Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you guys are a pain in the ass. We love our users. Didn’t you get the box of chocolates we sent you? Blasted post office…
The pain has been how we’ve handled support. We’ve tried to give you many ways to get help, perhaps too many. None of them have been as easy to use as we would like. So today we’re going to set things right. Today we’re launching support.github.com, powered by entp’s new app, Tender
But, why?
Over the past weeks we’ve identified these major problems with support:
- Too many options – So you have an issue, where do you report it? The Google group? IRC? Lighthouse? Should you email support"github":http://github.com/github.com? What if it’s an account issue or a private repo? You don’t want that out in the open. Which place do you go for the fastest response?
- Too many steps – If you go to the group or Lighthouse, you have to make an account. To get to IRC you have to install a client, log in, and hunt down someone who is paying attention to the channel. For email you have to launch up your client and fire off a message. It shouldn’t take this much effort!
- Snowball effect in Lighthouse – Many users have submitted their ideas and issues to Lighthouse. We want to hear from you, but the massive number of tickets in Lighthouse has become unmanageable. The things we want to add and need to fix get lost in the flood of tickets. Most days we receive more new tickets than we close in a week! This is not good for us or for you.
The first step in making support better was taken about a week ago. We added a contact form, a fast, one-step means of contacting support. Support requests nearly doubled. Quick and simple access to help, just what we wanted.
However, there are tons of helpful people in the Google group and on IRC that can help too. This form doesn’t put you in contact with them. The solution to this comes from the wonderful people at entp, the same people that made Lighthouse. They saw the same issues we saw, and they created Tender as a solution. Tender disguises
itself as a discussion forum, but it’s much more than that. Issues can be opened without logging in, they can be made private at any time (so only GitHub staff and the submitter can view them), and users can help each other out. On our side of things, we have fast access to all outstanding issues and we can link Tender reports to Lighthouse tickets. In short, it gives users a one-stop shop for all their support needs, and it frees Lighthouse up to do what it’s intended to do, track the things we need to get done.
The public Lighthouse tracker has been made read-only, we will be migrating tickets into the private tracker as we see fit. support"github":http://github.com/github.com will of course remain active, but will likely be forwarded into Tender sometime in the future. The Google group will remain open for general discussions, but we ask that support issues be directed to Tender instead.
yay! good call on this one.
Trying to figure out how to login so I can report this. :)
http://skitch.com/dlsspy/h8x3/support-login-failure
+1 – interested to see how tender works from an admin/support side. Simply allowing users to submit tickets for everything in lighthouse creates a lot of noise.
Is this for feature requests too or just support/bug issues? The category descriptions make it sound like it’s only for problems.
@ryanb Good catch, we added a Feature Requests forum.
Is there a reason you guys built your own system instead of using another one already out there…..like Helpspot, for instance?
@walker We didn’t build this, it’s from ENTP.
@dustin The proper authorities have been notified.
dustin: you have a login that’s not attached to an openid account yet. You’ll have to log in with the email and attach it to the openid account for it to work in the future (or, patiently wait for us to fix the bug).
walker: none of the other systems appealed to us for various reasons. We tried several but kept falling back to gmail for our support.
Have you guys seen getsatisfaction? It seems very similar to the new tender solution.
One of the main advantages of Tender is the Lighthouse integration. It’s a support forum tied into our private ticket tracker – hard to beat that.
it’d be nice if the entp guys compared that to UserVoice.
Awesome. Can’t wait to give it a go. Looks great.
We’ve poked at a lot of solutions over the past weeks, getsatisfaction was one we looked at. Personally, I don’t know, it just didn’t click with me. Tender did. Lighthouse integration is cool, forwarding our support email looks like it will be quite nice, and overall the site is simple but powerful. It also helps that the entp guys seem to agree with the things we find lacking, and have plans to add stuff to make the app even better.
The biggest thing we wanted was no roadblocks to submitting issues. Users shouldn’t be required to set up an account just to report something. The fewer steps to hinder the process, the more people will use it.
The second priority was to get users out of Lighthouse. But we didn’t want to just say “no, you can’t use this anymore, it’s private now”… instead we wanted to come to you with something that was designed specifically for users. Lighthouse is targeted more at the people managing the project, where Tender is targeted at the users. Simply locking down Lighthouse would have made things worse, not better.
Anywho, I’ve rambled enough (I know, I know, I do it all the time…) We look forward to using Tender, and whatever improvements entp throw at it.
Ya’might wanna migrate some of them GitHub Guides to this shiny new Knowledge Base.
Looks like a great change. and +1 to dag’s idea for integrating the GitHub Guides
This looks very promising, good work.
circle jerk
^ i kid, just want to try it for myself!
we added a Feature Requests forum.
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just want to try it for myself!
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The second priority was to get users out of Lighthouse. But we didn’t want to just say “no, you can’t use this anymore, it’s private now”… instead we wanted to come to you with something that was designed specifically for users. Lighthouse is targeted more at the people managing the project, where Tender is targeted at the users. Simply locking down Lighthouse would have made things worse, not better.
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