Aliysa_Enhance Aliysa, I appreciate you being available and posting here.
Started using Enhance over a year ago, I've used a ton of control panels in the past and really enjoyed using v11 with the expectation that it was a mature and actively developed product. I've had great support and help from Adam, and overall it worked.
I upgraded to v12, it wasn't terrible; there were hiccups, etc. Then I realized S3 backups broke, and there wasn't any sign they were broken. There were no errors, no alerts at all.
Half-baked seems to be a common theme. There are some core features that don't entirely work; there is no alerting or monitoring about critical actions, and limited logging that isn't easy to self-debug. Some core features don't include essential settings, such as configuring PHP modules or OpenLiteSpeed configuration. The documentation is thin and outdated.
Everyone sees you and Adam on the forums, but there isn't anyone taking ownership. Where is your CTO? Who's the decision maker right now? I'm sure neither of you wants to dread coming to work only to see more issues and complaints. Someone needs to step in and make some changes.
Here are some good first steps that would be good to implement to gain trust with your customers.
- Open up the roadmap to paid customers (login-wall), have planned and requested features, and allow customers to vote. The most votes are where the dev time should go. Stick to x number of features for a release.
- When releasing, follow alpha, beta, and prod. Strong statements that alpha and beta are essentially not fully functional.
- Patch update options, allow single patches to be applied, for testing versus having to wait for a release. Granted you can achieve the same with using alpha.
- A testing program should be implemented, allowing customers to join, provide feedback, and submit bugs.
- Support tickets and Bug submissions should be separate. If something is broken, support isn't going to be able to fix it.
- Allow customer-submitted bug reports, and all customers should see them. Then customers can follow them and get notified when they're fixed and tested. There will be some triage required, but at least then a customer knows that someone has identified the bug, and that it's being worked on and a fix is in place that can be tested.
Lastly, this is more personal. So take it or leave it. Due to using other community forums for paid and open-source software, Falrum just isn't working. I suggest that you look at moving to Discourse. You have a product that can get very technical, and Discourse is actually a full-fledged forum software. You can organize the community-generated content better, there's a solved option for posts, and it has a more powerful search. Flarum is too fisher-priced.
This isn't an attack, just constructive feedback. There's a loss of trust; the posts on the community prove that. Someone needs to step up, take ownership and put a plan forth to improve the situation.
Oh and make sure that this thread is updated regularly. I just ran into an issue today with S3 Backups, that was solved easily, and it should be posted here https://community.enhance.com/d/2431-v120x-post-upgrade-common-issues-and-how-to-fix
