Support re-launch

If you head on over to Perch Support you’ll find things looking a bit different. As we revealed on the blog earlier this month, we’ve been working to bring a new forum and support system online, and today we’re all set to start using it.

The key to our new support system is the new forum. This is based on the Laravel.io forum, and Richard Bagshaw has been expanding on the basic functionality of that system for us, integrating Perch Account logins and adding some special Perch features.

As before, we expect the majority of questions, issues and implementation requests to be posted to the forum. That should be a much nicer experience as you can now format your messages – including code – to make them readable, and even paste in a link to a Gist.

Behind the scenes we now have tools to see the posts we are responding to and also see which posts have had no responses. This was something we didn’t have with the old forums. It meant that on busy days posts got missed. We know how frustrating it is not to get an answer or for someone to appear to drop your post – it was never intentional and the new forum should stop that happening.

When posting you can mark something as a Question or a Conversation. Questions add the ability to mark a response as “solving” your problem. We would love you to do that as it helps people searching the forums to see which answer fixed that issue if they are having the same problem.

Marking a reply as the solution will award a point to the person who gave the right answer. Drew is pretty convinced that he is going to win on points but it will be interesting to see which non-staff Perchers are picking up points as well. To help you see who is answering your questions we also have a bird icon for staff users and a feather for anyone who is part of our Registered Developer Programme.

If you do need to give to us some private information for us to help, then we’ve moved ticketed support to an email system powered behind the scenes by Snappy.

We haven’t tried to import all of the old forum content. Partly because it’s a whole lot of work to do that, but also because a lot of the time old threads were being dug up and causing confusion. We’ll be keeping the archived forum around for a good while so don’t worry if there is something in there that you need to reference. If you want to continue a discussion you were having there just include the link to it when you post and we’ll read back.

Let us know what you think of the new forums, we hope this will be a good platform from which to develop the community side of things of Perch. We’d love to hear your suggestions for future developments!