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RIP Brightsign Forum

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Brian2
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The Brightsign forum is now dead.

The old ROKU / Brightsign forum used to get 6 new posts per day.

http://forums.roku.com/search.php?author_id=8919&sr=posts

 

The new forum now gets 5 posts in 12 days

http://support.brightsign.biz/forums/20662107-brightsign-general-discussion

 

We have now, for 6 months, been complaining about this forum's extremely poor user interface

and you have done very little to improve it.

http://support.brightsign.biz/entries/21178052-new-forum-layout

 

To your credit you have improved response time to questions posted but the controls are still atrocious.

 

Surely you must by now realize, The Zendesk implementation is never going to work for this forum.

You have a great product but an extremely poor support forum.  This is not a good image.

It's a bit like buying a Rolex from a homeless person.

 

Goodbye Brightsign forum.  I won't be back. RIP.

Brian

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7 comments

  • 0
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    Lyndon

    All of your concerns, along with those from others about the forums, have been forwarded. In the same time, we have taken steps to improve our faqs, demos, and help videos, and have reduced the response time on email support. That has also contributed to reduced activity on the forums. We used to frequently see double contacts where a user would send an email, and if he didn't get an answer fast enough, post a question on the forum.

  • 0
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    JRB Technical

    The forum format (in general, not just BrightSigns) can be helpful as the community as a whole usually helps out everyone. If the forums are laid out a operated correctly, both people looking for help, and people looking to help others will actively watch the forums to learn about problems, and help others as they can.  Support staff should also be very active in the forums to help people.  It seems BrightSign is going away from this model.

    Also, I know from first hand experience, that unfortunately support email response time usually takes about a week or longer. I have given up on sending in support emails now because of that. I don't expect a response within minutes, but there is no reason why responses should take more than a day or 2 (during weekdays).  I do not know what support staff work days are, but Digital Signage is a 24 hour a day 7 day a week International business.  I would think that BrightSign understands this, and should have someone monitoring the forums and emails ALL the time, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

    I concur with others, that the old forum format seemed to work much better, and this new format doesn't.  It is good that you are improving on all the other things, but you have a wide variety of boxes and firmware out there around the world, and what works on one box, unfortunately does not always work on another, even though one would think that it should.  There is no getting away from providing the best support that you can all the way around.  

  • 0
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    Lyndon

    John, most of our emails are answered within hours of coming in. We have coverage in the US as well as UK and Europe. So, even if people in the US are a sleep, there is someone that's also checking email during that time. So, we do have coverage locally and internationally of all queues.  If you send me the email address you've sent support requests under, I'll check what happened to your tickets.  I looked up your forum email address, but can't find these tickets you refer to. I found one question about mrss caching, and nothing else. 

  • 0
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    Brian2

    Support America,

    You are totally missing the point.

    To unlock the full potential of the Brightsign you need to be able to write custom scripts.

    To write a custom script you need to be a Geek or a technician.

    Geek communities thrive on the exchange of ideas through a vibrant forum.

    You used to have a vibrant forum, now you don't

     

     

    If you change your support structure from forum to emails, not only are you depriving the rest of us the benefit of learning from the solutions to a wide variety of problems,  You are condemning yourselves to answering the same question hundreds of times.

    I have sold hundreds of Brightsigns to Attractions, Museums, Galleries and institution here in Australia.

    I am now starting to lose sales because my customers response to your support forum is now mostly embarrasing derision.

    Please listen to your customers.  FIX THE FORUM !

  • 0
    Avatar
    support@brightsign.biz

    We have made some improvements to the support section that I hope really help. 

     

    1. We have provided access to your own personal profile page. You can access this by clicking on your name in the top menu bar at the right.
    2. We have promoted the FAQ and Forum directly to the main menu that you can see right next to your ticket menu items.
    3. We have promoted the Forum Top 5 items to the left hand navigation on all support parent pages.
    4. We have refactored the Support Menu in the left nav to promote the Forum
    5. We have removed most, if not all, of the ambiguous language that mixed the FAQ and Forum together

     

    Other items to look for that might have not been so clear before:

    1. The "Overview" and "Recent" buttons that give you different looks at the content within each section, FAQ and Forum.

    2. The "Subscribe" button that allows you to sign up for email notifications for any topic, group of topics or the whole forum.

  • 0
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    Eric Eskam

    I'd just like to re-iterate Brian2's comments - often the first thing I look for when evaluating a new product is the strength of the user community around the product.  Especially something like BrightSign that has extensive customization/scripting!

     

    Here's an example of a company sponsored user forum done very well:  http://forum.ubnt.com  Notice the volume and activity level in each of the product related forums.  The Unifi forum in particular has a substantial user community component that is a breath of fresh air compared to the ham fisted attempts at support many companies flounder with.

     

    And BTW if you need a robust, managed wifi solution that doesn't cost a fortune Unifi is hard to beat!  And no affiliation with Ubiquity other than a very satisfied customer.  I really like what I see from BrightSign so far, but some of the questions I have about support and the muddiness around what I can do with and without a subscription has me wary right now.

  • 0
    Avatar
    Lyndon

    Eric, please keep in mind that the BrightSign product isn't necessarily deployed by thousands and thousands of individual users doing scripting. Most of our customers use the BrightAuthor for authoring, or even the old text based playlists which were used for simple looping and interactive playback.

     

    Additionally, we have in some markets like Europe and Asia, there's a very robust support structure that involves vars and distributors, so those customers rarely contact us for support. They go through their integrators. 

     

    So, it's a rather small part of our community that actually uses scripting as their primary method for working with the BrightSign. And that part has shrunk has more and more functionality has made its way into the software's interface.  There was a time when our interactive playlist format would only do touch and buttons, but not serial, udp, keyboard, usb, remote, or IR. That was before BrightAuthor. But, back then, users had to script to do many things. 

     

    If you do have questions about what you can do or can't do with brightauthor v scripting, let us know. For the most part, scripting gives you flexibility. BrightAuthor caters to how most people use the product.

     

    For example, there's a rocanvas widget that let's you do layering of images, if you use that widget for all of  your image players. But, the only feature in BrightAuthor that uses it currently is livetext, so if you wanted to layer multiple images on top of one another, you can do it with scripting.

     

    Or, if you wanted to be able to change zone sizes on the fly, or move zones around, or more easily switch between the number of zones, you can do that with scripting, but hasn't made its way fully into brightauthor. 

     

    With BrightAuthor beta 3.4, there's now support for a plugin script for processing XML files for the livetext feature. This used to require more custom scripting. But, now writing this little function makes it easier to use brightauthor's livetext feature but with xml or other data files brightuathor doesn't directly support.

     

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