...so what happened to the group? ...and where's the support gone?

[Tolqua]

I recently started evaluating MLO.  There's a lot to like, but the complexity of the program is quite daunting so questions are inevitable despite the generally good documentation, tutorials and help.

 

My first questions were (partially) answered fairly quickly which gave an initial impression that MLO is a responsive and helpful organisation, but some questions were not answered and I quickly learned that this group was a better place for more involved topics (thanks Dwight).  Straight issues with simple problems, though, should be dealt with directly by support, especially where it’s a problem that the development team should know about.

 

Subsequent emails were answered less swiftly and some questions simply got ignored (despite reminders) whilst another 'answer' was repeated several times despite my saying I'd 'got it'.  Okay, it's not a perfect world and no harm's done by repeating things, but it is really annoying, especially when other questions are repeatedly ignored – that’s really not on. 

 

After a certain point I stopped getting responses altogether.  Around the same time my posts stopped appearing on this group so it looked to me like I’d been blacklisted – I was being ignored by support and my posts were being blocked, or so it seemed.

 

After a further few days it became clear that no new posts were appearing.  Personal messages were also apparently not getting through so I started to wonder whether MLO was in meltdown.  A week later and the ‘blockage’ has suddenly cleared – My posts, including those about the problem itself, are now visible (I’ve left most of them there for now), but nobody’s bothered to post an explanation for what happened so we’re left guessing and I’ve still had no reply from ‘support’.  Now I know my expectations are probably higher than most, but this just isn’t acceptable by any standard. 

 

I find it quite shocking that such an excellently crafted product is undermined in this way, but I know I’m not prepared to entrust the organisation of my life to a product on which support isn’t available.  Hopefully there’s an explanation that will help restore some confidence, but the fact that we’re having to ask for it doesn’t bode well for MLO.

 

I doubt I’ll get a direct response from MLO, but perhaps one of you who has access to the ‘inner circle’ can let them know that they can’t just ignore this sort without causing serious damage to their customers’ confidence.

 

Tolqua.

[Stéph]

Hello Tolqua,

Not seeing your correspondence trail, it's hard for me to comment. However, I'll note that I've never had any problems with getting replies to support issues from MLO.  Note that this forum is on Google. I don't think any of the rest of us have been having problems with posts getting delayed, so maybe there was some problem with your Google account?  If so, that's not MLO's fault.

One thing you'll notice from previous discussions here - Once correspondence turns from urgent support requests to requests for features or comments on how MLO could work better, we don't necessarily expect to get replies.  They get loads of requests and suggestions, which would start to get hard to deal with on an individual basis, and we just have to hope that our ideas have got noticed and are being considered.

So, the reduction in response you've been getting from support could really depend on quite a lot of possible causes.  As with other software, they rely on a responsive user group - Youi're best off continuing your discussions on these Google Groups, now that your questions are getting posted again.  Dwight is an advanced user and very helpful and the rest of us might interject occasionally, where we think we might have something to offer.

Stéph

[J Smith]

Yes, when I first moved to MLO I experienced very similar problems.  I ruffled a LOT of feathers when I first arrived. I think my posts got banned for a while too. (Too many posts too quickly??). I expected a vibrant active forum with the ability to get some quick-fire help from a buzzy triving community, plus reasonable support form the developers. 

However in my experience MLO support is extremely sleepy and unresponsive. Worse, the developers whose first language is not English seem to be busy developing the mobile apps and development on Windows seems to have stopped for a number of months. 

On the up-side, MLO on Windows is an extremely mature product that has almost zero bugs. And although this usergroup is small and slow-ish, it is extremely thoughtful, so it pays to ask your questions extremely carefully.

Imagine a gentlemans' club full of highly intelligent old-timers reading their newspapers an you will have this forum. In my experience, forget MLO staff, this forum is probably the best support you will get around here - unaccepatable though that is.

As a new user MLO is frankly a nightmare. Urgent questions are not answered. The documentation is woefully inadequate. It seems clear to me that MLO have barely even done any trials with new/mainstream users. 

However on the up-side, MLO is brilliant in many ways: It is but astonnishingly configurable. The ability to assign hotkeys for very close to everything you can think (including Contexts) of is a godsend. I love having multi-level tasks & projects. And trivially easy changing between task and project.  Multi-selections - the ability to select multiple rows at once and then have whatever you do next apply to them is absolutely remarkable. As is conditional formatting. And designing your views by writing your own Advance rules...

All-in-all, once users have tried all the other systems they often come back to MLO. Frankly it is much more of a task management "platform" than a ready to go "application". i.e. It is much more the domain of the extreme geek, than the busy business executive.

In my opinion, despite MLO's remarkable strengths, in the end it is crippled by having a database architecture that doesn not include a field for "Area of Life", nor a field for "GTD List" to facilitate easy moving of tasks & projects between GTD lists. However, the old timers around here seem to have evolved their own work-arounds and nobody seems to agree nor care very much. [DEEP sigh]

I have asked around on other forums (e.g. http://forum.gettingthingsdone.com) and there doesn't seem to be anything better and certainly nothing as highly configurable. If you are interested in the GTD method, an want something that is much simpler and better configured as a ready to use application then another site that could be useful is GTDNext.com, however after a blaze of initial progress about 1 year ago they have gone very quiet. 

Anyhow, that's my completely honest take of the situation. 

So on balance I recommend you persevere with MLO. If you find anything better please let us/me know. 

J

[Tolqua]

Thanks J for a very useful response.

I've barely scratched the surface with MLO, but can already see the power and flexibility of the Windows version.  As an environment for doing the main work of planning and organising it's the best I've seen, bar none, but it's having a good client on my Android phone that really brings it to life because an awful lot of the 'doing' will be done away from my PC.  I have considered using a Windows tablet, but a well thought-out Android phone companion is a much belter proposition so I'm pleased to hear that MLO is putting in the effort here.

I also think MLO is on the right track by not limiting the power of the desktop to harmonise functions with the intrinsically more limited phone apps.  As long as I can have the tasks behave as programmed on the desktop I'm quite happy to have to do all the tricky stuff back at the PC (I'm thinking of the recurrence options etc. which are only fully available on the PC, but once set and synced, tasks behave correctly on the phone).

My issues - at least the ones I've contacted support about - are all Android or sync related.  The more involved questions have been well handled by the responses from in the forum.

However, my point really is that having confidence in the system you're using is absolutely essential - the 'trusted system' that's the very foundation stone of the GTD and other methodologies depends entirely on the user being able to 'trust' it otherwise simply cannot work.  This being so, having a support system that's predictable and reliable is an absolute must, even if it has limitations.  My experience has been that the current system (or personnel) simply don't have a good appreciation of this.

Tolqua.

[Tolqua]

Hi Stéph.

I have no problem with the quality of response from the group as I have frequently acknowledged (visible only now the back posts have appeared), but if you look you'll see there was nothing between the 5th and 10th of this month, then a whole bunch of stuff got posted on the 10th.  Several of my posts that appeared that day were from the 5th or earlier (my posts started failing to appear earlier than this) and Dwight confirmed this behaviour so something was definitely wrong.

...but why are we spending so much time guessing about this when it would be so easy for someone at MLO (moderators?) to put something up by way of an explanation and, dare I say it, maybe even an apology!!  For heaven's sake - it costs nothing and saves so much off this silly second guessing.

I'm also well aware that not all feedback needs a reply, but when a straight and simple question's been asked repeatedly I don't think an answer's too much to ask.  lgnoring a number of emails altogether is not just unprofessional, it's downright rude.  It's a screw-up - Let's not make excuses.

I don't mind including copies of the correspondence, but I feel that the issues themselves could distract from or obfuscate the point I'm making and would definitely be better handled as separate topics.  I'd also have to do some redaction which means more work to do.

Tolqua.

On Thursday, 12 May 2016 15:22:15 UTC+1, Stéph wrote:

[Dwight Arthur]

I can confirm that around 10 May I received a bunch of emails representing posts to this forum. All of them seemed to be from relatively new users, and about half of them were from Tolqua. The various postings were for the most part several days old. I am unable to recall whether or not I saw messages on this forum from more veteran users during the days before 10 May. My assumption was that the authors of these delayed posts were still in moderation and that the moderator was unavailable for a few days. (As a feature of Google Groups, posts from new users are not displayed in the forum or mailed out until the forum's moderator has approved the posts. After a while when a user makes a few posts and does not do anything too offensive, the moderator takes the new user out of moderation and subsequent posts go up immediately.) This kind of thing happens from time to time in forums like this. Tolqua has suggested that the moderator should have posted a notice about the interruption of moderator services, or perhaps an apology. In my opinion this would be an unexpected but pleasant courtesy. But I don't come here for the pleasantries, I come here for the best available task manager.
-Dwight
ps John, to the best of my knowledge your posts were never banned. You were probably in moderation longer than most people as there was some question as to whether you were a user, or a troll, or both. There were some of us older gentlemen who wanted vengeance because you kept dunking their ties into their teacups. Others of us thought that having a wisecracking brat in the conversation might liven things up. Time passed and now I believe you have joined the ranks of the older gentlemen.
pps Any suggestion that I was offended by being called an oldtimer is ridiculous, if I acted offended it was just a coincidence.

[Tolqua]

Thanks for your confirmation, Dwight.

I can't agree with your calling a confirmation from MLO a 'pleasantry', though.  For sure it would be courteous and a nice thing to see, but there's also a straight practical purpose to such a post - It saves us wasting our time guessing what's going on when we could be discussing the product and how to get more out of it.  That's not pleasantry, it's just good, common sense.

It would also help to dispel what appears to be a growing feeling that MLO simply doesn't give a fig.  How is this not in MLO's best interest?

Tolqua.

PS Loving the caricature of the Old Guard!

[Nunya Bidness Gogl]

The following is just my $0.02, and is not intended to insult anyone in particular. Allow me to begin by insulting myself so that we can all be on equal footing. I am not quite the full blown neckbearded stereotypical basement dwelling Linux user, but let's just say that I have "some tendencies!"

There is nothing else out there like MLO. Not even close. A real native client on each platform that it supports (instead of some "cloud" based nonsense, which is nothing more than a website wrapped in an "app"). This allows you to make separate independent updates to your ToDo list, even if not connected to the internet at the time. And then sync up later when you are. Also the level of detail and number of options available support GTD better than anything else I have seen, as well as a number of other paradigms.

Now, on to the meat of my analysis of your OP, which I view as a sort of a culture clash. Or how shall I say this, again no offense intended, but I think far too many people these days expect the world in terms of customer service and immediate response and hand holding, instead of trying to figure things out for themselves. I think of it as a Linux crowd vs Windows (or even worse, Mac/iPhone) crowd, the former value self sufficiency and asking good questions (and only after they have spent at least some amount of time trying to figure the issue out themselves), and the latter want everything easy and spoon fed to them. The former are old time computer users, and currently use Android, and the latter are iPhone users. Multipurpose computers are complex devices, which previously were only the realm of geeks and hobbyists. With the rise in popularity of smart phones (iPhone especially, which led to Android) amongst the general populace, it brought to multipurpose computer usage many people who had absolutely no understandings of the underlying hardware and software.

This, in my view, has led to the further "dumbing down" of many "apps" taking options away from the user and over simplifying the user interface. You could think of the iPhone with it's one button as a reducto ad obsurdum case in point of this phenomenon, which I think illustrates my point nicely. Personally, as an old school computer power user, I find that sort of over-simplification and reduction in options maddening.

MLO is very very powerful and flexible software. It is complex, which is a necessity of such flexibility. It will take some time to figure it all out and become proficient. But it is worth putting the time in, as MLO is a system that can and will serve you well through almost any eventuality for the rest of your life. But that is slightly besides your main point.

Circling back to the "lack of service" by the developers, as a former business owner I also understand that everything costs money. They could employ someone to monitor and reply on the forum full time, but this would add to the cost of the product. And/or take resources away from further development and feature implementation. Which *I* would not want, personally. I suppose many others here feel the same. And given the fact that it's pretty complex software and requires a certain amount of patience and time to overcome the learning curve anyway, and theereforee is likeely to attract a certain type of individual, I suppose that the developers have sort of made the same analysis.

Support forums are very often community based, this culture began in the Free/Libre Software world but has now spread to other platforms. What we all must realize is that almost everyone here are volunteers / other users, who reply out of a sense of community and realization that if no one took the time to reply / help out, there would be no community and no answers. And out of hope that some day someone else here will be able to answer a question for them. But no one is obligated to do anything, and no one should EXPECT a reply.

But then again, in the final analysis, by choosing to go after this market segment (iPhone/Mac users), I suppose the developers of MLO have brought this upon themselves. If you are going to support Apple products (and charge a premium to do so? I'm not an Apple user and have no idea the pricing differences, if any) then I suppose that a certain level of service will be expected by that portion of the user base.

I hope that I have managed to offend everyone equally (starting with myself) and that instead of getting mad, that I spur people to some realizations of some underlying kernels of truth, and thusly we can all become further enlightened. :)

[Dwight Arthur]

Hi,  Bidness. I agree with a lot of what you say and I can tolerate most of what's left but I have to disagree with your thoughts about funding customer service. It's not a zero sum game. For a product with a steep learning curve  (that would be MLO) suboptimal customer service drives away prospective customers. Investing but not overinvesting in well managed customer service can often bring about increased revenue and ?ore (not less) funding for developers.
-Dwight  (50 years as a geek, but never touched Linux)

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mylifeorganiz...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to mylifeo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/d73db9f2-5629-4c1c-ada8-6551418690d8%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Nunya Bidness Gogl]

Hi Dwight,

Maybe you are right.

As I admitted to, "I have some tendencies" toward being cranky and certain older portions of internet culture, including a strong sense of self sufficiency and trying to figure things out on your own, first.

At any rate, are they paying you anything yet? If not, they should! You are a great asset to this community, I see you replying frequently in order to help people overcome the steep learning curve.