Nice. I have a recent story about this.

Basically, we have a process to sell something that is too big, complex and extensive for smaller customers so the idea was to drastically reduce this process to be able to give smaller customers the ability to sell that process.

So, in January, I got an email with the assignment to do this. Since we don’t do it like this, I say he should submit a ticket in our tracker and plan it into a release to have some sort of structure and organisation in what is being done and when. Such a thing should also happen with our project manager because, well, he is the person managing what is being worked on so he should know what is going on and what is important. This doesn’t happen.

4 Months later, the person sending the mail asked me what the status of that is, I didn’t know because I was busy with our other stuff that actually followed our organisation.

This feature is super-duper important and already promised to some customers so it needs to happen quickly. Okay, we plan it in a release and I start working on it. The Plan was that since this was a “1 Task Process”, doing that in our existing process, wouldn’t make much sense and we decided to do this in a separate process that then relies on the codebase of our “main” process. While working on it, more and more issues popped up that made it really complicated to do it like that because our existing code just relied on a lot of things even if they are not in use. This meant that, to use it in the capacity as I needed, I would have to rip a lot of stuff out of the existing codebase and made this more commonly useable even though this wasn’t “used” in the process anyway.

Yes, that sounds weird but you need to know that this is a codebase grown over 15 years so weird things are to be expected.

I do all of that and the sales team has a meeting and I was asked if I had already something that could be presented there, which I had, sort of.

This is presented in that meeting and suddenly this is not enough. “There needs to be other places to be involved in this as well and the customer needs to be able to make changes after the fact”.

So, from the initial “1 Task process” we are now at a more complex process to handle the additional stuff of involving a separate entity of the customer, starting another process and being able to make changes to the initial variables.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with changing things, but the utter lack of thought or planning of the person submitting the feature request is what drives me nuts. I mean, you had 4 months to think about what this should do and all you could come up with were 4 bullet points that just barely resemble the current state. Adding to that, the constant emphasis on “This is important and needs to happen ASAP”. I mean, in literally every mail that person sent to me was the “this is very important, this needs to be priority”.

It is like, yeah dude, I got that the 2nd time you wrote that to me but you could have at least invested some time yourself to properly think about this more than 10 minutes. To maybe notice that what you want isn’t enough to do what you need.

Yeah, got the mail yesterday. VIP member for 6 years and immediately cancelled it.

I mean, I am okay with paying for something that I use but double the price just like that? Nope.

“Smart” apparently doesn’t mean “it does things on its own” but simply “you can control it over our app”

Some other perspective here…

I think that this information would be possible to highlight, you could, for example, have an announcement channel that is read only for the regular users.

However, that doesn’t mean that this will reduce the number of questions though.

Even discord has a search function, granted it is not great but still, if you are willing to search for something you would be able to find it.

But this is the problem. For your regular users, it is much easier to simply ask that redundant question again and again instead of doing the least amount of searching yourself.

Heck, I had questions in some communities in which I copied the question in the title and searched on Google for it and got an answer in the first result.

What I want to say with this is that those redundant questions will be asked regardless of the platform.

What I think is worse about discord, especially as a help or support platform, is that it is a walled garden. All the knowledge accumulated there is locked away and cannot be found unless you are on discord and search for it. At least on reddit or Lemmy, you can still find the answer for something if you are looking for it.

I think that discord can work as a platform but only to a number of users. I have such a thing for a plugin that I am maintaining but there are not even 30 people on there. But I also give direct support and figure out issues that are either because the user did something wrong or it is an issue with the plugin. If it is a reaccuring problem I put that in the wiki or the FAQ otherwise, it is a bug report as a new issue so that the information are something you could find.

Not only that but GW2 also can link items and skills in the chat so that someone else can view them. And the best part is that this also works with the wiki command.

So, for example, you found an item and want to know what it is and what you can use to for, just link it after /wiki and you are redirected to the full page of that item.

Unfortunately, I lately have issues with firefox in which the first wiki command somehow screws with my firefox and thinks that it needs to restart before being able to work correctly.

• Guild Wars 2: 7634 hours
• Guild Wars: 3776 Hours
• Oxygen not Included: 1746 hours
• Terraria: 560 hours
• Elite Dangerous: 546 hours

Probably get devoured by a Titan (Attack on Titan)

I use a pihole which is a small computer that checks every domain request and blocks them when they are on one of my blacklists. This works great for browsing the web because you just don’t see most ads anymore. I also use adblocks for, for example, YouTube because pihole can’t distinguish between ads or legitimate requests when they come from the same domain.

I also download all videos from YouTube to watch. And I also don’t have cable.

Basically, I see so few instances of ads anymore that any few ads are getting so annoying. The 1-2 ads in front of a YouTube video or in the middle, I just don’t watch that video anymore.

But when I really noticed that was when I was spending the day with my father and we were watching a TV show on some free provider, every 10 minutes there were 1.5 minutes ads. Which is by far better as normal TV in my country (Germany) but damn, this was really annoying after just a single episode and I’m glad I don’t have to see those at home. It just interrupts the flow.