Introducing your new moderator, Melody Brandston!

[Andrew Plumb]

Hi Everyone,

I am happy to announce that Melody Brandston of MakerBot's Support department will be taking over peace keeping duties in this MakerBot Google Group!

Through her involvement with the documentation, if anyone is going to be enhancing and maintaining those FAQs we need to point newbies at (a.k.a RTFM!), it's her.  She is also in a better position to get more informal status updates communicated and apply Pointy Sticks if/when support issues arise.

Over to you, Melody!

Andrew.

--

"The future is already here.  It's just not very evenly distributed" -- William Gibson

Me: http://clothbot.com/wiki/

[funmakerBart]

We had a moderator from Makerbot? Oops! 

Hello Melody!

WatchingmylanguageBart

Op donderdag 13 december 2012 19:58:05 UTC+1 schreef Andrew Plumb het volgende:

[Andrew Plumb]

It was a less formal arrangement than that in my case than "from Makerbot".  I kept an eye on things, managed the first-post moderated queue, punted spammers, and redirected the occasional "distressed customer" support's way.  In exchange I received free stuff and a modest stipend to feed this addiction called "Three Dee Printing".

Easy enough to do when the core users are technically inclined; more of a challenge now that MBI is targeting non-technical folks with the Rep2.  I didn't feel it was fair to this new batch to have someone like me without the day-to-day internal contact any more.

Now I can pursue other Open Source interests without any conflict-of-interest clouding my judgement. ;-)

--
 
 

[funmakerBart]

Thanks!  Doing a great job to be not too prominent MB-ish..

Difficult...languages... Bart

Op donderdag 13 december 2012 20:52:35 UTC+1 schreef Andrew Plumb het volgende:

[Melody Brandston]

Hey folks,

When Andrew decided to step down as moderator here, it seemed like I was the obvious choice to take over, because I've been keeping an eye on the group for a while now. The hardest thing is going to be training myself to respond to messages after having trained myself not to.

As Andrew said, I work on documentation, so if you have suggestions about information you'd like to see on the MakerBot site, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I know some of you are waiting on Replicator 2s and that there's  some confusion about shipping running out of boxes. I don't think that' true--it seems like there was some kind of miscommunication between shipping and sales. We're going to figure out what's going on and let you know.

Andrew moderated this group with a pretty light hand and I'd like to do the same. That said, if there's anything you would like to see from me, let mm know.

Thanks,

Melody Brandston

Documentation
Makerbot Industries
melody.b...@makerbot.com

--
 
 

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[Steve]

Melody:

It would be great to have a MakerBot person as a regular contributor here. If you could address a few of the current issues it could result in a lot of happy customers.

The shipping status is a frustration for many of us. Not just the delays, some of that is understandable given the storm. The frustrating part is how difficult it is to get any useful information from the sales org. It took four days to get an email answered. I have been told in the last three consecutive weeks that my order would ship "Tuesday or Wednesday', or 'in a few days'. Not knowing the truth makes planning on our end difficult, and created problems with our own customers. Could you find out what is actually going on, and when orders from Oct 12-15 will in fact be shipping? Please.

One of the main reasons I was interested in a MakerBot was the documentation and the Videos. They are much better than other options available. I emailed Tech support for some info before purchasing, and was pleased at the response time and the quality of the information. I had a very positive view of the organization, until I called the sales guys for a shipping estimate after the original lead time was passed.

Many of the posts on this board have to do with how to make good high resolution prints, or how to print for long times without the printer jamming. This is clearly an area where Makerbot, and its customers, could benefit from some more documentation or videos. I asked MakerBot for the settings that were used to make the 100 micron prints in the marketing videos for the Replicator 2, and I was told they were not available. Someone made those great looking prints using some settings, probably in ReplicatorG, and just publishing a few notes on how each of those prints was made, and the settings used, would be very helpful. Why on earth would this information be confidential? It would seem that MakerBot would try very hard to get their customers making great prints, since those references are what will grow future business. Could you post this information on the board and your web site?

I would like to see a five minute 'tips and techniques' video every day done by someone at tech support. Nothing fancy just a simple talk on how to make a specific print, and the settings used, and why they were chosen. This does not take a committee months to plan, just ask each support guy to do a five minute talk about using the Replicator 2, and how to accomplish specific tasks or make great prints. They have already made great prints using the Rep 2,  just take a few minutes and show us how they were done. If each support guy did this once a week there could be great information flowing out every day and each support person would just have to take five minutes a week to share some of their experience. The five minutes a week spent proactively sharing information would most likely save then more time than that by solving problems before they get referred to support.

In terms of documentation, Protoparadigm has a great writeup on using PLA. It would be great to see you guys do something like this for printing on the Rep 2. See: http://www.protoparadigm.com/blog/2012/06/3d-printer-filament-buyers-guide/ . Give us some guidelines for how temp should be adjusted for different resolutions, print speeds, and part types. Help us understand what factors of part designs should have us thinking about changing different settings in ReplicatorG.

MakerWare is an interesting step. Its best feature is not having to slice with an interpreted language. It does have issues, and if MakerBot just said it is a work in progress, here is what it does well now, and here is what it will be doing well in future releases; I think people would have a better idea of what it is and when to use it or use ReplicatorG instead. Some documentation or a video addressing the types of things customers can use MakerWare for now and when they should use ReplictorG instead would likely save you some effort on the support end.

Changes to the extruder design and modifications to the Derilin plunger are frequently discussed on this board. If these mods do in fact let people successfully make longer prints then why wouldn't MakerBot want to officially support those changes? If those changes are not necessary for long prints (heat soaking problem, or set screws slipping, etc...) they we could use some great documentation on how to successfully make long prints without these changes. You have a lot of printers there, either you see these problems or you don't, either way document how people can make great prints without these mods if they are not needed, or make some official documentation showing how to use them. Better to get in front of an issue than to let it fester, especially when potential new customers read the board to find out about the machine.

Thanks,

Steve

[DrGlassDPM]

+1 for many of Steve's points.  I believe these are reasonable requests and could greatly improve our community/MBI status.

[whpthomas]

+1 for many of Steve's points too - high res printing tips is exactly what I need. I seem to be having better success than some, but there are obvious issues with smeer on smaller parts that I am having difficulty with. 

[Ryan Gerrish]

+ Elevenbillionty

[Dan Newman]

> I would like to see a five minute 'tips and techniques' video every day

> ...

> If each support guy did this once a week there could be great information

Anyone remember robot hospital? I think that was at most once a week. Daily
frequency might be a bit excessive but once or twice a week might be
nice. And the support folks know if there's a theme to the support that week
(lots of folks having problem X that week associated with a new software
release, hot new featured item at Thingiverse, etc.). As such, it's often
not hard to come up with relevant topics to discuss. And they don't have
to be Rep 2 centric either….

Dan

[Mose]

+1 for the great summary from Steve.  The main issue I have with my Replicator 2 is not the machine itself, but the difference between the marketing and the machine.  Nobody likes to feel like a sucker.  KOS's box-around-the-printer case is f'ing great.  Those of us who have Rep2s are trying to get the advertised quality out of them, creatively.  But I want to agree with Dan also- Rep2 has a nice rigid frame and a certain build size, but the stuff new people like me [and KOS?] have to learn is general to all hobbyist FDM-style printers.  General education would be great.

[Avandss]

exactly what steve said 

Hi/Welcome Melody

as for the shipping date issue..... maybe you could get a little involved in that discussion.

Thank you

On Thursday, December 13, 2012 5:39:07 PM UTC-5, Steve wrote:

[Hammerhead]

Melody, welcome to the group.

I've had the good fortune to be steered here by Ben M. and the support from him, and MBI, have been terrific.  Thanks for taking over - I'm sure there will be "those days", but hang in there.  We appreciate an official contact at MBI that can keep an eye on what happens and funnel information upstream to management.  Customers are any company's first best market focus and product improvement groups.

[Martin Read]

First, thanks to Andrew for all his work and welcome Melody.

I have been searching online for blue painters tape sheets as supplied with my Rep 2. Since this is a consumable item, would Makerbot consider selling this as spares ?

[Melody Brandston]

Thanks, Steve, for taking the time to write this up. You've asked some good questions, but I'm not going to be able to answer all of them -- that's not really what I'm here for. I will try and make sure they get answered, though.

We do have more documentation in the pipeline, including stuff on advanced settings and some instructional videos. I also suspect that you guys aren't aware of all the documentation we do have. For instance:

http://www.makerbot.com/support/guides/pla/ is our guide to printing with PLA.
http://www.makerbot.com/support/guides/printing/ is an introduction to some basic concepts.
http://www.makerbot.com/support/replicatorg/documentation/skeinforge/ is an intro to Skeinforge.

I'm going to try to have someone get back to you guys about shipping times tomorrow. I know some bots have shipped later than expected. We're working on it.

Again, I'm here more to keep an eye on things than to answer questions. That's what sup...@makerbot.com is here for. I'll keep your suggestions in mind, though, and pass them on to the relevant people.

[Ben McCallum]

Hi Everyone,

My name is Ben - I'm the support manager at MakerBot. I wanted to jump in here on some of the things here that have been addressed to Melody and to talk a little about how she and I will be involved in the forums in the future. 

Melody is going to be your moderator and liason to MakerBot. She's been on the groups for a long time now, and though she's extremely knowledgeable about everything MakerBot, it's not going to be her role to answer most questions directly. Instead, as liason, she's going to be passing along these requests to me and the rest of the support team, the sales people, and the engineering types as necessary. For instance, she asked me to address your questions about shipping times, so I've gathered some info and talked to people in a few departments, and I have some info for you all on that topic below. Please understand that we're going to try to maintain Andrew's style here. We're always going to be here to help answer your questions, but ultimately forum isn't about MakerBot - It's about the Operators. 

Melody asked me also about the feasibility of making a 5 minute tips-and-tricks video every day. I think this is an awesome idea, and I'm looking into what it would take for us to make it happen. For now, our support department doesn't quite have the bandwidth to commit to a video a day, but we're going to try our very best to make at least one video a week. I'm going to be working with Melody to identify topics from the forums that might make good videos, and we'll try to address common user questions from support tickets, phone calls and other channels. Look for the first video on the individual product video pages here: http://www.makerbot.com/support/ next week.

And about shipping times: after a few conversations with our sales and production departments, I learned that the explanation given to Avandss was part over-simplification, part mis-communication. It turns out that we have had enough packing materials to keep up with our daily shipping quota, but there was a concern about the rate at which we're building the bots vs the rate at which we're shipping them. In other words, for a few days last week we were building bots faster than we could ship them, and because we'd stocked the packing materials to keep pace with shipping rates, there was an appearance of running out of boxes. 

We did not, in fact run out of boxes, and we did not stop shipping. We've been shipping steadily since the beginning of production of the Replicator 2, and our production department is doing an AMAZING job of keeping an a massive number of bots moving out the door. It is true, as many have noted here, that the ship dates have moved a little past eight weeks for those who ordered their bots in early to mid October. This is partly because, with so many orders still coming in, we recognized a need a couple of months ago to increase our production and shipping capacity, and there's been some short-term pain while we train our new staff and equip the new space. For those who have been affected, we're sincerely sorry. We hadn't this to slow down the lead time - I would have notified you if we had - but it does appear that we may fall back another few days before lead times begin to decrease again. For those of you who ordered in late October through November, we expect that the steps we're taking now to increase production will begin to decrease lead times very soon, and we believe we'll be back on track within a week or two. Again - to everyone this has affected, I'm very sorry for the inconvenience, and I'm very sorry for the confusion that led to our response to Avandss. 

Last, I want to join Andrew in welcoming Melody - With Andrew stepping aside, I don't know anyone better qualified than she to moderate this forum, and I believe she'll do a fantastic job keeping this group as awesome as it's always been.

Best Regards,

Ben

MakerBot Support

[Steve]

 

Melody:

Thanks for the commitment to make sure that issues discussed on the board get referred to the proper people and get answered. If you can make that happen, you will generate a lot of happy customers. I am really looking foreword to the additional documentation and video you referred to. How will we know when these are available? 

Ben:

I have heard you were a great guy; this is reflected in the quality of your group, and your post. The more information and examples you can provide on how to make great prints, and the different factors that should be considered for making quality prints, the happier your customers will be then your group will have more time to work on other issues. At this stage people are not looking for a polished hollywood production, just a few minutes of experienced support guys showing us how to accomplish specific tasks, and examples of how to make quality prints. The Google group has a number of postings regarding long prints that stall after awhile, and jams in the extruder. Having you address this issue would be very helpful. Some say it is a tempt issue, some a plunger issue, some say we should do the extruder mod, some say it is part design. Perhaps it is some combination of all of these, but hearing from you on how Makerbot made the quality pieces in the marketing videos would be great. Also tell us the things we should consider, and do, to avoid jams and be able to successfully make long print time and high resolution prints. It would also be helpful if you took a half dozen significantly different parts from ThingiVerse and talked about the things to consider when printing them, and then showed the Skeinforge settings to use to get good results. Thanks for responding here, and looking into the shipping issues. I am eagerly awaiting your first tips video next week...

[Bottleworks]

No more http://www.makerbot.tv ?

[Avandss]

I for one can vouch for Ben, i already spoke to him in the past and he was extremely helpful and professional, as for the shipping i still do not understand what is going on, there is a person on this board that ordered his bot oct 15th, and his shipment went out Dec 3rd? you could see how that gets me upset.... if its not the boxes then i have a feeling some people are skipping the line....

i have 1 question

once and for all a real ETA for my order, Oct 17th ? i hope its before the holidays!

btw if you get a little more involved in the forums, it would be night and day, your truly a huge asset for makerbot.

thanks, 

one last thing..... sales rep on the phone.... they reallllllllly need to watch what they say and try to help more, i called twice, first time was the "you will fall in back of the line comment" that you corrected and fixed and this time..... well "boxes" says it all

thanks ben!