[WIP] Wish for first level communication

Feature Requests / Improvements
1

I would like to submit a suggestion for improvement.

I would like a fast and transparent first level contact for the community in the forum and on facebook.

I think it’s good and right that the DEV team takes care of the implementations and doesn’t bog down in Facebook or the like.

On the other hand, a 2 week sprint target was announced, which was then dropped unannounced.
The Facebook group is practically unmoderated.
It lacks in-between updates and a few informational teasers to keep the community informed.
An example of how it can go great is Daniele de Rosa’s projects (Bricksforge). This can be used as a blueprint for community communication.

None of this is the end of the world, but first level support would a) free you up from beginner questions / community links / requests and b) significantly increase transparency.
Also the community satisfaction would probably increase significantly.

I am also aware that staff costs money. But have a look around in the community. I’m sure there are people who would be happy to take care of the community as “fan support”.

What do you think?

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Yes, I fully agree.

First things first:

  • I really like bricks
  • I have found support when needed great
  • Bug reports in the forum are answered and dealt with in a good manner.

As a marketeer, I must agree though.

The empathy, transparency and communication were unique selling points.

As Bricks grew communication had become less and less. Updates with video’s have been replaced with a list of changes.

The only videos coming out are by the community.

Yes - the community has it’s role. But Bricks is not just a builder. It’s a company. It needs to connect to it’s audience.

I don’t care if the update takes 2 months. What I do care about is a small message. Just connecting.

It was what was lacking at the other builders - and was so refreshing to see it differently.

So I’m with you. In no way to bash Bricks, but much more so because I want to see it flourish.

Many different opinions on this. But I wouldn’t see a single reason why not to communicate. a few lines couldn’t take more than 10 minutes. But would have such an impact.

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Now might be a good time to plug my post from February too which still has yet to be addressed as well, I feel it brings very valid concerns around the ideation process which seems to have lots of room for improvement.

I think it serves as just one small example that goes to the topic of a disconnect in communication lately. I hope it’ll improve to be how it was previously, but with that said I still feel strongly Bricks is on the right path overall software wise and believe it’s a fantastic product. Concerns around the Ideation process. How are new requests handled in the Idea Board tool for Bricks Builder?

6

Though I understand your point, and I don’t want to bring your point down, that’s not what this post is about.

It’s about the communication with the community.

I.e. for the two week sprint. Instead of going back to it, the post is a request for a simple message stating something like.

“In december we announced a two week update cycle. As you all have noticed we didn’t follow through on it. The influx of people using Bricks has caused a burden on support we didn’t calculate when we send out the message. We want our service towards our customers to stay high, so we lost some momentum because of it.

Next to that we are currently working on a couple of large updates which we want to implement in a right way from the get go. There have also been a couple of hard to solve bugs that are taken us longer than expected but we want to fix, like the builder lag & classes that dissapear.

After the next three releases we hope to get back into a more frequent update cycle. But at this moment we need to get a couple of good updates out before we can.

The entire team thanks you for your patience, reports and enthousiasm using Bricks. Looking forward to see your projects in the Bricks forum ‘showcases’! “

-!- NOTE -!-
I made this up - there is not a single input from Bricks on this so do NOT take this as truth, it’s purely an example what this thread is about.

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Ah, you’re right. Sorry I missunderstood about that. I just re-read your post and Bricks to align.
Turns out I missed something, thanks for letting me know.

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8

Thank you so much for this very well-worded & thoughtful wish, @sebastianberger :slight_smile:

100% spot on. The level of communication & a consistent approach to it has been very much lacking lately.

We are committed to getting back to our roots and communicating more often & openly. Like in the good old days :slight_smile:

I hope the Bricks 1.7.1 FB post (Bricks Community | Facebook) can help start the conversation on how to best serve the community with much-needed non-code updates.

And that yesterday’s “Sneak peek” FB post (Bricks Community | Facebook) about the upcoming menu builder can provide an idea of how such a communication can look going forward. Although I am very much in favor of a forum-first approach.

The 1.8-beta + video post is something we’ll share here on the forum and only share a quick post + forum link on FB. Maybe also sending out an email as well.

Still figuring out how to come up with a concrete communication strategy.

Thank you so much for keeping us accountable!

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I am not on Facebook and do not intend to. But I miss all these great announcements, could you please post them here in the forum too? I think this forum is much more preferable than Facebook, I thinks there are more Bricksters who are not on FB and this would be a great place to hold it all together, also in terms of searching solutions . I also think for some people an email would be great, but don’t make it to hard for yourself to put it on all channels. Keep the discussion centralized.

Thanks for all the great work!

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so facebook is the new communication channel, and we get all news there? not happy, cause not using. :confused:

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@grafikundso Facebook is NOT the new communication channel. It is the channel that we have been mainly using SO FAR. It’s not a personal preference of mine. It is simply because it’s the channel that allows us to reach & engage with most users. Way more than here in the forum.

I am quoting myself here as you seem to have missed this part in my last message:

“I am very much in favor of a forum-first approach.”

We currently are in the process of finding the communication channels & strategies to reach more of our users effectively.

Personally, I prefer the forum too. Also because it’s public and we are not at the mercy of Facebook. Which behaves weirdly sometimes.

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Hi Thomas,

I am voting for newsletters … this way all if us, who do not have facebook and forum open all day, would be directly informed immediately and personally…

Best Regards
Michael

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why not trying some kind of automation or at least just make an official forum post with same infos as on facebook? or forum post with all infos and facebook with a link and only partial infos (would mean more work, so wouldnt recommend)

i think copy paste from forum + keeping forum as main channel would be a good way. i am no fan of keeping most infos on a channel (fb, twitter, whatever) not owning myself. means, always keep the main content on channels i own. like a forum :slight_smile:

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I don’t use Facebook, and probably never will. Love Bricks, but am missing out on stuff because of FB postings. Newsletters, short vids on new announcements (with longer explainer videos to follow), etc. would be great! Thanks, Thomas.

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17

Pretty much agree with the overall opinions expressed in this thread. Not on fb or any social media for that matter and think it’s crucial to have one “news central” which is accesible without any kinda account.

The best way (in my opinion) I’ve seen others do is to have some sort of a blog on the site where everything gets published (news, announcements, sneek peaks, etc). From there everything is pretty much automated. Latest posts get sent out via Newsletter once a month for people who like mail and articles are posted on whichever other platforms on which users are most active, in this case fb.

In an earlier post a mobile menu builder sneek peak was mentioned. I’d love to see that but won’t create an fb account for that haha. Those types of posts though show what kinda stuff is currently under development which I believe is important news to share.

I know it’s under progress on the board but given that the original date of creation on the board is so far back, I have no way of knowing whether it will come in a week, a month or a year.
I’m of course not asking for any dates or specifics since those are hard to plan and promise. But, seeing it Pop up as a sneak peek at least gives me an idea on how far along it is and builds my anticipation for it / makes it clear that it’ll likely come within whatever time frame.

I’m the last person that wants to be like “are we there yet” every couple days haha so just an ocasional surprise sneak peak or whatever it may be, accesible to everybody, would be wonderful :slight_smile:

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I vote for forum and newsletter

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Thomas, don’t feel you have erred. You are an excellent developer with two great products. We live in an age of being unable to tolerate waiting for something. Yes, communication is important and always appreciated.

With you, it’s quality and your team.

Thank you for Bricks!

Ros

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Slightly related… I noticed the Announcements section of the forum has not been updated since the 1.8 beta announcement, nothing for the final 1.8, nor 1.8.1 or 1.8.2. Maybe it was determined not to use it anymore but I had thought the Announcements section of the forum was going to be used with each release plus any other communication to Bricks’ users (at least to mirror the Facebook updates). Hopefully we’ll see those being posted again. :slight_smile:

21

It may just be me but I’m feeling like there’s been a lack of communication/transparency again the past few months with the 1.8.x series. While the beta period for 1.8.0 was a big one since it included a major new feature which needed much testing and refinement, since that version I’ve seen a few concerning items which I believe could be avoided or at least better handled with better communication.

  • Since 1.8.0 in particular it seems there has been a number of bugs which seem high-impacting or at least should have been easily avoidable with automated test harnesses. I wrote a forum post on this over a month ago FYI: An observed increase of uncaught (sometimes high-impact) defects, a request and offer to expand test cases for future releases

  • I also haven’t seen too much movement with respect to improvements with the feature request process, other than perhaps a slight improvement in the time from feature request to published idea for voting: [WIP] Concerns around the Ideation process. How are new requests handled in the Idea Board tool for Bricks Builder?

  • There is very active post thread requesting and discussing Global (and specifically morphed into Dynamic) Components which Brick’s competitor Cwicly has recently implemented and “changed the game” sort-of, but the Bricks’ team has been noticeably absent from the discussion here: Global Components are needed in Bricks!

  • There has also been a number of cases in smaller areas where there are Facebook-only posts, or absence of important items in the Announcements area of the forums here, such as official 1.8.0 and later releases (last announcement was just for the 1.8 beta). There has also been no formal announcement of the “User Survey 2023” in the forum here, only in the Facebook group. I may have misunderstood but I thought there was going to be an improvement in utilizing the forums here for the official communication channel for these types of things while cross-posting in Facebook too?

While things were definitely better for a while after this thread’s discussion since April and May, things seemed to have slipped backwards again for the last couple of months. I’d love to see things improve again and get back to where they were and should generally always be for Bricks’ users. :slight_smile:

I definitely recognize that Bricks is a small business still and like any small business will have a number of growing pains, I just also really hope comments from users/customers are taken into consideration to keep the community vibrant and happy and to learn where the weak points are and how to improve. :slight_smile: With that said and on the same note… this is a quick reminder too for others to fill out the “User Survey 2023” at BRICKS User survey 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣3️⃣.

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22

I agree that communication has tapered off … again. When Thomas does communicate, it is delightful, but it is not frequent enough to steer the ship. I can only hope that their hiring will include more resources for increased communications (either by someone else, or taking on some of Thomas’ work so he can communicate more). In my survey response, I identified communications as my number 1 area for improvement. Sorry to tag you again, @thomas

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23

Hey Thomas & team,

I know this is an old topic, but I got the feeling that communication is again getting worse. I’m not speaking only for myself, but we are talking on Discord - Unofficial Bricks Builder server and there are users that reported a bug and all, but have not heard back since first e-mail communication. FYI, the topic I have in mind now is Builder Lag, but I bet it’s not the only one.

I know that you may be working on that and trying to solve it, but we don’t know that. We only see a bunch of “WAIT” and “WIP” in the forum, and that’s not giving us any hope. We don’t know why that topic is WAIT, what is missing? Another login information? Video? Another user report? Same goes for WIP, there are topics that are WIP and are older than 1 year - I’m sure you are not working 1 year or more on them :slight_smile:
Sure, some of them are already solved, just still in WIP (or WAIT), but how do we know? We don’t.

That said, I may miss some announcements about that, because I’m not active on FB and Discord is not channel you use, so If it’s not in the forum topic - I may very well miss it.

The point here is, there was a time when communication was very good for a while, but it went down again. Especially for bugs that are bigger and harder to find/fix, at lest that’s the feeling that I got and I’m sure I’m not only one.

I love Bricks and I would love to see a bit more communication again. It doesn’t need to be a lot and with many details, but

“we are working on that …this is what we discovered for now… we are not yet sure what is best way to implement it… + more if if needed”

would make all the difference. At least then we would know that something is happening.

To sum up, improving communication would be wonderful :slight_smile:

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Well, they might have quite many earth-shattering feelings, and full on working with what’s left behind after the security incident.

But, does that means no communication? Silence? Nope. @thomas gathered everyone’s love towards building WordPress sites again, and did a tremendous job. Silence, not communicating, causes no love. That goes for every living creature on earth.

I hope it makes sense, and soon we can hear something.