WA is specialized in website and forum platforms. Why delegate this important function to Facebook (which some would see as a competitor)?
Please implement a user community forum here, as originally suggested!

this a good site

love it

Dmitriy - You said "Might not be a bad idea to re-open this forum, under a name that makes it clear its not handled by our support team but is rather user-to-user advice.
We should think about moderation though:
- what if no user answers a question?"

A user-to-user forum would be helpful. But the support team should still come in occasionally to answer questions of general interest that other users have not answered. There are many examples of this kind of shared user and support forum.

If support gets a support question that may be of general interest they should also post it in the user forum.

If you put a little support effort into helping users build this resource, it could wind up saving support time in the long run.

Hi Mike, thanks for your comment. I took some time to digest what you said before replying.

First, I agree - it sucks that we're slow. I know this, everyone single person in Wild Apricot knows this and every developer is very frustrated about this. I feel pain every day about this.

The thing is that we've got to a point in our business when we're "changing our skin", entering very new phase of our growth and system development. Because of this, we're in process of changing a lot of things, but most important are 2 things

1) changing the code foundation of Wild Apricot itself, so called "paying technical debt". This takes a lot of manpower and this is why we're slow. This is something we are finalizing now, but it still is going to take us 2 month to roll out

2) changing development process. We used to have one process, but now we have too many developers and other engineers, so we had to figure our new organization model and then implement it. It's kind of done one - now we have a number of development team, responsible for parts of Wild Apricot. The group are more or less autonomous and in future will be responsible for their own roadmap - e.g. Events, Membership, Payments, etc.

For now I still remain Product Manager and your complaints about Online store go to me, actually. I do use votes and age of the issues into account and they play major role in determining priority, but they are not the only priorities. For example, for online store there are a number of third party solutions which are easy to integrate and it'll take us a lot of time to develop something comparable to them. This is why I'm giving priority to other top ranked items in our roadmap (we have 50+ items in the roadmap, most are from the top wishlist ideas). But as I say, having roadmap is great, but for now we're very slow in implementing it.

As for single support platform - this is not that easy as you say. Just let me tell you that for now we're using 2: Zendesk for ticket and voice tech support and UserVoice for forums, ideas and feedback management. As soon as we can use just one, we will do this, but now it's not possible.

Thank you again, Mike, for your feedback.

Might not be a bad idea to re-open this forum, under a name that makes it clear its not handled by our support team but is rather user-to-user advice.
We should think about moderation though:
- what if no user answers a question?
- process to remove outdated threads

It's just hard for Support stuff to be in multiple sources. As I said before, Q&A quickly converted into another support channel and our support guys had to deal with support questions in 2 places. I do not disagree about possible value of Q&A forum, I just do not really want to spread thin our support.

But not every answer makes it into the FAQ, right?

So even if only your staff answers the Q&A forum questions, and not other users, we can still search the forum and find all the answers, not just the ones you think are important enough for the FAQ.

The better way for us is to work on FAQ articles: https://support.wildapricot.com/hc/en-us

Support can & is very helpful. As a new user, however, I found a lot of valuable information, tips, etc by reading questions posed by other users. Often, I was able to find the answers I needed by searching the General forum & did not have to submit a ticket to Support. Not only did Support not have to respond to the same questions posed by a different user, I got the info I needed right away & did not have to wait for a response. JMHO, but seems much more efficient for both users & Support. Then again, maybe I'm not the typical user who is willing to spend a little time on research before calling on Support.

Yes, we used to have General forum which was intended for user, so they can ask questions to each other. But after a long time we realized that there are a lot of questions from user but very few, almost none, answers from other user. This basically forum became our second support channel, where same support team was spending time answering questions. As we already have support channel, we decided to shut it down.

If I may ask you, why don't you think that our Support can be helpful in your case?