Stefan: i know this is reply to how you feel viewtopic.php?t=8126&p=18322#p18322
But please go easy. They are also a customer! Just ask for them for the logs, drop the attitude. No??
Uhm, I don’t see any “attitude”. I told him that there’s no advice and gave a proper reason, why… I didn’t use any profanities, offensive words, etc., so I don’t see the problem here, honestly.
Nothing personal towards you (and no offense - I honestly respect you as I do most of the developers!), Bill, but I’m getting slightly frustrated. First people were complaining that I’m too formal when I was using the standardized text blocks (which were checked and approved by Alex and Craig beforehand) and now I’m not using them and it’s still not ok.
I will not start being fake-friendly and writing on perfumed paper with little flowers and unicorns just because some people might feel offended by me communicating simple facts without the mentioned flowers and unicorns.
If more people would actively help in the forums, e.g. by approving/disapproving(!) posts, moving them to the right places(!) and such, you would certainly read less policing from me because I simply wouldn’t have to police that much. As I wrote elsewhere, I don’t necessarily like being the “bad cop” but when it’s necessary, I have no problem with it.
A couple of months(!) ago, I posted the forum moderation policy document in the context of a similar topic discussion to the wiki-editors group, stating clearly that I’m open for discussion, especially regarding the text blocks. The answer was zero. Please excuse me when I’m not willing to accept further criticism under this premises ^^. “You’re doing it wrong” without a constructive counter-proposal doesn’t work with me 
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Hey Stefan,
I didn’t see the post Bill quoted until after he quoted, but I think in general there can be a happy medium between “yelling” at people (unnecessary use of exclamation points which I suspect is adding to what some of us see as too aggressive) and fake-nice on perfumed paper accompanied by rainbows and unicorns.
I appreciate you’re getting frustrated, but imagine how the user feels when someone responds as the forums-police rather than with some helpful comments. Just try to imagine how you, as a new user and not an experienced IT admin who doesn’t seem to like users, would appreciate being communicated with. If that doesn’t work for you, perhaps imagine how you’d want your mom to be communicated to if she called in to a customer service center for help on something she didn’t fully understand. If you still don’t see a problem, I think we have greater concerns.
All we’re asking is that you take a look at how you’re being perceived, and try to lighten up just a little bit. No need for the aforementioned fakeness. I think its also appropriate to not look at what you feel are any other flaws in how people are approving/moving posts, and just take a look primarily at how you respond to people.
Craig… Pardon me if I don’t fully understand, but is the general tone of customer service out of 3DR something Vu and his team should eventually take ownership of? Or is that a different thing all together?
I meant frustrated with the internal communications, not the users .
The perception is probably the key. For me “yelling” would be ALL CAPS or all bold or ALL CAPS AND BOLD.
Regarding what you said about “flaws in others”, how I “feel” does not have any kind of influence on how I handle users. I’m also not looking for any flaws in others but we do have a moderation policy which was as such approved by Craig and which says that posts which lack any kind of useful information should not be approved and posts which are in the wrong subforums should be moved by a moderator.
Yet I often find posts which should not have been approved and/or are in the wrong subforum. I have written a few mails about this to the admin/mod group in the past.
Please don’t misunderstand me here! I’m not trying to blame anyone or complain. But I am currently about 8-12h per day at least with half an eye in the forums to move stuff around and frankly, sometimes I feel, I’m the only one. Again - not complaining! Just stating facts.
My point being - if posts, e.g. posts which lack necessary information, are not disapproved by others AND the approving moderator also does not tell the user that something is missing, I have to tell it. Because if people are looking for help, their post being ignored because it lacks information is worse to them then a maybe not excessively overwhelmingly heartly note on that from a moderator which they will forget as soon as they happily got their stuff running again.
When the moderation policy was written, Craig was in charge of the forum.
About the exclamation points, by the way:
Remember that I’m no native speaker, and I’m over 40 (means, I learned English a very long time ago).
When I learned English, I learned that a sentence which includes a calling, a request, an order, etc. is to be concluded with an exclamation point while a sentence which contains mere information is to be concluded with a full stop. I’m mostly using this rule, so I don’t even think about yelling or anything like this.
Just by the way, the OP seemingly understood my writing exactly as I meant it:
[quote=“jpspen”]No worries… I’m very to the point as well… Didn’t bother me a bit…
LOL !
John[/quote]
I just think that just ask a question ie. “Please post logs? thx, then we can help” or something like that, has a helpful tone. “Without any kind of information about your setup and logfiles - no!!” and the exclamation marks makes it read “Without any kind of information about your setup and logfiles - NO” in internet speak.
I think it’s just the simple words of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ that helps be more friendly. We are here to help, and in this case the OP was not offended. Good thing. As a native english speaker, maybe this stability is more apparent.
Also, I don’t have the ability to move posts any more, so unless I’m given mod permissions to do so again, I cannot help you there. Believe me, I tried 
Hi all,
@Bill - I see how that curt response could sting a customer. I think that a well worded canned response can relieve us of that potential hullabaloo.
@Josh - yes. 3DR will be setting the direction and tone of the standardized responses. I apologize for not doing it sooner. I’ve been speaking with Craig these past couple of weeks to get up to speed. I wanted to fully understand how the forums function within the larger 3DR support strategy, compared to how it’s being utilized today, and what we want it to look like tomorrow. Expect to see a strategy soon. Thank you everyone for your continued support and patience until then.
@Stefan - I feel your pain. I think that it’s a matter of syntax and wording of the canned response. You and I have extensive experience with support queues and missing info during help requests. I am in 100% agreement with you regarding the administrative problems caused by missing required info. Let me work on a new canned response that fits the tone that I want to set for 3DR. I’ll have that to you all in a few hours.
Lastly, I’ll be setting up a moderators call and continue it monthly so that we all start singing from the same hymn book.
Thank you everyone for the continued support of our customer and our community.