Moneydance's new support digs.

After years and years I suddenly upgraded from "New Member" to "Full Member" on the old forum ... so of course you're moving! It looks like there's lot of nice features here that should make the move a success!

sbourne -- I was thinking the same thing ;-).

My first impression is that this new forum is cluttered and hard to navigate, but admittedly that's probably just resistance to change... It will probably be fine once I get used to it.

-g

Is there no proposal to categorise posts? In the old forum we had installation, importing and migrating, tracking investments, etc, whereas (unless I'm missing something) there is no such categorisation of topics here.

Things are going to get awful jumbled, aren't they?

Also, to be honest, I much prefer the 'cleaner' less cluttered look of the old forum. You could see 11 or 12 topics at a time in a typical browser window, but here you can only see about five.

If a forum is to be a good means of providing support, the users need to be able to easily home in on the discussion threads that are most likely to provide an answer to their problem.

So far I don't see anything here that adds significant value over what was available on the old forum.

Sorry......

Are there any?

Go on.... Convince me - if you can. :-)

I like the smileys, but I'm sure I'll get over that as soon as I run out of adjectives. (Where's that thesaurus...)
But seriously,
I like that we can separate out cries for help from feature requests. I hope that Ash can re-assign them when wrong, such as when a feature is requested is already there.
I like that we can "Me too" on posts.

I agree that we will sorely miss the sorting by topic.

Sorry to keep piling in with the negatives, but... here's another one.

The old forum is a mine of useful reference information and contains lots of stuff that isn't documented anywhere else. If it's proposed to eventually close the old forum, all that information will be lost. The posting rate to the Moneydance forum is not wildly high, so it's going to take a long time for the same level of useful information to be re-accumulated here.

And what happens if this site were to close? Do you then risk losing all that information and history again?

All those support questions and answers, along with all the discussions about the finer points of the product are a most valuable resource. Personally, if Moneydance were my product I'd want to protect that information. There's no way I'd put it into someone else's ultimate control. I'd want it all on a site that I owned, even if that site didn't have some of the supposed 'whizz-bang' features that are promised here.

Apologies again for not thinking the move here is the best thing since sliced bread, but it is often the quality of support that is a key product differentiator when making a choice between software package A and software package B.

As a relatively small organisation it's in your interests to provide facilities where your user base is, to a large extent, able to support itself through a forum. It's far better to have users helping each other than to have to pile resources into answering every single support question yourselves.

Next to the product itself, your support (and therefore the forum) is your biggest asset.

Sorry guys... but I think dumping the old forum and coming here isn't a good move.

Midahed makes some excellent points. It would be a shame to ever lose the posts in the old or this new forum. I hope the Moneydance team is taking steps to prevent that from happening.

From my personal perspective, I liked the old forum. But it seems that the old forum was a pain for the company to run. I guess I can learn my way around the new one.

The "secret" name change from Reilly Technologies to The Infinite Kind combined with the un-announced move from the old in-house forum to Get Satisfaction gives me an unsettled feeling. The first time I clicked on the forum link and was sent here instead of the old forum, I actually thought the moneydance site had been hacked, and my first thought was to report it. Only after seeing Ash's and Sean's posts in the new forum did I realize the move was intentional. I think that's a pretty awful way for existing customers to find out about the changes. Reilly / TIK of course needs to take whatever actions necessary to grow its business. But I think they need to appreciate the value of the user community that has built up around their product, again as Midahed pointed out. In this case, it would have been better to give the community a heads-up a week or two in advance of the changes. Just an advance notice that these changes are coming, and if possible, some reasons for the changes. Really nothing more than is being done now, but the timing makes all the difference.

We thought long and hard about switching the forums here, and literally there were two cons in our estimation.

The first, being that users would have to sign up again. I figured that would be mitigated by the more open sign up policies here, along with the greater utility of having a Get Satisfaction user name.

The second was the vast amount of information in the old forums. Which is why we didn't delete them. They're still google-able and indexed by the site wide search.

Sadly the old forums just weren't tenable. A variety of issues made it a total nightmare for us to keep up with.

At first I didn't like this new stuff...but that is always the way things are, isn't it? We'll get used to it.

I like I can log in with my "myopenid" account (www.myopenid.com)
Cheers

Wow, this forum is just plain awful. You actually pay these guys to run this?

I know it's just my opinion, but I find the layout ugly, and usability poor on this site. Check out Apple's user forums for a better looking page. In general, I find that the pages are just too cluttered. You definitely will need categories as well. The old categories seemed to work just fine.

I have been trying to keep an open mind, but I agree the usability of the site is poor. I am glad that it is better for Sean and Co. though as I'd rather the effort be put toward moneydance than the forum.

One question -- on the old forum, I would get an e-mail update when a topic I am watching gets updated. Is there any way to do that here? Also is there anyway to tell which topics have new posts?

If you go to the very top of the screen towards the left-hand side there's a 'You' link. The options include setting-up your preferences regarding e-mail notifications.

Having posted and searched on this forum a few times, I now think it's better than I initially thought.

I still would prefer to be able to see more posts on a single screen, but the fact that I can only see five or six at a time isn't going to stop me coming here for advice.

I really miss the categorisation of posts by major topic group like 'managing investments', 'importing and exporting', etc. The current jumbled posts don't invite browsing of topics like the old forum did. If I have a problem to solve, I prefer to go to an appropriate topic group (like 'importing and exporting') and then browse the topics to find threads that might contain some interesting information. That's not so practical when all the threads are in the same pot. To put it another way, when you open a filing cabinet it's helpful if the contents are grouped into orderly folders. Without that order and grouping, you may as well tip all the papers into a big pile on the floor.

As it's structured at the moment, the site is assuming that it's search capabilities render any logical thread structure as completely redundant. I'd prefer the option of having some topic categorisation as well.

...but it's better than I thought it was going to be.

Additionally, most traditional BBS forums show not only the number of replies, but how many time the post has been read.

>>>The options include setting-up your preferences regarding e-mail notifications.

But it appears to me that you have to tag each thread that yoiu want to get notices. Even the lousy yabb hadd the opton to follow categories.. which would now be tags !!! So what is needed a matrix of tags per user - to select which ones you wanted to follow.

On the other hand - if you look at some of the companies that are on here - there are some mover and shakers - Mozilla, facebook, and two of my favorites tokbox and jott !! If I was younger.... lol

The search is much better and faster. I especially like the search as you type feature when starting a new post. There. I said something nice.

I miss the categories, and always forget about the tags.

I wish there was a way to turn a Question into an Idea, or a Problem into a Question, etc. How is a new user supposed to know whether it's just something they don't know about vs. an actual defect?

As others, after the initial learning curve, getsatisfation, works well, but for organization like categories/managed tabs, etc. IF and its a big IF MD had a better and complete help/faq/wiki , when that happens the combo would probably work well.

Actually getsatisfaction is a company on getsatisfaction !! So you - or better - MD folks could put in requests for functions there.

I hate the new forum. How on earth do I get a question posted? This forum keeps thinking it knows what I want to ask, but it doesn't. It is driving me crazy.

One complaint - otherwise it has its good points: If I make the mistake of typing in my full post/question BEFORE I remember to sign in -- you have to really trick the site out to not lose what you've typed.

I don't find Get Satisfaction very satisfactory. I still can't get used to it and a site like this should be such user-friendly, that it would not raise opposition. I understand the position of the developers as the got rid of the extra burden of keeping a Forum in the air, but I liked the Forum better.

This new 'forum' (edit=leaves a lot to be desired). Can't get it to work right with Firefox 3... I needed to use IE just to post. And don't get me started on the crappy interface, the inability to sort based on most recent postings and flag things I haven't read, etc., etc.

Cripes why not use one of the established products like HoFo uses?

How many %$^% frowny faces can I put here?

I'm using FF 3.0.3 and have had no issue caused by FireFox, agree in general - tho - a regular FREE BBS system like phpBB would be great..

But no support vehicle is any good if there isn't any suport folks !!

In terms of ease of use (user friendliness), this new forum is horrible compared to the old forum.

great. I think getsatisfaction is a great tool. I don't have any of the problems that people mentioned above, and though it doesn't work exactly like the common forums, I still find it very user friendly.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds these new forums totally useless.
I find it pretty much impossible to get my head around the set up of the forum.
I would gladly go back to the old forums.
Maybe someone can point me to a help area to understand the format for these forums ... but then. After years of using forums, having to check out a help area to be able to use a forum seems to speak volumes for the user unfriendliness of the forums.

The only advantage I can see is it is easier for the developers.

My one hope is that it will suddenly click and I will get it. But I have my doubts.

My major gripe is the main page for The Infinite Kind (at least I think it is). I have the topics sorted by recent activity. Yet, what do I find. The topics go like so ... Question asked 2 hours ago .. John Crispin last replied 1 day ago .. Idea shared 8 days ago .. George last replied 6 hours ago ..
HOLD ON. How did it go from 8 days to 6 hours ? I have no idea what the reasoning is for this. Baffling.

Get satisfaction is not useful. The old system was much better.

great news!

Yes it is wonderful news!! I have been using Moneydance for only 2 months (ex Quicken UK) and I like the program very much. Glad to hear we have a new support person to help us.

Hi folks,

For what its worth, I like the new forum. It has some quirks but I've never had any problem finding information and I think that overall it is an improvement on the more traditional style of forum.

For those who want to see posts categorised as in the old forum, apparently Get Satisfaction are planning a new "near term" feature addition whereby the company (infinite kind) can provide some predefined tags (e.g. installation, investments etc) that can be selected by users in addition to them being able to provide their own arbitrary tags.

Have a look at this thread and click on the 'I like this idea' button. (That's one of the features I like).

http://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfa...

So where you used to be able to browse by category you'd now be able to browse by company-defined tag. Same result.

Cheers,
Kevin

Call me shallow, but I just can't get my head around the damn smiley faces. I haven't had to do any serious digging for solutions to show-stoppers, but if/when that time comes I'm hoping that the substance to this site goes beyond what is suggested by "how does this make you feel", and "the mood in here". Yech.

Not familiar with old forum, but it sounds like the "traditional" kind. I think this layout is better than that (the traditional), but: I don't find the smiley's of much help either (though cute I guess), the delay in echoing input when typing in a subject post while the server tries to find matches to other posts (I guess) is really annoying; it it can not be too fast to notice the checking should quit after the first X (say 20) words input.

I also still think a well maintained, MD "to do" list that is easy to find and has user prioritizable/rated items with status, would be really worthwhile.

I agree with avp2 about a separate "to do" list. What he's describing is an issue tracker. A forum is good for discussion, sharing ideas etc but it is not the best way to manage tasks, bugs and new feature requests.

There is (or was) an issue tracker at http://moneydance.com/trac but I think a professional organisation needs something a little better than trac. Jira is excellent. I've never used FogBugz but I notice that's what you use for logging your support emails.

Maybe even a way to sort what is on this site/list by the counts on each item's "x people have this problem too" and adding a "we are working on it, thinking about it, just keeping it on the list or we are not going to work on it" status for each.

I' afraid I'm on Midahed's side. This forum has nothing familiar about it. It is strange; difficult to use and I just do no like it.

I think it's reasonably intuitive. What I don't like though is the confusing and self-serving way the "Get Satisfaction" brand gets stuffed in everyone's face all the time. They should disappear into the background. Everything should be branded "The Infinite Kind". As a software developer I would never, ever let the host overshadow my brand like that. Brand is everything.

Why is there no link to this forum on the Moneydance website? how's anyone going to find out the forum exists?

Wow, that's an extremely unexpected place to find it. The "Help" is usually reserved for "help" with the website, not for the support of the product, and it's rarely on the top line. A product site should ALWAYS have a top line entry called SUPPORT. Actually if you look at the content under "Help", it may be as simple as renaming "Help" to "Support". Nit-picking? No, not at all - details like this are extremely important in marketing a product.