Hi all,
I've been hanging out on this Google Group since I joined Heroku about 9
months ago and I've been answering questions where I can. I also hang
out and try to answer questions on StackOverflow, Twitter, Google Plus,
Facebook, my blog, and a few other places where the Heroku community is
asking questions. Honestly it's a bit overwhelming to have so many
channels to follow. We want to help the community in every way we can,
but there are only a handful of us spread very thin across all of the
sources of questions. What this leads to is the kind of frustration
we've seen here in the past when questions are not answered by qualified
folks in a timely fashion. If we don't consolidate, we run the risk
that we will do a poor job on all of them.
We could just stop answering questions here and leave the group open but
because the group is named "heroku" I think people come here expecting
that Heroku people will be here answering questions. (Please tell me if
that assumption is incorrect.)
If the Heroku community wants a place to converse then maybe another
community run group named something like "heroku-fans" or
"heroku-community" would set expectations more accurately.
Thanks for participating in this discussion! We really are trying to
provide better and more consistent help, not the opposite. Help us help
you. :)
-James
On 04/25/2012 01:38 PM, Jeff Schmitz wrote:
Another topic - where/how to troubleshoot. This group offers immediate
support for troubleshooting, including posts like "Anbody else seeing
XYZ" which neither support.heroku.com <http://support.heroku.com> nor SO
can help with.
I'm not opposed to using SO, but some of the traffic here would be off
limits there.
On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Sara Dornsife <s...@heroku.com
<mailto:s...@heroku.com>> wrote:
Let me apologize again for the miscommunication. I screwed up. Let
me also elaborate on my previous response.
As you know (and hopefully one of the reasons you guys love us), we
move fast. Sometimes, too fast. This went from an idea to a note in
a newsletter very quickly without the appropriate process we should
apply to it. I take responsibility for this.
We want to involve you guys. By definition, if you're on this list,
you are passionate supportive developers that we love and consider a
core part of Heroku. This step was inappropriately skipped.
Here's the baseline we're operating from:
- Through support, we hear regularly from users who are frustrated
with this group and the lack of response they received.
- Prospects are looking for a thriving community as part of their
evaluation of Heroku. I say "prospects" here meaning individual
developers, not just "enterprise" level customers. This Google Group
isn't that. The traffic is low enough that it appears to mean we
don't have an active community.
- Stack Overflow has to grown to actually be a better place for
getting answers many times than this Google Group. Traffic there is
WAY higher than this group.
- Heroku would like to officially participate more actively in
community work. Spreading our efforts has a cost.
With that baseline, we have discussed internally focusing our users
and community efforts on Stack Overflow. That consideration should
have been discussed here, soliciting your feedback and suggestions.
While we didn't get the sequence right, we do have the discussion
going now. Let's treat it as that - a discussion.
I see a few topics to discuss:
- Focusing Heroku's community efforts in SO
- Leaving this group up
- Shutting this group down
- Other ideas
Am I missing anything?
Sara
On Apr 25, 2012, at 1:28 PM, Ted Husted wrote:
> Hmmm, if any of us here agreed with any of those (unsubstantiated)
> statements, then we wouldn't be here.
>
> -Ted.
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 2:22 PM, Sara Dornsife <s...@heroku.com
<mailto:s...@heroku.com>> wrote:
>> I'm Sara Dornsife, Dir of Dev Mktg at Heroku. Sorry for not
introducing
>> myself earlier. Also sorry for not posting here about wanting to
close this
>> list before it hit the newsletter.
>>
>> List traffic has been low and very often the questions/comments
posted here
>> are best resolved on support.heroku.com
<http://support.heroku.com>. At the same time, Stackoverflow
>> usage has continued to grow and the community there is very active.
>>
>> For those reasons, we feel its best to consolidate to support and
>> Stackoverflow.
>> Sara
>>
>>
>> On Apr 25, 2012, at 12:39 PM, Justin Houk wrote:
>>
>> I agree with Jeff. FWIW, I find the SO community to be
micromanaging,
>> pedantic, and downright annoying to try to interact with.
Which, I guess,
>> is why I'm here and not there.
>>
>> On the other hand, I guess it shows how little Heroku takes this
list
>> seriously that we hear about this announcement from the
newsletter and not
>> here? The community does lose some value without a certain level of
>> interest and support from Heroku proper.
>>
>> --Justin
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Jeff Schmitz
<jeffrey.j.schm...@gmail.com <mailto:jeffrey.j.schm...@gmail.com>>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I agree.
>>>
>>> Stack Overflow is completely different from a mailing list. Here
>>> discussion is encouraged. There, it is penalized and can be
edited or
>>> deleted.
>>>
>>> I suppose we can create our own google group?
>>>
>>> jeff
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 12:28 PM, David Whatley
<nsxda...@gmail.com <mailto:nsxda...@gmail.com>>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> For the record, this is the way I keep abreast of all the
heroku things.
>>>> Doing away with it is sheer madness. The sort of bad
decisionss I saw
>>>> coming the sad day Salesforce came into the picture. I warned
them... This
>>>> is going to change you no matter what they say. And it has.
>>>>
>>>> David
>>>>
>>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>>
>>>> On Apr 25, 2012, at 12:17 PM, Neil Middleton
<neil.middle...@gmail.com <mailto:neil.middle...@gmail.com>>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> In order to play devils advocate here (I'm not saying if I'm
on one side
>>>> of the fence or the other):
>>>>
>>>> 1) The group isn't a great archive for problems as the
specific problems
>>>> tend to be buried in email threads.
>>>> 2) For a lot of the problems on here, support.heroku.com
<http://support.heroku.com> is probably the
>>>> best place to go.
>>>> 3) The StackOverflow tag on SO is remarkably active:
>>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/heroku
>>>> 3) Google have already done this with some success:
>>>>
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/google-appengine/Z6XN_64cA7w
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Neil
>>>>
>>>> On Wednesday, 25 April 2012 at 18:12, Alex Chaffee wrote:
>>>>
>>>> fIn the latest Heroku Newsletter[1], it says this group will
be killed
>>>> at the end of April, and suggests instead to go to
support.heroku.com <http://support.heroku.com>
>>>> (which is private) or stackoverflow.com
<http://stackoverflow.com>. While SO is awesome, is it
>>>> really an adequate replacement for this group? I've found that
SO is a
>>>> great complement to mailing lists but doesn't allow for the
same kind
>>>> of deep discussion and community building. Worse, it requires
active
>>>> attention rather than arriving in one's inbox, so the people
who are
>>>> most likely to have an answer to a question are the least
likely to
>>>> hear it -- since they're not having any problems.
>>>>
>>>> Why uproot a productive community (this mailing list) and hope
that it
>>>> migrates to a new place with a radically different interaction
model?
>>>>
>>>> [1]
>>>>
http://lists.heroku.com/t/ViewEmail/r/6DFC781E555FD71E/CEC5941F8B0A6F4BC5EC08CADFFC107B
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Alex Chaffee - a...@stinky.com <mailto:a...@stinky.com>
>>>> http://alexchaffee.com
>>>> http://twitter.com/alexch
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Justin Houk
>> Co-Founder, 10x10 Room
>> http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6055184
>> http://10x10room.com
>> http://playconclave.com
>>
>>
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