Hello again PK, and thanks for your thoughts.
We're glad that having the technical support team more involved is making a noticeable difference, and your feedback is very helpful as we try to get better. I want to elaborate on your point about the responses on this list. One of the things you see us doing -- redirecting users to other forums -- is very intentional. While this list is an appropriate (and encouraged) venue for open discussion, there are better platforms for specific programming <http://stackoverflow.com> and system administration <http://serverfault.com> questions, and we want to encourage people to use those when appropriate. This isn't because we want to ignore the question -- we answer a lot of questions on StackExchange sites as well -- but for visibility, which has two very different benefits for the user community at large. First, we encourage people to move the appropriate questions to StackExchange sites in order to get you an answer faster: there are many more eyeballs on StackOverflow than in this mailing list; this attention means more chances for the help you need. Second, the visibility of those questions and answers is a lot better on a Stack Exchange Q&A site than on this mailing list. A Google search for "App Engine eventual consistency <https://www.google.com/search?q=app+engine+eventual+consistency&oq=app+engine+eventual+consistency&aqs=chrome..69i57.5344j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=app+engine+eventual+consistency>" demonstrates what I mean -- the first page is dominated by official docs and StackOverflow questions, not mailing list archives. We feel that if somebody (including us) is going to help you with a tough technical problem, that work should be as useful as possible, and that usefulness includes helping the next person who encounters the same issue. You were also wondering whether our organization monitors for responses: we do, but not in the way you imply. Our aim is to be helpful and informative, not verbose. Simply put, if the direction of a conversation makes us think that we in the support org can give useful input, we give it. If it needs attention from a product manager or our legal team, we internally raise that flag. And if there's nothing we can do besides acknowledge that we heard you, we try to do that. Perhaps, in our attempts to improve on our prior "neglect" of the mailing lists, we're being too chatty, and we'll definitely keep that possibility in mind going forward. Regards, -- Jesse J. Scherer Technical Program Manager, Google Cloud Support jsche...@google.com On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 6:05:18 PM UTC-4, PK wrote: > > Hi, > > Just a couple of thoughts I wanted to share for a while but two responses > in the list today triggered this. > > For a while now I see Google Technical Support monitoring this list and > responding to threads and this is very positive. For those of use who have > been with GAE for a long time, this is refreshing after the absolute > neglect that followed the early days with the participation of the > developers themselves. > > However, I see a pattern I do not like. I feel that at times you do reply > just so that you reply without adding a lot of value. For instance, many of > the very quick responses that can be summarized as “this is not the right > forum for this question” or today’s “I cannot tell you if this is a bug and > when will be fixed but programs break input into buffers and sometime they > do not properly reassemble them, so here you have an explanation” make me > wonder if they add any value or just help increase a metric of responses > your organization is monitoring. > > Again just my 2c, > PK > p...@gae123.com > > PS I suspect this is the wrong forum for this kind of feedback and > apologize in advance. > > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/6e309e11-a07e-436e-b9fe-6f9984e7213f%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
