John C: What about the feedback? 5 minutes a day is all it takes!

I don't know why this didn't occur to me before:

We users/kvetchers/idea-generators have gotten some feedback about how difficult and frustrating it is for John C, et al, to be able to sift through all of these threads here, while also trying to get some actual tweaking, recoding, and customization done. I understand the frustration generated because the same issues are being brought up over and over and over, and how issues are being spread out over multiple, convoluted threads, and because topic drift and extraneous emotional exchanges clutter up and hide the important information. One of the biggest problems facing John & Kanguyen's team seems to be that there's just too much to keep up with and sift through, to organize the info generated and to put it into some sort of logically collated order.

Pursuant to that, I'm sure that there must be at least a half dozen of us regulars here, probably more, who have read every post in every thread in the Comments Forum since Jive went live. There are a bunch of us who—in between the course of our various and sundry other duties during our days—have managed to deeply absorb the gist of almost every problem stated so far. We may not know the solutions, but we sure do know about the problems! We've thought about them a lot, we've exerted the thought power required offer up suggestions and some lateral-thinking ideas; we've provided troubleshooting data, workarounds, and more. In the case of people like Jochem, possible/probable solutions have been spelled out at a very competent and professional level.

Then it dawned on me:

For the price (CHEAP!) of one good entry-level employee—s/he of reasonable and relevant education and mettle—would be of great benefit if their job description was to go through the threads as we users have, with an eye toward methodically distilling and organizing the issues we've been hashing over and to prepare the data in a suitably robust resource-organization/GTD app. An info-gathering proxy, if you will, for John C. & whoever else might have their sleeves rolled up these days.

Shoot, with Summer coming up, and an announcement made, it wouldn't surprise me if hundreds of recent college grads would show up to jump at the chance to intern at Adobe doing anything they could, just for the opportunty to get experience, get noticed, and maybe get hired.

Hmm...

As an addition to what was said in earlier posts about badges and points:

The detrimental effects of badges and especially points were pointed out numerous times by many of us from the very beginning of the trial period.

Just to repeat one specific point about points: Even if they were not destructive, as they are, and even if they were not given in an erratic way, as they are, the points would still be silly because they do not reflect the insight and contributions within in each forum.

Perhaps a solution to the repeative posts (noise to Adobe) is to do as some suggest and create a list of issues that are being worked on, issues that they will get to next, issues that in infeasible, and issues that they would like to do.  But rather than have  endless replies to the post have a "vote" box so we as users can register our priorities, which may be different than the perceived priorites of Jive and Adobe.  Not that is will do a lot of good, but at least the users can resiger their desires without all the noise and endless posts on the same topics.

Thanks to kanguyen for taking the time. THAT'S the type of progress report we're asking for. (At least, I'm pretty sure I expressed a desire of many of us by framing the start of this thread the way I did).

kanguyen wrote: "...he has the support of various internal people like me, who can provide some assistance to him."

Just curious...what do you do as an employee, kanguyen? If you'd mentioned it before, I'm sorry to say I missed it. "Program Manager" is a little nebulous. It might be beneficial to know what your duties and skills-sets are a little more specifically; there could be questions we might want to direct to you, that you're especially equipped to answer.

Anyway...

Yes, of course, there are specific things we want fixed, changed or improved, and yes, we have harped, repeated, reiterated, demanded, and kvetched about them over and over again.

But actually stating and addressing those issues is not what this thread is about. This thread is about the importance of keeping us in the loop.

So Phillip, Harbs, Jozi, Kath and everyone else who might want to use this thread to bring up, discuss and get answers to specific issues...PLEASE DON'T. To use the lack of response about specific issues as an example is one thing (as I did in my first post), but to use this thread to rehash problems of functionality is off-topic, and dilutes the more important point I’m trying to make here.

I started this thread PRECISELY because I was tired of seeing the same issues brought up time and time again, in a dozen different ways and in every other thread in this forum. I also understand that keeping track of bugs is made all the more difficult for you guys if the reporting of them is all balled up with an intense and negative emotional context.  I was suggesting that regular reports from John C. and/or anyone else working on the forum problems would provide a bit of a salve for the anxiety being felt and vehemently expressed by everyone who visits this forum to complain or point out a problem.

I started this thread because it seemed to me that the concepts spelled out in the "Something Adobe Corporate needs to pay attention to..." thread (and the similar thread I missed that Dave Milbut started -"hey adobe" ), as well as the longer articles they linked to should be of enormous importance if Adobe cares even one little bit about keeping and building upon the richly important resource that these forums have become. That some of us might be worthy of the title "super-user", and some might not—those are designations better left to others to pin upon us. But the point is, we're complaining because we care about the health and functionality of these forums. The wealth of these forums' resource is undeniably embodied in the people who participate; the script and code and functionality and hardware and bandwidth is merely the vehicle...and a relatively inexpensive one at that. Further, it kind of worried me that those concepts were either unread, or ignored, or dismissed by John C. and company, and therefore tacitly deemed unworthy of even a quick reply, except by a few of our user peers. And even though they go hand-in-hand, I believe that the overarching idea of catering attention to customers' wants and desires is even more important than the actual nuts and bolts of functional operation, especially in light of the ever-more-malleable playing field that technologically-focused business has become in the past 5 years.

I can only deduce that Adobe (The corporate entity) has some sort of interest in maintaining, building upon, and improving the forums. Otherwise, why would enormous changeover job be tackled at all? There are likely broader considerations about the direction and scope of the forums that we can only guess about. And if past is prologue, we will never be told of them, because the high muckety mucks rarely see a benefit in sharing that corporate vision with us. And pardon me if I'm a little out of bounds by saying so, but I don't think it's a good idea for that sense of propriety and insularity to trickle all the way down to affect the way the men and women in the trenches deal with the users.

It doesn't need to be pointed out that the most active and vocal participants in these threads is comprised of a relatively small group of people. That condition is exactly the same as it is on any forum you care to name. Many of us—certainly a lot more than are making most of the noise lately—have made these forums a part of our daily lives. Many of us (and certainly not solely the main actors in these threads) have been at it for upwards of 7, 8, 10 years, or more. I dare say that those of us who have been around for so long have every right in the world to speak out on behalf of the majority of users who don't have the time, or the desire, or who don't have the long-view tenure to understand pretty intimately how changes that are made can have a heavy and long-lasting impact on the value of this place to them, to every new user discovering it for the first time. By integral extension, that value acts as a mirror held up to Adobe itself.

The changes being made can either be largely positive, or they can be largely negative. We can all have a hand in how that plays out.

I'm still idealistic enough to believe that Adobe would prefer that the forums be a positive reflection, a feather in the corporatre hat, the current hassles being attended to notwithstanding. And I'm idealistic enough to believe that most of the noisiest among us don't want to come off as nasty, redundant haranguers. But without an active and open two-way feedback loop between us, it feels to me like we are being treated as an annoyance. I feel this whole process we're all involved in—employees and users alike—would be a lot more productive if it exhibited the sense of being a united effort instead of what I feel is a currently building adversarial storm.

If we users continually feel like Adobe doesn't care to deign to keeping us informed, to let us know that our opinions, our desires, our concerns matter, it could be that we start reflecting that attitude right back. If Adobe doesn't give a clown's butt about us, why should we continue caring and contributing?

We regular users bring an almost incalculable value to this forum; indeed we (those of us here now, and those who will participate in the future) ARE the value. Period. So, let's say some of us current regulars get more up our noses than we can handle, and quit participating. Individually, it might not mean a whole lot. There are plenty of folks around who are just as knowledgeable and thoughtful and dedicated as any one of us. Collectively, though, just as our value is virtually incalculable, so the loss would be as well. And who among us is naive enough to believe that the steadfast, reliable resource which has been built up over the past 10–15 years can be easily replaced?

Our asking for a regular dialogue about the progress of improving and fine-tuning should be considered part and parcel of a mutually beneficial relationship here, part of the basic infrastructure of interacting with valued customers. It shouldn't be merely tolerated as an afterthought, or as something that might be gotten around to if the thought occurs, and there are a few minutes to spare while the afternoon pot of coffee is being made.

That whole "5 minutes a day is all it takes!" business? Simply a metaphorical in-joke of sorts. Maybe it'll take longer, maybe not. But once regular reporting is established, and we're all able to follow along with the progress in context, it shouldn't be too unreasonable a burden on time and energy.

—Respectfully submitted,

Phos....

I'm a program manager who has worked with John for most of the past year on planning and managing the migration of the forums to Jive, and I talk to John at least a couple of times a week, so I'm aware of what he's working on.

I'm also helping John to stay on top of a whole heap of post-launch items we're tracking - some of which are bugs and some of which are feature enhancements. Right now I have a list of about 50 items, most of which have been reported by you guys. There are a bunch more that are in John's head, but these are the important ones that he's noted as our top priorities.

Are we listening? Yes. We are, however, finding it difficult to read everything (due to the sheer volume) and due to these things being sometimes included within discussions about other things. Volume and noise are challenging for us. It's hard to separate personal preference/taste from usability, and usability issues are not simple things to fix because it's about making it work for everyone.

Resourcing is another. John is the only full-time resource dedicated to forums, though he has the support of various internal people like me, who can provide some assistance to him. Every time an important issue is reported to you guys, John is asking Jive about if it can be done, how we could solve it, etc. John made a joke earlier this week about how the Jive support guys must hate him by now due to the sheer volume of questions he asks. Jive is being responsive. Some things are easier than others to fix - some are definitely more complex to fix.

Take the email threading issue for example. Simple in concept - follow the RFC. Difficult in practice. We've come up with an initial fix that would allow better threading in email clients by removing the unique characters which show up in the square brackets - this is scheduled to go live this weekend. Technically, that was not hard to do, though it took some effort to coordinate the fix and the testing to ensure we weren't breaking any exisitng functionality. Fixing the email headers themselves to do proper heading is far more technically complex because it requires Jive to dive into what they call "core" functionality - basically, getting into the guts of the system. Much riskier, requires much more testing and planning. In this case, we know exactly what we need to do, but we require someone else to do it, we require a budget to do it, and we need time. Is it on our list? Yes. When can we get it done? We don't know yet, which is the reason John hasn't said anything yet - he doesn't want to commit to anything unless he knows it's actively being worked on and knows it has a firm, target release date in sight.

This week, we have been working on some bugs - some of which you guys have seen and/or reported, others which are a little bit more under the hood and not so much visible to you guys. One such fix was some data cleanup from a bug that affected about 40 users where they were seeing their accounts "multiply" every time they logged in. We've merged all their content back into a single account. This was important to do for those 40 users, not something the greater community will benefit from, but required a great deal of coordination and testing to make sure that we did it properly and didn't impact anyone else.

We're working on proper reporting. We're trying to figure out why some attachments are getting stuck in the queue. We're seeing what we can do about inching up the login session time. We haven't forgotten about the web services.

We're hard at work trying to find an underlying cause for performance issues - it's not where we'd want it to be, but because it's intermittent and there are so many variables, we are having trouble narrowing it down to specific scenarios where we can duplicate the issue. This is like when you take your car to the garage because it's making that noise, and of course when the technician sits behind the wheel, the car doesn't make the noise. You know it's making the noise! You've heard it a dozen times! But if the tech can't duplicate it consistently, he can't fix it. Performance is probably top on our list.

There is a lot going on behind the scenes and John is working hard. There's the reality of budgets, resources, and prioritization. But hopefully it helps to know that we're listening to you guys, we're keeping a really long list, and especially know that John is always, ALWAYS championing your voice inside Adobe. Your feedback does matter. Please keep it coming. In a perfect world, we'd be able to get to everything and do it quickly. We're in the process of trying to transition out of a project post-launch state into an operational mode.

John will be posting an announcement shortly about some upcoming system downtime this weekend, which is being used to release some bug fixes and feature requests (breadcrumb at the bottom!).

we'd made suggetions about putting some quick navigation links in the right-column boxes for forum thread indexes.

I can only comment on the small realm I haunt, and I certainly cannot answer for John on the larger questions you are asking.  But we are testing the link box concept in the premiere forum.  It exists in the PPro CS4 and PPro CS3 forums so you can jump back and forth easily along with other useful links...