Why Sencha is moving its support forums to Stack Overflow
On January 1st, Sencha plans to switch its primary support forum from a hosted solution to Stack Overflow. Obviously, we’re flattered, but we think we’re the right place to support any developer community. Other framework and library creators have answered questions about their products here before—check out this answer from curl creator Daniel Stenberg. But we don’t often have companies use us as the first line of support.
For those that don’t know, Sencha Ext JS is a mature JavaScript framework for creating desktop-quality applications that run either in any browser or as a native application and has been around for about ten years. The framework is object-oriented, modular, and extensible. It handles a lot of the busywork of an application, including object lifecycle, themes, layout, data storage, Ajax communication, and more. They even have UI libraries that can be used across any other JavaScript framework.
We talked to the general manager of the Sencha brand, Kegan Blumenthal, about why they decided to move their support forum and what that means for users of the framework in the future.
Scaling to keep pace with support
About two years ago, Sencha was acquired by Idera. Before then, support was handled directly by the same engineers writing the code, architecting new features, and improving the product. “That was pretty luxurious, in my opinion,” says Blumenthal. “But at the same time, not sustainable.” No company can grow a software business while having their most senior developers constantly manning the support lines.
Naturally, long-time customers who had grown accustomed to having all questions answered by the folks who wrote the code grumbled. The forums became more a lot of noise, distracting from the actual support going on. “I think that they feel that the quality of solutions that have been presented in the forum has gone down,” says Blumenthal. “They’re probably right. Mostly because of the fact that the people who wrote those features are not the ones responding anymore.”
All that noise was drowning the actual work of answering questions. Sencha has free users as well as premium users, which they call platinum. And those paying customers were getting lost on the forums. “With so much noise and our platinum customers using the same forums for support, it was really hard for our team to decipher who’s who,” says Blumenthal. Platinum customers will still have direct access to company support, but through a gated forum, to ensure that they get the value that they are paying for.
“A more modern approach”
Sencha already has a bustling community using Stack Overflow. There are already 24,000 questions using the ‘extjs’ tag. Their developer users—some two million in total, 300,000 of whom visit the site every month—are already using Stack Overflow as part of a hybrid support approach. This just makes it official. It makes sense; if a customer doesn’t find an answer on the official forums, they turn to a search engine. And that search engine finds us.
On top of that, Stack Overflow is a better way to surface questions and answers than bulletin board software. We’ve got robust search and a pretty strong presence in search results. “Obviously you guys index,” says Blumenthal. “Our bulletin board doesn’t. So I think the SEO benefits and also the search features that you guys have is really helpful; what we have currently doesn’t match up.”
Along with moving their customers over, they’ll also be moving their support engineer teams, as well as encouraging their most active customers to continue posting answers when the forum moves to read-only access. “We have an MVP program, and so we’re going to put a contest in place in those first 30 days for the most answers,” says Blumenthal. “There’s a number of prizes that we’ll publicly announce, mostly differing levels of Amazon gift cards and swag. You guys have those leaderboards so makes it pretty easy.”
While this process has just been announced, Sencha will be providing more detail to their customers on what their customers need to do once the move is official. We’re excited to have more developers participate in our community, and we look forward to seeing them build a wealth of knowledge about Ext JS on our site.
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“We have an MVP program, and so we’re going to put a contest in place in those first 30 days for the most answers,” says Blumenthal. “There’s a number of prizes that we’ll publicly announce, mostly differing levels of Amazon gift cards and swag. You guys have those leaderboards so makes it pretty easy.”
So now you’re adding incentives to post answers other than rep, or _helping_ users. This is a _Quantity over Quality_ approach, and as such it’s not a fit with SO’s mission of Quality Q&A.
Stack Overflow isn’t doing anything to incentivize users beyond the reputation system. Sencha has selected a group of active users to provide answers to questions on their tags. Those answers still have to meet our regular quality standards. We think it’s pretty cool that other companies want to use our forums for their official support; it says a lot about the quality of the folks who come here.
This is a terrible move by Sencha.
SoundCloud did something similar, driving people to Stack Overflow for “official support”. It lead s to tons of support questions along the lines of “my account is broken” that could only be answered by actual SoundCloud support people with access to internal SoundCloud account tooling. Those questions are closed, downvoted, and general a source of a lot of negative feelings in both directions for the asker and for the community.
Case in point, the most recent SoundCloud question as of writing, is somebody clearly thinking they’re talking to some kind of official SoundCloud support, asking about the status of a monetary transaction on their account:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58877927/payment-on-soundcloud
Downvoted, closed, yet the OP has no recourse but to say “but soundcloud support doesn’t help and there was link here”.
Your customers still need a support channel that is *not* Stack Overflow, closing their own support forums is just going to lead to their customers being extremely disappointment or angry at the reception they get on Stack Overflow.
> We think it’s pretty cool that other companies want to use our forums for their official support;
“Our forums”? Stack Exchange has forums now?
“We have an MVP program, and so we’re going to put a contest in place in those first 30 days for the most answers,” says Blumenthal. “There’s a number of prizes that we’ll publicly announce, mostly differing levels of Amazon gift cards and swag. You guys have those leaderboards so makes it pretty easy.”
This is antithetical to the values of Stack Overflow. Please don’t
Stack Overflow promotes rewarding participation like they do with the contents here https://contests.stackoverflow.com/. Which I like to think is a pretty exciting feature to help drive swag to those who help out and garner Stack Overflow reputation.
I don’t want rewarding from Stackoverflow, I want some respect from Sencha for being a customer for so long now. I am still there, even after the takeover and the lot of fuzz that was spread over the internet by the former collegues of Sencha. I even see that “die hard” Sencha addicts, like Jesus Garcia (author of a book about Ext JS and Loiane Groaner (another author of a Sencha Ext JS book) seem to have moved away from Sencha Ext JS. But again, I am still there and I love your products, but as a company you always seems to have another unpleasant surprise for your customers. Maybe that should be an issue at the boarding table next time, add with some reflections from you long lasting and loyal customers.
Sencha forum was not only about Q&A. It was also about bug reports and feature requests. Lots of users update the framework to the latest sources and provide feedback shortly it they spot a bug or see something that can be improved. In most cases users provide workarounds and expect Sencha to apply a proper fix in the future releases. That’s why direct communication with core developers made sense. Rayn, how do you see posting bug reports and feature requests on StackOverflow? Don’t you think that having StackOverflow as the main communication channel is just an attempt to move the “noise” and pass the responsibility over to the end users? I don’t think you’ll get new users with the transfer. We all are developers and use StackOverflow this or that way. To my mind it will only bring you the overload of questions.
And further alienation of the customer. Sencha really needs other ways to get Ext JS back in popularity with the community and this step is not one of them. Mi14 I totally agree, I feel exactly like the same.
Great questions. Bugs are a huge concern of ours and something we really want to do a better job with. So we really want to drive bug reporting and repair efficiency up! And we realize that in order to do this, we need to work our support process much more vigorously which provides an efficient means of reporting bugs for free. This process allows us to engage with customers’ issues quicker. Where the support personnel can triage the bug and get it into the engineering queue. It also allows us to respond to bugs faster, because the support crew becomes your advocate in getting the bug fixed. Overall the bug reporting is free, the support personnel becomes your engineering advocate and helps you find a way around the issue. This I think is the perfect mix to help drive reporting efficiency! Please contact us at any time if you have a problem with entering bugs through support.
The same could be said for feature requests. Feature requests can be submitted for free as well. I’m listening everywhere I can for feature requests too.
We also have another program for providing feedback directly into the core teams. And that’s with the MVP program.
If for some reason you don’t feel like your heard ask for me in the support portal, and I’ll get on and help out.
I’m just reading this now because Sencha has closed the forum completely as of today… It leads us to this page here…
“We also have another program for providing feedback directly into the core teams. And that’s with the MVP program.”
I’m a MVP of several years yet I’ve never had access, feedback or anything else from “core teams”… This might be a case of what you “envision” is not the “actual” experience you are talking about…
This does not exactly boost my confidence in Sencha. We have a paid support contract, and we have experienced this scenario multiple times:
1) We report a problem.
2) Sencha support acknowledges that it is indeed a bug in Sencha.
3) Nothing happens.
4) Nothing continues to happen; the bug never gets fixed.
@Torsten Martinsen
That’s exactly what we experienced as well. In some very rare cases we got an override, but I think in more cases we told Sencha what the problem was. But even then, the bugs were not fixed. I also can’t really see the improvements mentioned on the website. In 7.3.1 there are several bugs related to the Virtual Store that are even denied to be a bug. After several fiddles and explanations, however, it was then realized. And these are really serious bugs from my point of view. Try for example the Column Filter in combination with a Virtual Store in 7.3.1. The result you will get is pretty much random.
Hi Torsten, I apologize for your poor experience. Feel free to rope me into the ticket you’re getting blocked on. I’d like to make sure things are flowing smoothly for you.
It’s our goal to provide high quality support all the time. And when I find things like this I like to find out why and how we can do a better job. I appreciate the feedback! We’re taking great strides to serve our customers better everyday.
We’ve put a hug emphasis on fixing more bugs more often. We’re getting close to finishing up our 7.1 development cycle with a focus on bug fixes. And we’re currently planning the 7.2 dev cycle. Our focus is to make the product better!
This might also be of interest to read about some of the things we’re working on.
https://www.sencha.com/blog/fall-sencha-gm-update/
I can understand the desire to do this, but would it not make more sense to set up a Stack Exchange site for Sencha, and to route any strictly programming based questions to Stack Overflow?
Hi Brandon, could you please detail how to report bugs these days. I used to report them on the forum and I cannot find any information anywhere on how to report bugs nowadays. You said your support process provided an important means of reporting bugs for free. So I tried to use our account for support.sencha.com and opened a bug ticket. This, however, was charged from our credits. So where is the free way of reporting bugs?
I am a customer of Sencha for over 10 years and this move really flabbergasted me. As a commercial customer I’d like to communicate with other Ext JS using customers/developers. Sometimes I have an Ext JS question, but the original forum had also a good form of communicating about Sencha as a company and their atttitude towards their customers and users. With the elimination of the original Sencha forum, I feel that Sencha has stepped away another big step in taking their customers serious.
In the perspective of Ext JS support from the community the figures mentioned on how popular Stackoverflow is, is totally irrelevant to me. I use Stackoverflow a lot, but not for professional Sencha support and discussion.
I want the forum back, at least for communcating about releases, suggestions and to contact other professional Ext JS users.
Good post guys!
Ahh classic Sencha, instead of putting article of the desired form that you’re trying to reach in the archive they once again said “who cares about the developers who actually need to use this ducktape of a framework”, and remind us all that we are paying for this level documentation.
Please just let us do our work and access the old archive that have solutions to problems we need to solve. If we had documentation that was any good we would read that instead of relying on others Fiddles.
I’m convinced now that the SO experiment has failed. The forum was (and is) indexable and an encyclopedia of knowledge.
SO, Slack, Disord or whatever isn’t going to replace forums, perhaps someone in the community should launch unofficial forums until Sencha gets it. (they’ve clearly missed the point with SO, which is ok, but generally I find answers on JavaScript there very average.
It’s another cost cutting exercise, which didn’t work. Time to rethink