Feedback to Google Technical Support on their contribution in this list

[PK]

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.

[Jesse Scherer (Google Cloud Support)]

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 and system administration 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" 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
jsch...@google.com

[Kaan Soral]

It's refreshing to see you again PK

I completely agree with all your points

There used to be a lot of active community members on these groups, those were the days, all the threads either got official or unofficial attention, yet turning down threads and redirecting to other places kills the community slowly, and as you spotted it's happening again

Offtopic-ish, I really really miss the old community members, wonder what happened to robertk, or the guy who daisy chained N appengine projects to break free of the limits etc., it seems even Vinny gave up now, considering we even had guido one point, the current state of the gae community is sad

[Nick]

My 2c:

I think that suggesting people cross post to stackoverflow is useful, I think telling them they've posted in the wrong place kills discussion around problems and questions. There are a lot of surface questions for appengine that can have deep answers, and stack overflow actively restricts the kinds of information that can be shared and disallows any discussion or conjecture.

I also personally don't like some questions being posted outside of stackoverflow in the ops section of stack exchange - that's no good to me. Running on a PaaS isn't about ops - that's you're job, not ours. I think everything should be on stack overflow to reduce search surface area. Mostly this is because the only solution is 'program around it' anyway.

All in all, the continued support of Google in this forum gives it a totally different feeling now - it feels like Google are invested in GAE as a continued piece of the cloud platform, so it's been a very positive change. It would be great to see product managers and engineers leading discussion in here too, rather than just support helping people with problems.

[Thomas Wiradikusuma]

Hi Kaan,

I agree with you that the community here is no longer as active as the "good old days" (I've been here since GAE first introduced Java).

But! I think this is also because the "veterans" are used to GAE and now they're busy building stuff!

I'm a satisfied customer and I prefer that GAE becomes the boring stable platform :)