Bring the Tech Support forum back

[rhn]

Just headed over to the support site to get some input on some crashes I have had recently. Was rather horrified (though not really surprised...) to see endless pages of tickets there going unanswered. Is no one actually helping people there any more? I assumed the reason you moved the support away from the volunteer basis on the forum was because you had a group of organised people who you thought could do better on the new site?

But as the state of things now, is there a chance we could have the old Tech support forum back? At least people could help each other out there. Common users really don't have any reason to go to the support site as part of their daily routine(I bet most don't even know it exist). I myself have looked in on the old tech forum on many occasions and contributed with what little I could now and then. It was right there and it was easy to do while browsing the forum.
And at least the Tech Support forum might keep some(yeah there will always be people for whom it is beyond reading the subforum list, but..) of the crash logs etc. out of the other forum subforums. Because as it is now it seems their only hope for help is posting their problems in places like General FTB chat and the "Ask a simple question..." thread etc.

Lets get a proper place for these things again. Bring back the Tech Support Forum!

 

[Lawbroken]

I assumed the reason you moved the support away from the volunteer basis on the forum was because you had a group of organised people who you thought could do better on the new site?

Was a group of people. They have either given up given tech support or have other things (off the internet) to deal with.

But as the state of things now, is there a chance we could have the old Tech support forum back? At least people could help each other out there. Common users really don't have any reason to go to the support site as part of their daily routine(I bet most don't even know it exist). I myself have looked in on the old tech forum on many occasions and contributed with what little I could now and then. It was right there and it was easy to do while browsing the forum.

When the talking stage was going on about changing/moving tech support I was one that wanted it to stay on the forums (with minor changes) However they didn't want to put the work in to set it up in a way that it was kept in one location and moved it off location due to being easier for them.

Lets get a proper place for these things again. Bring back the Tech Support Forum!

I agree. The Tech Support needs to be moved back onto the forums with changes (mainly an input information system).
A normal Tech Support section wont work when users can just put "My modded MC doesn't work" as the context of the thread.

 

[rhn]

I agree. The Tech Support needs to be moved back onto the forums with changes (mainly an input information system).
A normal Tech Support section wont work when users can just put "My modded MC doesn't work" as the context of the thread.

Absolutely, a new subforum with some form of nudging(forcing) people to input relevant information would be ideal. But until/if such an arrangement can be made could we not just simply have the old style subforum back? All the "My modded MC doesn't work" still goes on, just in all the inappropriate places. And people have to go through the motion of asking for the correct information etc. every single time to help them, instead of being able to refer to a proper place/information on how to give proper information. And those who do it right are just left ignored on the new site. From my point of view even the old style sub forum with no new features is still a win-win for all parties.

 

[Lawbroken]

IF it's even on the to-do list it's very far down.

Doing such a thing will most likely put more work on the moderations which at the moment there is 3, Vauthil is leaving soon and the other 2 can't give the forum as much time as it needs.

So people to moderate the forums is needed before changing anything on the forum lay out.

 

[rhn]

IF it's even on the to-do list it's very far down.

Doing such a thing will most likely put more work on the moderations which at the moment there is 3, Vauthil is leaving soon and the other 2 can't give the forum as much time as it needs.

So people to moderate the forums is needed before changing anything on the forum lay out.

Hmm yeah of course sympathetic to the moderator situation atm. which of course needs to be dealt with. However it might be my ignorance and inexperience of moderation work of this calibre, but having a hard time imagining what extra work load it could lead to. Maybe moving tech support threads in wrong places to the new subforum, but perhaps that is a job that could be deputised out to to other people, like for example the volunteer spam cleaners(did I just volunteer my self for more work )? Or perhaps we could be more instrumental in detecting and flagging "troublesome threads" to keep an eye on to lighten the reading load?

 

[Lawbroken]

You would be shocked at how many rules are broken throughout the tech support section.

Mainly people getting annoyed and mad about people not helping them with a problem.

 

[Nerixel]

Mainly people getting annoyed and mad about people not helping them with a problem.

Can attest to this. When I did tech support (probably over a year ago now), the amount of *cough* self-righteous *cough* people that got annoyed at you for asking questions that they considered unrelated was... painful.

 

[Vauthil]

One of my first experiences on the forums here as a user was getting bitched at by a totally non-related person in a Tech Support thread for daring to perform Troubleshooting 101 with the original poster instead of just magically knowing the solution based on the very limited amount of data initially provided. Apparently it was condescending or something to want to cover the issues from the basics (I admit, I am a condescending bastard at times, but that wasn't one of them).

In addition to angry people who can't/won't/don't follow directions, Tech Support was regularly plagued with two-Minecraft-versions-later necromancy, demands to support things outside the scope of modpacks ("I JUST INSTALLED OPTIFINE AND MO CREATURES AND BETTER THAN WOLVES ON MY DIREWOLF20 INSTANCE I GOT FROM THE TECHNIC LAUNCHER WHY WILL NOBODY HELP ME YOU'RE ALL MEAN @#$%!!!"), arguments over how to properly provide support (see paragraph above)... yeah, there was quite an amount of forum rule-breaking crap going down there. Still happens sometimes with the Bug Reports section now, but not nearly as often as Tech Support.

How it ends up going forward is something I don't know. I was on board with having tech support shifted to a separate framework, but I also wanted an account bridge so that the transition between sub-sites was seamless. The reasons for off-siting it in my opinion are far more complex and have to deal with the interplay of forum moderation duties versus technical support know-how, but I won't bore people with that because it's my opinion and not the policy per se.

(And yes, most of the forum "moderation" done now is by Flipz, other team members, and the select group of folks with Spam Cleaner access. I'm holding down the fort on things like Server Promotions and random reports other folks don't end up handling, but I am essentially a non-entity at this point myself compared to the time I used to spend monitoring and playing bonsai with discussions on the forum. Until the new moderation framework is put in place, it's gonna be severely low on bandwidth. No, I don't have anything to report on that, I specifically requested to not be involved in the transition itself so that nobody has to feel awkward about how I would do things when going forward it needs to be about how they will do things.)

 

[NJM1564]

Just headed over to the support site to get some input on some crashes I have had recently. Was rather horrified (though not really surprised...) to see endless pages of tickets there going unanswered. Is no one actually helping people there any more? I assumed the reason you moved the support away from the volunteer basis on the forum was because you had a group of organised people who you thought could do better on the new site?

But as the state of things now, is there a chance we could have the old Tech support forum back? At least people could help each other out there. Common users really don't have any reason to go to the support site as part of their daily routine(I bet most don't even know it exist). I myself have looked in on the old tech forum on many occasions and contributed with what little I could now and then. It was right there and it was easy to do while browsing the forum.
And at least the Tech Support forum might keep some(yeah there will always be people for whom it is beyond reading the subforum list, but..) of the crash logs etc. out of the other forum subforums. Because as it is now it seems their only hope for help is posting their problems in places like General FTB chat and the "Ask a simple question..." thread etc.

Lets get a proper place for these things again. Bring back the Tech Support Forum!

Worse than that the link in the main forum section links to a page with "The page you requested doesn't exist or is private.".
Not that that section was ever that useful. Any even minor deviation from the packs were ignored. Or shouted down. It's not like it specifically stated that it was FTB pack support. And even if they were flooded with irrelevant complaints not even trying to help is just rude. They could have at lest pointed us in the direction of those who could help.
Fortunately that was a long time ago and I have since learned how to read crash logs.

I would suggest at lest adding a public support section. A centralized place for people to go who have honest issues that they do not know how to solve themselves. One where other players could help out as needed. Probably with a entry forum system asking for things like; What launcher are you using, what pack, was it modified, does the crash log mention any mods if so what.
Hell, we really have bin needing a generalized minecraft mod forums for a long time not. And I have suggested a general mod wiki several times.

 

[Captainnana]

I think I'll readd a forum section for tech support and see if it's more successful than the support site then we can make a decision.