Just wanted to bring up the number one thing that irritates me about this community board (and hence leaves a bad taste in my mouth when thinking of Auth0 and how you do customer support) - closing “inactive” issues randomly. Sometimes not even replying to the user’s request. I have a couple of questions about this:
Why close at all? Closing a topic prevents users from following up with the OP (maybe they’d ask for extra details so every other googler in the future could also implement the solution or update the solution to depict the current state of things). If you need to internally filter issues/do some sort of clean up, why not use the Solved flag (I’m not sure if Discourse allows you to manually set it for other people’s topics).
Why close it after your (usually long-overdue) response? Often times I see issues die out since there is no response from your side. I understand that volume piles up over time and it’s hard to keep up with everyone (side note: if volume is a problem, has this been escalated and transformed into hiring more support engineers, etc?). Volume aside, it seems downright rude to ask a user if their issue is still relevant, only to close it 2-4 days later. After all, it took you months (sometimes 6-10!) to respond.
Thank you a lot for the feedback. I agree with your point of view however also try to understand ours:
As you pointed things pile up and what was explained and also you noticed the bandwidth we have in our community team right now is not sufficient to cover such number of incoming topics that’s why sometimes the waiting time for an answer is terribly long to be honest. That’s true we’re super sorry for that. Some time ago we’re started working on implementing a strategy to make this situation more sustainable, but it’s no easy task and we need some time for that. In the meantime unfortunately we’re not expanding our headcount in the Community Team as of now.
Closing a topic doesn’t mean anything in terms of user being able to add context / ask questions etc. to the topic. Maybe my message didn’t include that but when we were following up with old topics during last winter we said that we will be closing topics if there is no activity however users should feel free to re-open them (cause you can)
When it comes to not providing answer even such a long time. As I mentioned before our headcount is too small for now to tackle such number of incoming questions therefore from our perspective we need to balance our time in order to cover as many topics as possible. Working on old topics if something may be no longer relevant or a user already found out an a solution but didn’t say that is less efficient than simply asking if you guys still need help and jumping to those that have been recently submitted.
Thank you a lot for the feedback and I hope we will continue discussion here as maybe some great ideas will arise on how can we make the experience better overall for everyone but primarily our community developers. Thank you and feel free to express your thoughts on that!
Thank you, Konrad, for such a quick answer. Sorry if I sounded over-dramatic.
About your second point - how can one re-open a topic? All I see (even for topics I’ve started) is:
This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
Lastly, to satisfy my own curiosity - is there an alternative route to getting support for priority issues? E.g. if we were to experience some production errors or downtime (as we have in the past). Would a higher tier plan unlock some other communication channels for us?
So let me tell you how it looks like. The Community Team is responsible for handling questions that are coming into community forum (which is here). We’re the smallest team out of let’s call it all support teams in the company. There are a few others teams handling support as well, such as developer support team that is solely responsible for handling our paying customers inquiries (which is all developer , developer pro, enterprise customers).
Can you share with me a screenshot of a topic that you cannot reply to anymore? Cause it’s strange as we have that option turned on on Discourse. Thank you!
Hmmm okokok gotchya! Strange but thanks for reporting that! We weren’t aware of that! I’ll go through the Discourse settings again and will make it work!
Sure! It’s quite strange we’re still investigating that but if you can simply list all the topics that you want me to re-open I would do so. Thank you!
