems that some wise soul has pre-programmed the removal of certain 4-letter words and thats probably for the best

Edited by Peter W Flint
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19 minutes ago, Peter W Flint said:

 

"When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left."

 

See also the move to compulsory subscription-based pricing.

 

That has been justified as allowing increased investment in the development of the software. It would be nice if that included some more investment in the technical help and bug reporting system.

Edited by line-weight
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9 hours ago, line-weight said:

See also the move to compulsory subscription-based pricing.

Yes, I’ve been following that discussion and make my criticism with that in mind. I think there are some good arguments for an SaaS model, but the lack of thoroughness from the support end makes me suspicious that those arguments are anything other than marketing copy. 

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A little round-up of my experiment doing bug submits & help page feedback as we are requested to do.

 

1) Bug submit done on 20th January

- took about 12 minutes of my time. I wrote out description & provided sample video

- prior to that I had started a thread on the issue here in the forums

- no immediate confirmation email

- got a response by email 5 days later confirming it had been replicated & would be looked into

- some time later, acknowledged in the forum thread by VW employee

- it was fixed in the next release

 

2) Bug submit done on 16th February

- took 5-10 minutes of my time.

- I simply gave a link to a thread on the forums where the problem was already described & discussed in detail.

- no immediate confirmation email

- as of now, 2 months later no email response

- no response from any VW employees on the relevant forum thread

 

3) "Help" pages feedback submitted via webform 28th January

- took about 10 minutes of my time

- no immediate confirmation email

- email reponse a few days later, saying my feedback would be incorporated into an update to the help page

- help page was updated

 

4) Another "Help" pages feedback submitted via webform 28th January

- took about 10 minutes of my time

- no immediate confirmation email

- no response of any kind 2.5 months later

- no changes made to help pages so far.

 

 

So, that's a 50% success rate. That's certainly better than nothing, and I appreciate the items that were responded to.

 

However, I'm not sure it's a better success rate than nagging about things on the forums. So I don't feel to encouraged to carry on with my experiment of doing things the "proper" way.

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En 29/1/2023 a las 13:07, JuanP dijo:
Cita

3 - As for the post about us not being interested "in customer's input, feedback, or criticism," this is far from the truth. We have created multiple venues, forums, and live sessions where we can interact with customers. In addition, team members from tech support, R&D, and QA are constantly monitoring the forums and taking your feedback seriously.

 

From the users and customers (like me) point of view this hard work and interest from you, sadly, is not making any difference. VW2023 has a lot of bugs and Spanish users (by the way, localization is absolutely negligent) haven't any news about fixes or SP4 releases. We still fighting with windows that loses their depth relation when user switch from VW to another app, among many others bugs. Did we pay good money for a deficient and low quality product?

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