Did Lithium tell Plusnet? - Forum Upgrade, why didn't they say?

[#1]

There have been many implications in recent times that Plusnet do not have a clue what Lithium are doing. Is this just another example? Well if you are only able to read here, you'd think so.

The Forum Software has been upgraded to 16.5-release r309149 (currently). We knew that 16.5 was coming but not when (we were on 16.3, BT have 16.4 when I last looked). Nor do we know exactly when this happened - it's certainly fairly recent. I'm not telling the whole story here, because it was actually mentioned on Staging - but THAT is NOT telling the Community here.

WHY wasn't there an Announcement on the Community Announcements board? Clearly, this sort of information is just not regarded as significant enough for us to be told

Well folks, take a look at all the error problems and bugs we have reported and see what's changed - some things I expect will have - but how many have actually been fixed!

[#2]

We let you guys know that the platform would be updated over on the staging site. I also told you that the changes would not affect anything further than updates to the backend system (I even provided you with the change log and there is nothing in there that will affect anyone using the site). That was almost 3 weeks ago and I have been checking everything over and only found one minor bug which I have notified Lithium about already.

[#3]

That's fine @jaread83  but what about the vast majority of us who are not privy to the details shared on staging?  Quite a number of us have contributed to the bug reporting and discussions, yet cannot discover which of the bugs are actually being investigated by Lithium yet alone being fixed!  I for one am not prepared to trawl through the list of reported issues and then attempt to test if they have been sorted.  Give us a clue and we can help - but patience is wearing very thin.

M

[#4]

Let me try and summarise the changes for you...

Okay, I am going to just summarise what changes are on the platform here. You will notice that most of these do no affect regular users.

Profile Plus (beta) - This is an 'opt in' beta of a new feature and we haven't got it.

TKB updates - we are not using the Tribal Knowledge Base (but might in the future) but the updates enable voting the usefulness of TKB articles.

Private Messages responsive design - I already updated the private message with my own responsive CSS and as far as I know there are no changes here.

Value analytics - some updates to the data we can see about activity on the community

User bans audit log - again, backend changes that do not affect you guys

API updates - Only useful to me and my team, gives us some more options when using the API to create custom modules

Lithium Social Intelligence - increased the amount of reports it can create

And then there are also other minor fixes:

Fixed issue in backend where a developer couldn't move the signature area in the profile page (not that I wanted to move it anyway)

product review author updates (we do not use product reviews here)

Fixed where if a file has an ampersand (&) in the filename of an attached file will not longer invalidate the XML

Fix for the mention system where a username would have a space

And there you have it, that is the entire platform software update summarised. As you can see.. there isn't really anything here that affects our community here.

[#5]

Jack, I saw no fixes listed in the change log you posted, just a whole load of new features most of which were of no real interest apart from the TKB which might be fine for the Library articles ........ but is a paid for add-on.

What we want to know is what bugs are going to be fixed when. At present I see no sign of anything being fixed. Even the focus issues with the TinyMCE editor implementation still exist.

[#6]

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@Anotherone wrote:

Jack, I saw no fixes listed in the change log you posted

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So why make a post about it? You knew that this wouldn't affect anything here and I had checked over the staging site over the last few weeks and found no problems (okay.. maybe 1 minor issue but that has been raised with Lithium already).

Look, my main point of letting you all know about anything that is changing is exactly that.. I want to tell you what is 'changing'. There is no point in communicating an update that has no affect on anyone except for Staff here working in the backend system or for features that are not being used.

Furthermore, you claim that we did not know when this would happen. On staging, I clearly put a date on my post about it (which you read and replied to) stating that the upgrade would go live on the 23rd (admittedly, we pushed it back by a week to make sure everything was working fine anyway)-  so they did tell us when. There was just no point in communicating the fact here as there is absolutely nothing that will affect anyone at all.

[#7]

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@jaread83 wrote:

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There was just no point in communicating the fact here as there is absolutely nothing that will affect anyone at all.

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This does generate two big questions:

1.   If there is nothing to see, nothing fixed, then why bother with the update at all.  Leave it alone until there is value in doing the update?  (OK, as an ex developer I can understand the desire to keep things up to date, but changes can bring in their own unexpected problems - and this Forum has enough unresolved issues already!),
2. What is happening to all of the bugs already reported and purportedly 'under investigation'?  When can we expect a release with some of these being fixed.

It seems that the Project Management has arrived at a position that believes "What we have is good enough" and only a few minor presentation tweaks are needed.  If this is the case then we can all relax and let things progress to a natural conclusion.

I know that it's not really your problem @jaread83, your personal efforts are much appreciated, so maybe one of the management team would like an opportunity to explain where the current goalposts are and to identify some of the milestones in place to guide progress?

M

[#8]

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@jaread83 wrote:

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@Anotherone wrote:

Jack, I saw no fixes listed in the change log you posted

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So why make a post about it? You knew that this wouldn't affect anything here and I had checked over the staging site over the last few weeks and found no problems (okay.. maybe 1 minor issue but that has been raised with Lithium already).

Look, my main point of letting you all know about anything that is changing is exactly that.. I want to tell you what is 'changing'. There is no point in communicating an update that has no affect on anyone except for Staff here working in the backend system or for features that are not being used.

Furthermore, you claim that we did not know when this would happen. On staging, I clearly put a date on my post about it (which you read and replied to) stating that the upgrade would go live on the 23rd (admittedly, we pushed it back by a week to make sure everything was working fine anyway)-  so they did tell us when. There was just no point in communicating the fact here as there is absolutely nothing that will affect anyone at all.

I did say I wasn't telling the whole story

I'm not telling the whole story here, because it was actually mentioned on Staging - but THAT is NOT telling the Community here.

As Maurice has already said, it's not really your problem and it's down to the management team, but you seemed to have missed an important point - again not your responsibility

WHY wasn't there an Announcement on the Community Announcements board?

It's a matter of keeping everyone informed and the fact that there have been some fixes previously, but we've not been told of what progress there is on all the various bugs and what has been fixed.

As this is supposedly the first official release of the responsive design, I'd have expected most of the bugs associated with the responsive aspects to have been fixed - have they - I doubt it, and I haven't yet spent any time looking at what may or may not have been fixed.
I'm getting rather fed up with being an unpaid bug checker for Plusnet and Lithium when Plusnet can't be bothered to keep us informed.

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[#9]

By the look of things reading on here NOWT of importance to the forum has been fixed