I am not sure where to start with all this. I cant believe you guys did all this along with a site redesign at the same time and no notice period, I am speechless!
I cant believe I will be losing email support while you increase the price at the same time. I paid for priority support and now that's an insane price per year for what is email support. It takes serious cahoonas to both increase the price and cripple email support at the same time. Email support pricing should be far far more reasonable, I honestly thought $1250 was a mistake when I saw the screenshot above, I could understand having an email support pricing tier and then a $1250 priority support tier but also renewals shouldnt be going up while we lose proper email support.
Then if we dont pay for support we cant use the market place and cant even save our prior purchases so if we need to reinstall an addon we are out of luck.
We are lucky, we can afford the support increase price wise but one of the HUGE reasons I liked IPB was the email support, it can be very curt at times but I valued it and if you had only increased the price and not removed email support I would have dealt with it as it has been a decade.
I am strongly considering renewing our Xenforo license to have a play and test viability after this.
Initial feedback:
Build the knowledge base publicly first before removing support
I understand the desire to have self support with a knowledge base, its a good thing for everyone if it gets populated but you should have been doing this months ago building the knowledge base publicly before doing any changes, that way you can point to the option and say its there and useful. Get a common ticket theme in, create a KB article then have the subject field for support request do a search as you type pointing you to articles that sounds similar before submitting the email request.
We need a reported/acknowledged bugs area
This needs to be along with the knowledge base really, a bug tracker would have cut your support requests because people would be able to see if it has been reported before, I know the support forum kinda does that but its not a bug tracker and its not clear if its an active bug with a fix pending or release or even workaround.
When I hit an issue on other software I always check to see if it has been reported first on bug trackers but because of the strange mantra of open a ticket you guys have we are blind to upcoming fixes usually until release, Jordon has at least been mentioning them but its still not a proper solution.
Both things above should have been done before these policy changes with support
That way your customers would have become familiar with them and you could have iterated through any issues with them before removing email support and you could actually see if this type of support works well before causing big issues for your customers, it seems so rushed.
You guys made the whole "tickets are similar" problem yourselves with the submit a ticket mantra that is here, you should have been correcting that before making sweeping changes to support. You have entered self support mantra with none of the real tools used by others to help aid people do this. You may have plans for these tools but you literally have not shown them to us which is crazy if they exist. Right now we have a sole forum for support, I have no idea why you have rushed this through.
I have more to say but I thought I would shoot out first.
Please get the knowledge base live and a bug tracker live asap to at least help and to be honest delay the email support changes past the renewal/January deadline until this mess is sorted and people are comfortable, this should be a much much slower transition.
Also contributors/devs need a discount/special license to prevent the massive bleed that will happen.
Its crazy you dont have a way of reducing their burden and its a major issue to the viability of the market place and IPB. Their are fewer addons here than other competitors and it will only get worse with dev's having to pay large amounts to renew AND customers of devs having to pay to even buy their addons or even install them. This is crazy crazy crazy and so hostile to developers. Its one of the main reasons no one wants a certain v5 of software out there, regularly people complain about the lack of addons.
You could get them to apply with the proviso the license isnt used to sell addons not on the marketplace and not run a full site on. Aka they can have a public site showcasing with the options etc and even getting support there but it cant be a way for a serious site that has nothing to do with the developer to get a cheap license. Hell they could apply after they have published an addon and the large discount applies to the renewals side of it.
I am really disappointed some of the best developers here are now looking at possibly removing addons to reduce their burden rather than developing for those addons and being able to test on those addons, its so opposite and harmful because of the increased costs.
And there was me thinking things had improved a lot when @Jordan Miller with communications and community activity, I actually could see things improving a lot with better engagement with end customers then this whole chaos happens.
