IPS Products are awesome, but your support BLOWS.

[Mote Marketing, Inc.]

IPS makes it essentially impossible to get decent product support. I just clicked "Get Support". The only option to proceed was to disable all customizations, which I did, but it would not allow me to disable the custom theme. Then, I when I clicked "Reenable all customizations", all but one were not reenabled, causing our site to go belly-up. I had to call my Developer and have her re-enable everything, which costs me cash.

Why does Invision SUCK so incredibly hard at providing reasonable support? I've been using your products for something like 15 or 20 years, and have given thousands to your company over the years, but you just keep pissing me off to the point that we are seriously looking for other options to power our platform. Seriously, your support is just faeces.

Also, despite the fact that all of the relevant PHP functions are quite clearly disabled, I have a persistent warning that "Dangerous PHP functions are disabled. According to my Developer, this is a common and widespread problem. Why, oh why can't you guys do better than this? This is an expensive platform, but it has way too many issues, including a UXI that is clearly designed by Developers with ZERO human interface talent. Can't you guys hire someone who knows how to design UIs with a modicum of expertise?

 

[Mote Marketing, Inc.]

I am an enterprise-level UI designer and capital software project manager, and if you give me a decent support and help system, I can resolve almost anything on my own, but I am almost never successful using the IPS so-called "Support" system. Many of the articles are completely out of date, and do not reflect current realities. It's so damned ridiculous and frustrating. For God's sake, PLEASE get your faeces together.

[PatrickRQ]

There were periods that IPS support was great but I think they got simply overwhelmed with number of support requests and increasing stupidity of human race.

I renewed my license after few years and suddenly found out there is no more ticket support. I sometimes find IPS support kind of "hard understanding" simple things or asking too many complex questions on simple issue report.

They work on a basis on self constructed pattern, probably as a result of past experience. Possibly it works great, however for simple matters it complicates things. Sometimes it is like writing "100 pages of documentation of a submit button".

From my experience working with customers in my company, I must say customer from before 10 years and customer now are two different sort of person. I may only say that nowadays customer is very demanding but worst in that is fact they act as a senior but have 0 ability of doing things themselves.

[Matt]

Hi,

I'm a little confused as to what help you need, if you let us know what you need a hand with, we'll be happy to assist.

As always, if a ticket needs investigation by a developer or is sensitive in nature, one of our team will convert it into a private email ticket for you.

Thanks

[PatrickRQ]

@Matt, personally none, I just made a comment as a response to momentary frustration of @Mote Marketing, Inc.

[Mote Marketing, Inc.]

Patrick (and Matt), this is hardly a case of "momentary frustration". I've been purchasing and using IPS products since 2007, for Pete's sake. It is an irrefutable fact that the IPS ACP now makes it (at best) difficult, and (at worst) essentially impossible to start a support ticket. It wasn't always that way. I am not a casual, ignorant or lazy end-user...as an FAA LAX air traffic controller and international aircraft accident investigator, I ran $100M+ safety-critical national airspace capital software projects, and am a highly-experienced tech dude in a hugely diverse range of disciplines by virtually any standard. I personally developed the ReachOut365 platform, which is used by some of the world's largest insurance companies, and routinely work with Fortune 500 companies. I'm not bragging; it's just the truth. If I have access to decent self-support, I can resolve 99.9% of any issues that arise. I hate having to start a support ticket and engage in the time-consuming back and forth by email dance and would much rather self-serve. I should not be penalized and jacked around simply because "the rest of the human race is stupid" (to paraphrase Patrick).

On the contrary, with IPS, I do not enjoy such access. Your "Help & Support" pages, despite having voluminous articles, rarely enable me to solve complex issues. Many of them are hopelessly out-of-date, and refer to screens and settings (e.g., social media integration) that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the present realities. Many of them are also extremely "shallow" in terms of necessary detail as well. I fully understand how difficult it is to keep such things updated, but that is not my problem in this case (except that at the end of the day, you've made it "my problem"). On the other hand, you marketing/sales media is first-rate. It's clearly a matter of priorities.

Furthermore, your ACP "Get Support" function explicitly and unavoidably requires the Admin to disable all third-party customizations (in order to even start a ticket). A few days ago, I did that (with extreme hesitation, and for good reason, as it turned out), and when I clicked the "Re-enable customizations" (or similar button), my custom app settings (developed by one of, if not the Number-1 IPS-savvy and experienced [non-IP employee] Devs on Planet Earth), all but one were not re-enabled, which effectively nuked my website. I had to call that Dev to have her re-enable everything, which cost me out-of-pocket). I rarely ask for support, but when I do, after spending thousands on your products over a 15 year period, it shouldn't be such an unmitigated pain in the ass. I've been told by not merely one, but several IPS-expert Developers that we've worked with (in so many words), that, "IPS products are generally really good, but their support absolutely sucks. It's not just "my" opinion...it is a widely-held truism.

Whilst I certainly understand you guys wanting to "channel" the support process to prevent issues that can be thusly resolved (by disabling 3rd-party plugins and apps, etc.). I have better things to do than to bust your balls, but I am extremely unhappy with this convoluted and crappy support ticket process, and I am not the only one by any stretch.

I've already paid my Developer to work around the issue that I was attempting to start a stupid support ticket about, so that's no longer an issue. We have a highly customized site that has cost me tens of thousands to develop. Much of that expense is because the IPS front-end UI is so clearly designed by Developers (rather than talented UI designers), and among other things, so profoundly inefficient (in terms of screen "real estate" usage) and un-intuitive in terms of UXI strategies.

In all fairness, I must also say that, once a support ticket actually somehow gets through, you guys are excellent (for the most part) in resolving issues (provided they don't come anywhere near straying from your frankly draconian definition of what constitutes "covered" topics). I understand that your margins require tight control, but I feel like you guys take it to a rather absurd extreme at times. Again, it wasn't always that way. Perhaps I'm just spoiled by the polar opposite end of the spectrum, such as Rackspace's Support and documentation, which blows your doors off on its worst day. It is hardly surprising or inappropriate for a businessman who has a lot riding on this platform choice to express strident frustration at poor performance.

Even despite the huge pile of cash I've spent to self-resolve the clumsy UI issues (in particular), I am finding myself very seriously wondering if we made a ginormous error in judgment by going with the IPS platform, and the lack of effective, timely support is no small part of that second-guessing. Could you (Matt and IPS) please consider:

1. Streamlining the support ticket process.
2. Focus a bit on bringing your Support articles up-to-date, and;
3. Hire or contract with skilled UXI designers?

Thank you.

Edited January 26, 2022 by Mote Marketing, Inc.

[Runar]

1 hour ago, Mote Marketing, Inc. said:

Focus a bit on bringing your Support articles up-to-date, and;

I also wish for this. It applies to the developer documentation as well, where some articles tell you to do things in ways that will make absolutely sure your resource doesn't get approved to the Marketplace. It's frustrating to the point where I'd rather read the source code directly than try to make sense of the documentation, which in my humble opinion is not a good sign.

I understand and respect that keeping help guides and developer documentation up-to-date is a time-consuming task, but outdated and sometimes wrong documentation is worse than no documentation.

[Daniel F]

37 minutes ago, Runar said:

It applies to the developer documentation as well, where some articles tell you to do things in ways that will make absolutely sure your resource doesn't get approved to the Marketplace

Have you any examples? I remember that somebody reported few guides which we have updated immediately after they were reported.

[Runar]

4 minutes ago, Daniel F said:

Have you any examples?

Thank you for asking! These are the ones I've found the last weeks:

• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/general/autoloading-classes-r6/
  
  General issue: Something is wrong with the text styling on this page.
   
• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/general/caching-r8/
  
  General issue: The section "The caching layer" references several old and no longer supported caching methods, such as ACP and Xcache.
   
• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/development/plugins/complete-example-of-a-plugin-in-ips-community-suite-r50/
  
  The section "Step 5: Making Database Changes" makes several references to altering the core_members table. There is a warning at the top of the section, but the examples and text further down need to be updated.
   
• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/development/applications/versions-and-upgrading-your-application-r51/
  
  References adding a column to the core_groups table.
   
• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/development/extensions/coregroupform-r140/
  
  References adding a column to the core_groups table.

[Brainy S.]

3 hours ago, Mote Marketing, Inc. said:

profoundly inefficient (in terms of screen "real estate" usage) and un-intuitive in terms of UXI strategies.

I do agree that the area of screen real estate design is a huge area of opportunity for IPS and wish there was the ability for people to more easily modify these design choices. Also, it's taken me a long time to get accustomed to the nooks and crannies of the UI and wish this aspect in particular would get a great deal of reconsideration in the future.

With the major change in standard support I really wish this also would further be taken as an opportunity to provide greater (and updated) technical references / documentation to those not using the cloud-based SaaS version of IPS. I often wonder if the lack of such resources is meant to discourage all of the self-hosted IPS users and encourage them to move to the cloud.

That being said, at the end of the day I'm glad for the continued availability of a reasonable price-point for entry for all of us self-hosted users and the ability (if somewhat difficult and frustrating at times) to dig through the volumes of material to cobble together answers from the quite old information scattered throughout the site.

Edited January 26, 2022 by Brainy S.

[Matt]

7 hours ago, Mote Marketing, Inc. said:

Patrick (and Matt), this is hardly a case of "momentary frustration". I've been purchasing and using IPS products since 2007, for Pete's sake. It is an irrefutable fact that the IPS ACP now makes it (at best) difficult, and (at worst) essentially impossible to start a support ticket. It wasn't always that way. I am not a casual, ignorant or lazy end-user...as an FAA LAX air traffic controller and international aircraft accident investigator, I ran $100M+ safety-critical national airspace capital software projects, and am a highly-experienced tech dude in a hugely diverse range of disciplines by virtually any standard. I personally developed the ReachOut365 platform, which is used by some of the world's largest insurance companies, and routinely work with Fortune 500 companies. I'm not bragging; it's just the truth. If I have access to decent self-support, I can resolve 99.9% of any issues that arise. I hate having to start a support ticket and engage in the time-consuming back and forth by email dance and would much rather self-serve. I should not be penalized and jacked around simply because "the rest of the human race is stupid" (to paraphrase Patrick).

On the contrary, with IPS, I do not enjoy such access. Your "Help & Support" pages, despite having voluminous articles, rarely enable me to solve complex issues. Many of them are hopelessly out-of-date, and refer to screens and settings (e.g., social media integration) that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the present realities. Many of them are also extremely "shallow" in terms of necessary detail as well. I fully understand how difficult it is to keep such things updated, but that is not my problem in this case (except that at the end of the day, you've made it "my problem"). On the other hand, you marketing/sales media is first-rate. It's clearly a matter of priorities.

Furthermore, your ACP "Get Support" function explicitly and unavoidably requires the Admin to disable all third-party customizations (in order to even start a ticket). A few days ago, I did that (with extreme hesitation, and for good reason, as it turned out), and when I clicked the "Re-enable customizations" (or similar button), my custom app settings (developed by one of, if not the Number-1 IPS-savvy and experienced [non-IP employee] Devs on Planet Earth), all but one were not re-enabled, which effectively nuked my website. I had to call that Dev to have her re-enable everything, which cost me out-of-pocket). I rarely ask for support, but when I do, after spending thousands on your products over a 15 year period, it shouldn't be such an unmitigated pain in the ass. I've been told by not merely one, but several IPS-expert Developers that we've worked with (in so many words), that, "IPS products are generally really good, but their support absolutely sucks. It's not just "my" opinion...it is a widely-held truism.

Whilst I certainly understand you guys wanting to "channel" the support process to prevent issues that can be thusly resolved (by disabling 3rd-party plugins and apps, etc.). I have better things to do than to bust your balls, but I am extremely unhappy with this convoluted and crappy support ticket process, and I am not the only one by any stretch.

I've already paid my Developer to work around the issue that I was attempting to start a stupid support ticket about, so that's no longer an issue. We have a highly customized site that has cost me tens of thousands to develop. Much of that expense is because the IPS front-end UI is so clearly designed by Developers (rather than talented UI designers), and among other things, so profoundly inefficient (in terms of screen "real estate" usage) and un-intuitive in terms of UXI strategies.

In all fairness, I must also say that, once a support ticket actually somehow gets through, you guys are excellent (for the most part) in resolving issues (provided they don't come anywhere near straying from your frankly draconian definition of what constitutes "covered" topics). I understand that your margins require tight control, but I feel like you guys take it to a rather absurd extreme at times. Again, it wasn't always that way. Perhaps I'm just spoiled by the polar opposite end of the spectrum, such as Rackspace's Support and documentation, which blows your doors off on its worst day. It is hardly surprising or inappropriate for a businessman who has a lot riding on this platform choice to express strident frustration at poor performance.

Even despite the huge pile of cash I've spent to self-resolve the clumsy UI issues (in particular), I am finding myself very seriously wondering if we made a ginormous error in judgment by going with the IPS platform, and the lack of effective, timely support is no small part of that second-guessing. Could you (Matt and IPS) please consider:

1. Streamlining the support ticket process.
2. Focus a bit on bringing your Support articles up-to-date, and;
3. Hire or contract with skilled UXI designers?

Thank you.

Thanks for the through and detailed feedback.

I'm sorry that you had issues with the disable/enable 3rd party customisations tool. Generally we find this to be robust but as with anything in code, it's possible edge cases arise. I'll happily take any logs or information you may have as to way your custom app failed to come back online so we can look for any issues with our code.

I realise it's the "can you turn off your modem and turn it back on again" step is frustrating but when you come onto our side of the fence, you see dozens of tickets a day where something is broken, so we investigate and it sometimes goes through a T1 tech (20-30 mins) then into a developer (60-90 mins) to determine that it's an issue with third party code. This happens daily. In your case with a skilled developer, there's only a slim chance it's the case, but we have to pitch this at the lowest common denominator unfortunately.

We are in a bit of a bind as we're committed to low renewal fees, so the forum app renews at $80/year or just under $7 a month. This doesn't cover a lot of support time or development time, so we really have to make it as streamlined as possible. It's why we're still able to offer email support for our cloud community plans. I would imagine it's why Rackspace are also able to offer support.

In terms of documentation, we do review it but not as often as we would like to. That's a fair comment and I'll review our policy. 

[Daniel F]

4 hours ago, Runar said:

Thank you for asking! These are the ones I've found the last weeks:

• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/general/autoloading-classes-r6/
  
  General issue: Something is wrong with the text styling on this page.
   
• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/general/caching-r8/
  
  General issue: The section "The caching layer" references several old and no longer supported caching methods, such as ACP and Xcache.
   
• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/development/plugins/complete-example-of-a-plugin-in-ips-community-suite-r50/
  
  The section "Step 5: Making Database Changes" makes several references to altering the core_members table. There is a warning at the top of the section, but the examples and text further down need to be updated.
   
• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/development/applications/versions-and-upgrading-your-application-r51/
  
  References adding a column to the core_groups table.
   
• https://invisioncommunity.com/developers/docs/development/extensions/coregroupform-r140/
  
  References adding a column to the core_groups table.

Thanks, will take care of this.

[OptimusBain]

7 hours ago, Runar said:

I also wish for this. It applies to the developer documentation as well, where some articles tell you to do things in ways that will make absolutely sure your resource doesn't get approved to the Marketplace. It's frustrating to the point where I'd rather read the source code directly than try to make sense of the documentation, which in my humble opinion is not a good sign.

I understand and respect that keeping help guides and developer documentation up-to-date is a time-consuming task, but outdated and sometimes wrong documentation is worse than no documentation.

I second this. Many articles are quite outdated. They should be updated as the new features are released.

[Marc]

8 minutes ago, OptimusBain said:

I second this. Many articles are quite outdated. They should be updated as the new features are released.

As mentioned by my colleague above, this is being taken care of

[Jonas Erlandsson]

8 hours ago, Daniel F said:

Have you any examples? I remember that somebody reported few guides which we have updated immediately after they were reported.

I'm quite new in this world, but I, for one, would love some more in-depth examples/guides on how to create/extend the platform. What we have now is the extremely basic Hello World application example, which doesn't cover how to work with the JavaScript framework (it's linked to some other JS framework page that is more of an api documentation than examples), neither does it explain how to work with the menu system. Literally all it does is showing the text "Hello world".

When I've been following guides (i.e the release-notes guide) the active page navigation often disappear so that I have to find the right section in the sidebar, open it and one or two more steps to find the next page. Linking to the next page at the end of the section would be a very easy and welcome addition. It might not be a really big issue, but that sidebar is really cluttered with links making it a bit cumbersome.

Regarding support in general I must say that @Marc Stridgen has been really quick to answer my questions in the forums.

[Matt]

@Jonas Erlandsson What sort of guides would you like to see?

[Jonas Erlandsson]

I think it would be a really cool idea to have a deep diving guide that starts with how to build an application with all its' bells and whistles (not just a text dumping out Hello World), such as menu integration, view files and JavaScript shenanigans.
That application could then serve as a base for a guide on how to build an extension, a plugin and whatever module type you might have.

That would obviously be a big job, but I think that would be a great way to educate people on how to work with your product. In the end that could help bring the need for support down because it would make it easier to debug things on your own as long as you have a the basic understanding about your platform, since the main applications follow the same principle. Does that make sense?

[Mote Marketing, Inc.]

I want to thank Marc S. and the others who responded to my lengthy diatribe. Marc, I sincerely appreciate your willingness to examine issues brought to your attention. As for help articles, I find that in addition to some being materially out-of-date, most are quite superficial, and lack sufficient practical examples to be of any real use. For example, I have been working with a custom IPS Developer for over a year on a highly-customized IPS-powered portal (LiveMusicColorado.com), and still do not have a firm idea regarding how a number of features are intended to work, despite reading and re-reading every help article I can find in your system. See the attached image, which is a screen capture of my browser bookmarks relating to IPS. As this demonstrates, I am totally willing and able to do my own homework, but your Help system just doesn't cut it (unless you're a Developer, in which case, the documentation is reasonably good). An example of features that are not well-documented include "Our Picks".

I also want to say that, whilst I completely understand your requirement to avoid support overhead that results from third-party plugins or dev work, forcing me (a 15 year patron of IPS products) to choose between a) crashing my site, or b) successfully submitting a support ticket, simply because your platform does not, in fact, properly re-enable all of those custom  elements, is a rather crappy and unacceptable answer in my book, and is, as I mentioned previously, inducing us to look very hard at scrapping approx. $20K in IPS custom development costs in favor of a software platform that provides a modicum of accessibility to product support, when a legitimate issue arises.

I'm not merely trying to bust your balls here...my loyalty and commitment to you guys is demonstrated by being a customer since 2007, and the fact that I chose IPS to power an expensive commercial website.

Edited February 4, 2022 by Mote Marketing, Inc.

[Mote Marketing, Inc.]

I would also recommend that you consider implementing "in-line" help within the IPS ACP itself. I crafted such a strategy for our ReachOut365® enterprise content delivery platform that is used by some of the world's largest insurance companies. In our app, many if not all (non-self-explanatory) field labels have a pink underline indicating that there is mouseover help text available. This way, rather than the user having to go view an (out-of-date) external Help article, there is field/feature information right there where you need it). In addition to this, our mouseover help popups often link to more detailed external articles when appropriate (that we constantly update).

[Jonas Erlandsson]

On 2/4/2022 at 10:18 PM, Mote Marketing, Inc. said:

I would also recommend that you consider implementing "in-line" help within the IPS ACP itself. I crafted such a strategy for our ReachOut365® enterprise content delivery platform that is used by some of the world's largest insurance companies. In our app, many if not all (non-self-explanatory) field labels have a pink underline indicating that there is mouseover help text available. This way, rather than the user having to go view an (out-of-date) external Help article, there is field/feature information right there where you need it). In addition to this, our mouseover help popups often link to more detailed external articles when appropriate (that we constantly update).

To me that sounds extremely cluttered and making the tool more cumbersome to work with. I guess that boils down to level of knowledge. At one point that kind of help just becomes a distraction. If applying such a strategy would be on the table I'd ask for a setting where it can be turned off.

 

On 2/4/2022 at 10:05 PM, Mote Marketing, Inc. said:

I am totally willing and able to do my own homework, but your Help system just doesn't cut it (unless you're a Developer, in which case, the documentation is reasonably good).

I wish this was true, but in fact the documentation is a mix of API docs (classes and params), while other pages are guides on how to do things. I'm a developer since 2008 and still find this extremely confusing.

I can start reading an article on how to do X, which gives me a link to Y, and when I click on Y it shows me a class description, but it doesn't tell me how to actually use it. It takes for granted that I know where to put the file.
It would be so much better to completely separate these two types of documentation and have guides/tutorials in one section and API explanations in another, and reference to them from the guides by explicitly calling it what it is.

To me it's even come so far that I don't really use the documentation at all, but rather debug the application to understand how things work under the hood. And that's something I really shouldn't have to do. When I've asked in the forum I don't get any pointers either. Instead you insists on getting direct access to the server to be able to check.
I don't want the support team to log in via SSH to my server to check the installation. That's a huge security risk.
I want to fix it myself by getting pointers where to look so that I can 1) fix it and 2) report back to you what the error was.
If you need to have 100% control over your installation in order to give support you shouldn't sell the on-premise at all.

 

Even if this isn't 100% related I think it's important - when building stuff I need to enable some dev-mode in order to generate some file structure, move over to my editor/IDE and code, then go back into the Developer Central to create some other thing. The entire developer experience is throwing me between my editor/IDE and the ACP. I would highly recommend creating a CLI tool where I can work without the disturbance of switching to the dev central to do things.
This workflow feels like a 2003 type of standard that no one really works by anymore. It feels like you're living in 2012 with no real desire to move into 2022. Hell, you're still even using jQuery.

[Mote Marketing, Inc.]

I was trying to be somewhat charitable, Jonas. 🙂

[Mote Marketing, Inc.]

PS - It's not "cluttered" at all, as it's simply an underline (or other unobtrusive indicator, such as small "Help" info (e.g., "i for info" icons) on or adjacent to existing UI labeling denoting help popups available. That's the entire point (to not clutter the interface with always-displayed help text, but displaying it only when the user wants to see it, which is facilitated by a brief delay in displaying the mousover popup, to avoid inadvertent display unless the user hovers over the desired label for a certain amount of time). The other point is that it intrinsically  ties help "articles" directly to the relevant UI elements). Our users have responded quite favorably to this strategy, and the IPS ACP could really benefit from this, since so many features are not at all "intuitive", in terms of how they are intended to work, or what the correct setup options are for any given scenario. Microsoft and others use this approach extensively, so it's hardly controversial or "ground-breaking". It obviously requires a sound balance between brevity (of a popup) and the verbosity of a full-on external Help article.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Mote Marketing, Inc.

[Marc]

I think at this point these are actually more suggestions than anything support related here. Of course we are always looking at ways to improve the product, and if you feel inline help is something you would like to see in the product, please do post that up in the suggestions area. Suggestions are very much appreciated always.

[InfinityRazz]

Just to chime in here(not support related, sorry 😞 ): 

-Docs of what you can/can't do (or even just a notification header in certain docs) while being hosted on invision cloud would be immensely helpful.. 

Wasted many a hours looking over/understanding some things, just to see that I need to edit some .PHP or something else that is unavailable to me simply because... Cloud 😅

[Marc]

1 minute ago, InfinityRazz said:

Just to chime in here(not support related, sorry 😞 ): 

-Docs of what you can/can't do (or even just a notification header in certain docs) while being hosted on invision cloud would be immensely helpful.. 

Wasted many a hours looking over/understanding some things, just to see that I need to edit some .PHP or something else that is unavailable to me simply because... Cloud 😅

That one is a pretty simple one. You cannot edit files on cloud. If anything mentions editing files, thats not something you can do there