Gecko Tribe Forums

[antone]

I have a challenge, and I thought I'd ask for your comments on how to address it.

The problem is that between tech support, performing installations, adding features, fixing bugs, working on the next generation versions of programs, maintaining websites, and marketing, it's often difficult (more like impossible) to keep on top of everything. Usually that means that programming work doesn't get done (since it requires the most concentration and is thus hardest to do when a million things are on my mind).

The question is, what incentives can I provide to CaRP users to help each other with tech support questions and perhaps installation service? My thoughts:

* I'd rather avoid from anything that involves monetary compensation, since that would replace tech support with accounting and detecting and dealing with abuse (eg. if I were to pay $x for each question answered in the forum, people would post questions under one name and answer them under another).

* I'd like to encourage those of you who answer others' questions to put a link to your site in you sig in the forum so that the more you post, the more inbound links you get. (Of course, if people start posting empty fluff posts, I'll delete them--please don't abuse the system!)

* I'd be happy to build a page linking to "CaRP Experts" to hilight people who make a significant contribution to the community.

* If you sell (or give away) CaRP-related products (I've seen training videos, templates, etc.), I'd be happy to build a directory of such things and link to you...as long as you're not competing directly with something I'm selling.

* In fact, if there's somebody out there who'd like to be paid to install CaRP for people, I'd consider linking to you instead of to me for that service. You'd work entirely independantly--payments would NOT run through me (again, I don't want to replace one kind of work with accounting and abuse prevention). ...of course, I've got to look out for my customers (who are disclosing their passwords to whoever does the installation), so I'm not sure what it would take for me to put that level of trust in someone else who I don't really know.

Any thoughts?
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Antone Roundy

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[bupaje]

[mportable]

Antone,
I'm really interested in the community sharing advanced tips on how we are combining Carp, Grouper, and Moray. Incentives are always great, but I don't have a solution for that yet, only some tips for better forum integration.

Would you add some more sections to the forums?

Would you add sections for:
-- Advanced Tips for CaRP Evolution (sub-section under carp)
-- Advanced Tips for Grouper Evolution ( sub-sectionunder grouper)
-- Advanced Tips for Moray (sub-section under a new moray section) It doesn't fall under just Carp or Grouper, so it is hard to chat about it. This piece of code has a lot of potential, but has very little info on how to integrate it into each of our setups.
-- Feature Requests section. In this section users could vote and comment on what they would like you to focus on for the future.

You give a vast amount of examples that cover all the basic usage on the website, and the provided general help sections are great for discussing that. But the people with more advanced setups don't have a dedicated section to chat about usage and tips. I'm sure these are the people that take up a significant amount of your time answering questions. Maybe with a sub-section for these questions we can alleviate some of the burden on you by helping each other, or at least have it separate from the general questions.

Thanks,
Mike

[antone]

[bupaje]

I'll add one more to that list - Showcase. Let your users showcase what they are doing with your scripts on their sites (probably have to add a blurb about non-hate, racist etc sites only). This will do some selling work for you.

Also if you instituted a point system you could occasionaly have a drawing from among the MVP's for a free product. This doesn't have to cost you money. On my old site I was able to get lots of prizes for free in exchange for showcasing a related product. For example you could contact TopStyle, Wrox or other publishers of PHP books, some of the larger news syndicators etc and ask if they would be interested in providing a prize in exchange for a
"This contest generously sponsored by _________. Check out their products here _____________ and you can read a review of __________ here."

If you can deliver targeted traffic some are willing to do this - I had great luck with this myself and they sponsored several thousand dollars worth of prizes the last 2-3 years I had the site -you can let them mail it as it saves you a headache and makes them feel secure. It all depends on the amount of traffic you have and/or number of users.

There are other options but this might be one way to entice help without having to dig into your pocket.

[Patrick]

Showcasing is generally a good idea, because it leverages everybody's desire to show off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoboo

But a better idea still is adding Showcases to the example code library, aka "How to do this"

Note: 90% of people want to do something somebody else has done, 10% innovate.

So competent people and experts need an area to show off in (non-forum, no-noise, easily accessible, open code and categorised area) to feed the crowd of hungry people.

Of vourse, this doesn't help with my own stupidity but anyway.

cheers!

[mrLenin]

[Kuyumcus]

I will try to give some ideas for you.
Make a ticket system for Carp
Carp Free: Three tickets that user who add Carp code to their web site. Each ticket can contain more question but one ticket mean one post to you.
Carp Koi: 10 ticket at initial, 3 ticket per month. After every update, user can get more 5 ticket at initial. You can give small contribution to who solve the tickets. (eg: 50 cent per ticket) The ticket owner should have one website with upgrading Carp Koi. Also only registered experts can solve the tickets. So they can not do tricks to get money from you. Because if they try to make cheat, they have to upgrade new Carp Koi:)
Carp Evolution: 20 ticket at initial, 5 ticket per month. The same as at above.
PS: You can solve the tickets yourself in the free Carp. Two reason, first you don't need to give money without any sale, second you can encourage user to upgrade Koi or evolution. Or if you can give permission to solve tickets to Carp experts, and after ticket if they can encourage user to upgrade Koi or evolution you can give comission to them. So ticket solving will be free in free version but you will have more opportunity to think about other problems:)


May be it make sense for you.I hope it will be useful for you:)

[markwaldin]

Antone,

You could avoid a huge number of support issues if you would clearly document your product. Right now it is like a chinese puzzle to understand to do anything but the basics.

What I have been able to do with it is wonderful. At $30 for Carp Evolution it is a very good bargain. However, I have probably spent $200 of my own time (probably much more than that) trying to decipher your explanations and lack thereof about these commands and the relationships between moray, grouper and carp.

I would like to suggest that you document your software thoroughly and raise the price to $60. I would have gladly paid the extra $30 to get decent documentation.

Right now I would not recommend this product to anyone. Much too frustrating.

[kimhav]

Agree that documentation is vital for any project to survive; but I wouldn't go that far to say that I wouldn't recommend CaRP to other users; I found this component last night and I've already passed on the url to CaRP to several other site and community developers.

Also about the showcase or when a proper solution has been provided I would highly suggest that the code to set up what ever there was need for get posted as well here; as qiute a few already does. But, that of course makes it easier for people to se what the different config parameters does and doesn't. That for me was what I spent some time on to figure out.

[fcord23]

I think having the link backs to those who answer questions for others is excellent.

[Myday]

I bought Carp Evolution 4 on August 27 and I haven't done anything
with it yet...

I really want to get an Amazon feed on my WP blog but I'm chicken
about trying to install it... I really would appreciate getting help with
that and would even pay a small fee.

Please...anyone?

Fran