The future of items support

Hi all.

We are working on some better tools to help you support your items, but they’re a little way off yet. If you’re big enough to think about setting up your own forums, I wouldn’t wait around.

We also don’t expect that what we build will be perfect for everyone, so we’re still going to allow people to run their own support systems if they prefer.

The comments cannot work as a forum. Never ever ever. Because they will not act as a forum. There is a big diffrence. Every discussion has a page, and all the info is on that page. I do not think that comments can be translated to pages. And starting a conversatio with a customer, than continue with another, and the other one comes back and adds a new comment and not a reply ( happens 90% of the time ) is not an elegant solution.

I do not know RUBY so i cannot tell you if it’s easy or not. You have to take in to account that they are millions of comments to handle, and indexes to be created for each comment page, it’s more complicated when made to a bigger user number than just for a couple of users.

This is the way i see it. Nevertheless, what are you going to offer support for? WP Themes? Site templates? CMS themes? or on another marketplace?

Sorry if i lack sense in some places. It’s late at night where i live

notahat said
We are working on some better tools to help you support your items, but they’re a little way off yet.

kubasto said
Thanks for the heads up. Is there a chance to hear some date? (so I could complain if there is a delay, of course )

You cannot get that. Trust me

>The comments cannot work as a forum. Never ever ever. Because they will not act as a forum. There is a big diffrence. Every discussion has a page, and all the info is on that page. I do not think that comments can be translated to pages.

I’m not quite sure what difference in turning the comments section into a page would be. Assuming on your forums each topic is a conversation between the author and user only, which is how the comment system works ATM there would be no difference. All in info is in the comments section between the user asking the question and the Author. Only difference is the forums have topic titles and are searchable. Couldn’t you just make the comments searchable and enforce the user creates a title thereby cloning the role of a discussion topic…

>And starting a conversatio with a customer, than continue with another, and the other one comes back and adds a new comment and not a reply ( happens 90% of the time ) is not an elegant solution.

OK, this is where the comment section comes undone. But what if envato designed it such that when you add another comment and you have one previously it just appends to that previous comment. Seems easy enough to code. In any case you can’t comment on other people’s comments anyway… If I remember so you should ALWAYS be appending to your previous comments right? Well if you’re asking for support anyway…

>I do not know RUBY so i cannot tell you if it’s easy or not. You have to take in to account that they are millions of comments to handle, and indexes to be created for each comment page, it’s more complicated when made to a bigger user number than just for a couple of users. I don’t know RoR either, but with a user base as large as envato it not going to be easy I agree.

>This is the way i see it. Nevertheless, what are you going to offer support for? WP Themes? Site templates? CMS themes? or on another marketplace?

I guess it would have to be everything. Photodune, codecanyon, yada yada yada.

>Sorry if i lack sense in some places. It’s late at night where i live

It’s OK, I never really understood you anyway.

notahat said
Hi all.

We are working on some better tools to help you support your items, but they’re a little way off yet. If you’re big enough to think about setting up your own forums, I wouldn’t wait around.

We also don’t expect that what we build will be perfect for everyone, so we’re still going to allow people to run their own support systems if they prefer.

BTW could you guys put that “Get Support” button on all item pages in the mean time? Then let us choose between 4 options:

• no support
• upcoming item forums (disabled for now)
• current comments section
• our very own support forum, i.e. editable URL

Would be best to be able to set different options for each item, so the admin of it should be probably on the “edit item” screen. Default option should be set to current comments section. Those authors with tons of items do not need to offer much support so they should be fine with current comments section. This could help unite the mess created by external forums a little bit and shouldn’t be too hard to implement. Plus the button could stay there even after you introduce the item forums. Could you make something like that?

What freshface said is a great idea So consider this. Freshface, are you up to a new theme approval?:) That is why spending time on the forums?:) Or that is not the case. You are among a few authors that i want to see what they come up with

We are in the same position. We put up our first plugin on 1/31 and by 2/3 it was up in about 25 different hack/nulled script sites. On one hand we were stoked to see that it was good enough to be hacked and distributed that many times, on the other… well we were angry. We know that it’s just part of the game these days but our time and expertise is not free.

We have decided that we want to do something similar to what freshface does with support, where you go to his support site and you have to verify with your receipt number from envato before you can even look at the support notes. I am not really sure how to set it up similarly, but it’s a good system. This is such a beginner question but can you guys/gals suggest a route to go down as far as with the api to verify purchases?

Thanks!

So the situation look like this:
- Envato developer is not very optimistic about the not-so-soon coming changes.
- freshface is suggesting a great solution, which will be never used, probably.
- Besides the external support forum, duotive gets 0,77 comments/sale on the official comment section, so I guess it doesn’t work very well.

I’ll have to think about it.

Not a good idea to talk about that kind of files here, but anyway here you are: https://github.com/JeffreyWay/Envato-Marketplace-API-Wrapper-in-PHP