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Originally Posted by Scott Betz
Usually software forums take the view that quesions and answers publically posted on official forums results in more effective dissemination of information about the program.
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I don't disagree that forum postings can have a potentially wider audience than an email sent to us, and for the folks that read them regularly or reach them by search engines, they are a valuable resource. That's why we have them.
However, in my role as the head support ninja, I'm cautious about letting folks assume that posting a something on the forums guarantees that we'll read and respond to every single post. Our trouble ticket system that we use when we have our "official" support hats on has a lot of options that a general-purpose forum doesn't.
Example: if you respond six months from now to a trouble ticket, it'll open back up and stay assigned to the person that was helping you before. Doing that for every post in every thread on our forum would be a lot muddier of a situation. Who at omni responds when one poster responds directly to another?
There's also the issue that arises when folks want to ask us a question, but don't want to ask us, google, and everyone else on the forum. ("I lost my password" emails, for example.) Given that we're going to have multiple points of contact, I'd like to keep one option as the "Official" support option.
We make the assumption that every email that's not obviously spam that comes in to a support address is an explicit request for a response from us, and we provide that.
If folks want to *guarantee* that they'll get their feature request into our database, or want to *guarantee* that they'll get a response to their question, I'd ask them to use the tool that makes it easier for us to do so. Right now, that's still email.