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How Do I Get A Reply On This Forum? Currently Batting Zero For Two (Answer: Now One For Three)

Robert Capon

May 16, 2019 14:12

Answered

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Hi:

I'm a long time user of SkySafari, and have owned a number of the Pro versions through version 6. It's been frustrating that I can't contact the company for tech support. But my frustration has been greatly compounded by my forum posts going unanswered.

My first post was related to being unable to hear the audio program in SkySafari. It went unanswered for several days until I finally resolved the problem myself and deleted the message.

The second post was a feature request for a multi-star pointing model such as TPoint posted on May 9th. No response in 7 days.

So here I am. I love SkySafari (5 out of 5 all the way), but find product support to be extremely poor. The forum is helpful if you're able to perform a search and find the answer to your problem from a previous post. But if you can't find the answer in the knowledge base, you're pretty much on your own.

Kind regards,

Rob

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5 comments

• 1
  
  Keiron Smith May 16, 2019 16:16

  Hi Robert, 

  Thanks for your feedback and for sleuthing out the solution for enabling audio.

  Everyone has their own list of must-have features.  The developers have their own roadmap as well.  Bill, SkySafari's lead developer, is very busy, but always reads all the feature requests and replies if and when he has the time.  If you discover and report a bug, then discussions will come quickly.  But, wish-lists just have to wait until such time that Bill is ready to review the idea proposed.  No matter how great the feature request its just not going to get implemented and released in the next couple of months.  There is already a long list of must-haves and would-be-nice features that are already under development.  

  The community forums also succeed when community members help one another.  We have a thousands of very passionate SkySafari users that can bring these community forums to life, by looking into one another's posts, and offering assistance where specialized knowledge or a tinkling for conversation and experimentation is at hand.  

  Thanks for your patience and understanding.

   

• 1
  
  Robert Capon May 16, 2019 16:39

  Hi Keiron:

  I'm a very experienced amateur astronomer, and had a backyard observatory for many years. (See Sky and Telescope, May 2015, pages 64-68). As such, I'm used to the community forum model. The major benefit of the forum model is that community members can benefit from each other's questions and answers, and the forum represents a knowledge base over time. I received excellent support from DC3 Dreams for ACP and Expert, and from Software Bisque for all of their products. Both companies used a similar forum approach. But they always responded to each posting the same day, usually within just a few hours.

  I'm also a pretty good customer of Simulation Curriculum. In addition to purchasing most/all of your Pro versions, I've owned Sky-Wire and two models of Sky-Fi. I don't mind paying the price for the relatively expensive app every time you do a major update, because I want to support your product development work. I'm using SkySafari to control a computerized telescope for visual astronomy. It's important to me, so I'm happy to do my part to help the company create cool new features. I didn't need any of the new features in Pro 6, but upgraded to support the ongoing product development.

  But in my opinion, the fundamental foundation of the product has to be Simulation Curriculum's willingness to support your customers. If you're going to use the Forum to do that, then perhaps it's time for you to hire some people in technical support to do that full time, rather than having your software developer respond to messages selectively in between code development. 

  In the meantime, I'll continue to slog through problems on my own, and will remain very frustrated with the company.

  Regarding a multi-star pointing model, I think it would be a major upgrade to SS Pro 7. Fundamentally, if you're using SS to control a telescope, it's to find stuff. And I think a 2-star model is just too limited. When I had my observatory, I used to perform a 309 plate pointing model for arcsecond pointing accuracy. But something as a simple 10 star TPoint model would dramatically improve GOTO accuracy with SkySafari and would give a lot of users a real reason to buy the next upgrade. But that's just my opinion.

  Respectfully,

  Rob

• 0
  
  Keiron Smith May 16, 2019 17:02

  Hi Robert, 

  We could certainly use your wisdom and experience here in the community forums.  You know your stuff.

  I will do better to respond to all queries even if my doing so will not actually move the discussion further down the road.

  Thank you for the thoughtful reply.  

• 0
  
  Robert Capon May 16, 2019 17:43

  Ok, Keiron. If I can be helpful on the multi-star pointing model (or anything else), you can reach me by email. All best, Rob

• 0
  
  Growflavor June 21, 2019 19:12

  Hi Keiron,

  RE: "The developers have their own roadmap as well."

  LiveSky has a public roadmap: https://www.livesky.com/roadmap.html

  I suggest that one way to encourage people on these forums would be to have

  A) a regularly updated (e.g. 2x per month) post pinned to top of the main SkySafari forum & a post pinned to the top of the main Starry Night Forum with the public roadmaps for those programs followed by their list as Bill wrote "on our list of things we'd like to do eventually, but no timeframe"

  B) a second pinned post with your schedule of what day or interval you visit & answer questions on each forum so we know when we will next hear your replies to the posts in that particular forum.

  This way we all at least know both when we will here your input on questions & also what is being worked on currently, what progress is being made, & in what ways our items are being considered for the future: near term, v, long term, v never.

  This would be helpful in managing forum user expectations plus also help people understand the choice to allocate resources = $ towards daily development rather than daily support since I personally understand that many 'upgrades' would need to be sold to fund even a part time support person & I would rather have that money go towards the features all us users want & from which we all benefit.

  C) [Benchmark] Surprisingly, unlike the Cloudy Nights or Kerbal Space Program or Orbiter forums, we can not quote (or 'mention' e.g. @Keiron )  people in these posts or click on user avatars to see their other posts.  And there are no 'social encouragement' features like 'like/vote' notifications for our specific posts.

  Kind regards, Chadwick