Question

I am very happy with the level of support Fog Creek is giving its FogBugz customers. We pay support fees, but I think they (I guess I mean you) would help me even if not.

When I find a bug or have an urgent question, I usually send an e-mail and get a response within days. When I have a not so urgent question, a minor glitch or a feature request, I post here. And most of the time, I get some decent answer within a week. Maybe two.

But since a few months, I noticed that my questions here are not getting answered at all!

Of course it's not important questions. If I really needed answers, I should have sent e-mails. And don't take this as a complaint. Except I'm used to a smaller latency than recently: you can do better! :-)

It made me wonder: what are you support people so busy with?

Answer 1

Short answer: plug-ins. Our support engineers are also coders. They're happiest when they're coding, and we recently got fully staffed, so we're working through a backlog of development ideas, both internal and external. Email is our primary support channel, and we get to this site as much as we can, but our primary goal is to make FogBugz and Kiln easier to troubleshoot and sell.

We have a Do It Later plug-in forthcoming, and a cool HipChat integration plug-in, plus we've improved the logging for FogBugz and Kiln so that they're easier to troubleshoot. We're just about to start running a Mercurial/Kiln webinar.

We've made changes to this site to get across the point that, if you need help from us, you need to contact us. Our usage of it was somewhat curtailed when the spam algorithm canceled a bunch of our votes, even though we're admins! It expects there to be a lot more and a lot more varied users on this site, so some of our legitimate behavior looks like spam, but it doesn't exclude admin actions from spam policing.

I personally am working on getting this site off StackExchange's servers and onto our own, which will allow us to do some cool stuff with it. In the meantime, we're trying to make it clear that this is only a place to file and vote on feature requests. I've done some screen scraping and scripting that now feeds feature request voting directly into our internal FogBugz, too.

So, a lot going on, not much of it visible.