Brendan Johan Lee 5 Years Ago Hi Milen! I feel that doing this probably wasn't a good idea. Basically what has happened is that you have killed a whole lot of potential feedback. The good thing about the beta-program was the information from you to us. The beta program helped us understand what you are working on, and what you are planning on changing at an early enough stage that we could provide feedback. But killing of the beta program and replacing it with radio silence, is basically killing of one of your better communication channels. None of us are going to read the whole Jira-ticket lists to see what is changing. Only a very few people (whith to much time on their hands) are going to download a release candidate and randomly try to find out what has changed. What you need is a good, clear, and easy channel to communicate these things to us, in a way that I as a developer can understand them, but also, the end user, who would look at the Jira-list and not see anything other than giberish. So if you do actually want feedback, don't kill of the one place we could determine what you need feedback on, and what we should start looking into to prepare for the future without providing an alternative. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel Milen Dyankov Brendan Johan Lee 5 Years Ago Thank you Brendan Johan Lee! You are right and I couldn't agree more with you, regarding the importance of the information flow from Liferay's product teams to the community members. You are wrong assuming that our intention is to kill it or "replace it with radio silence". It is quite the opposite in fact. I am preparing another blog post to explain this in more details but essentially all Beta programs consisted of 3 main things: Announcements/Instructions, Documentation and Forum discussions and all those are still available and will be available. For example, here is what is new in the Alpha 1 release: https://community.liferay.com/blogs/-/blogs/liferay-portal-7-2-ce-alpha-1-release. The 7.2 documentation needs some more work but hopefully it will be ready soon. And we do encourage everyone to contribute to the forum discussions. To the best of our knowledge, there is nothing that the new process makes impossible or harder than the one we used in the beta programs. That said, it may be the case that we missed something that was particularly important to you in the Beta program. If so, please let us know and we will do our beast to address the issue. Please email us (developer-relations@liferay.com) your concerns and suggestions. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel Brendan Johan Lee Milen Dyankov 5 Years Ago Hi Again Milen! Was not my intention to imply that you were planning onreplacing it with radio silence. I know that you, Jamie (and previously James) have worked a lot on improving communications, and a lot of things have been improved (such as the dev site which has been a _huge_ improvement). However, your link to the blogpost illustrates my point exactly. I've not seen that blogpost. Why? Because I don't have time to read the blog all the time. That is something I get to do once in a blue moon when I have a bit of downtime. The beta testing sites on the other hand, I was always active on, and actively both following and contributing. Why? Beacuse they were directly important for my job. My point here is rather that you are moving away from a nice distilled single point of access for everything about a coming upgrade, to having all of the information spread out across many different places, ranomly mixed in among all sorts of other information. That makes things much more complicated for us. And in the end leads to us having to invest much more effort to actually provide feedback. This is bad. Now. If everything about a future release was distilled and provided nicely in one place, I would be happy. It can be as simple as a single page with links to the documentation, blog posts about the new features, any discussions in the forum, and potentially also slack, and a mechanism to subscribe to changes to the page, that would be a fine replacement. A different way of seeing it: With the beta program, I had a single place, where I passively could receive any relevant information about an upcoming release (by for example subrscribing to topics), and provide feedback in the same single point of access. This has now changed, and the only way to stay updated is to continuously _actively_ seek out information, which in my opinion is a big step backwards. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Milen Dyankov Brendan Johan Lee 5 Years Ago Thank you Brendan Johan Lee! You are right and I couldn't agree more with you, regarding the importance of the information flow from Liferay's product teams to the community members. You are wrong assuming that our intention is to kill it or "replace it with radio silence". It is quite the opposite in fact. I am preparing another blog post to explain this in more details but essentially all Beta programs consisted of 3 main things: Announcements/Instructions, Documentation and Forum discussions and all those are still available and will be available. For example, here is what is new in the Alpha 1 release: https://community.liferay.com/blogs/-/blogs/liferay-portal-7-2-ce-alpha-1-release. The 7.2 documentation needs some more work but hopefully it will be ready soon. And we do encourage everyone to contribute to the forum discussions. To the best of our knowledge, there is nothing that the new process makes impossible or harder than the one we used in the beta programs. That said, it may be the case that we missed something that was particularly important to you in the Beta program. If so, please let us know and we will do our beast to address the issue. Please email us (developer-relations@liferay.com) your concerns and suggestions. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel Brendan Johan Lee Milen Dyankov 5 Years Ago Hi Again Milen! Was not my intention to imply that you were planning onreplacing it with radio silence. I know that you, Jamie (and previously James) have worked a lot on improving communications, and a lot of things have been improved (such as the dev site which has been a _huge_ improvement). However, your link to the blogpost illustrates my point exactly. I've not seen that blogpost. Why? Because I don't have time to read the blog all the time. That is something I get to do once in a blue moon when I have a bit of downtime. The beta testing sites on the other hand, I was always active on, and actively both following and contributing. Why? Beacuse they were directly important for my job. My point here is rather that you are moving away from a nice distilled single point of access for everything about a coming upgrade, to having all of the information spread out across many different places, ranomly mixed in among all sorts of other information. That makes things much more complicated for us. And in the end leads to us having to invest much more effort to actually provide feedback. This is bad. Now. If everything about a future release was distilled and provided nicely in one place, I would be happy. It can be as simple as a single page with links to the documentation, blog posts about the new features, any discussions in the forum, and potentially also slack, and a mechanism to subscribe to changes to the page, that would be a fine replacement. A different way of seeing it: With the beta program, I had a single place, where I passively could receive any relevant information about an upcoming release (by for example subrscribing to topics), and provide feedback in the same single point of access. This has now changed, and the only way to stay updated is to continuously _actively_ seek out information, which in my opinion is a big step backwards. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Brendan Johan Lee Milen Dyankov 5 Years Ago Hi Again Milen! Was not my intention to imply that you were planning onreplacing it with radio silence. I know that you, Jamie (and previously James) have worked a lot on improving communications, and a lot of things have been improved (such as the dev site which has been a _huge_ improvement). However, your link to the blogpost illustrates my point exactly. I've not seen that blogpost. Why? Because I don't have time to read the blog all the time. That is something I get to do once in a blue moon when I have a bit of downtime. The beta testing sites on the other hand, I was always active on, and actively both following and contributing. Why? Beacuse they were directly important for my job. My point here is rather that you are moving away from a nice distilled single point of access for everything about a coming upgrade, to having all of the information spread out across many different places, ranomly mixed in among all sorts of other information. That makes things much more complicated for us. And in the end leads to us having to invest much more effort to actually provide feedback. This is bad. Now. If everything about a future release was distilled and provided nicely in one place, I would be happy. It can be as simple as a single page with links to the documentation, blog posts about the new features, any discussions in the forum, and potentially also slack, and a mechanism to subscribe to changes to the page, that would be a fine replacement. A different way of seeing it: With the beta program, I had a single place, where I passively could receive any relevant information about an upcoming release (by for example subrscribing to topics), and provide feedback in the same single point of access. This has now changed, and the only way to stay updated is to continuously _actively_ seek out information, which in my opinion is a big step backwards. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Oliver Bayer 5 Years Ago Hi Milen, I had to agree with Brendan. But I think it's not only related to the beta program. Instead I think sth. changed from 5.x to 6.x in the way how Liferay respond to contributions of any kind. I've started back in the days of 5.2.x. There it was common to "meet" Liferay devs in the forum for questions, bugs, contributions etc. Nowadays it seems -I had to quote Brendan- "radio silence". A few examples: - Last year I've encountered a bug, asked in the forum and didn't get any response until today - I've created a bug ticket in may 2018 (LPS-80504) and didn't get any response even though I've provided details + a workaround - I would have liked to contribute a webcontent preview feature (LPS-57016 / LPS-15096) which also gets the attention of some Liferay devs who liked it. I've improved the first solution (5.2.3) a lot and migrated it for 6.2. This ticket is older than 3 years and still no one from Liferay accepted or declined it. I don't have that much time besides the daily work. But still I like to contribute as you can see e.g. https://web.liferay.com/de/community/special-projects/top-contributor-awards-2013. I don't mind if the Liferay devs don't like each one of my ideas :). But don't getting ANY response over years is very discouraging for contributing in the future. Maybe it sounds too harsh which wasn't the intention at all :). It's just because I like the open-source idea of contributing and at the same time Liferay is giving us a hard time ... Hopefully it will change over the next months / years. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Milen Dyankov 5 Years Ago Hi Brendan Johan Lee and Oliver Bayer I see your point and I understand the need to have all the information grouped in a single, well known place. That said, the way we were doing it with the Beta program was far from optimal. It was very time consuming to prepare the program, it came vary late in the game (as a result a lot of feedback was not taken into account) and it introduced information fragmentation between the "regular" and the "beta" feedback channels. The change I talk about above is an attempt to solve those issues but you are right, it caused us to lose the central place of information grouping. That is not meant to stay that way though. So please, think of the current situation as a transition phase. I don't want to make any premature promises yet, but I can assure you we are spending significant amount of time working on something that will allow us to better group and present the information in specific context, that will not suffer from the fragmentation and time constraints the Beta program had. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel Oliver Bayer Milen Dyankov 4 Years Ago Hey Milen, it's been 4 months since you've announced the "new big thing" for contributions of all kind. As said it's not just the beta program which is affected. Do you made any progress in this regard? I can't see much improvement e.g. in the response time to tickets or mails until now ;). Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel Milen Dyankov Oliver Bayer 4 Years Ago Hey Oliver, The changes I was talking about were regarding the need to have all the information grouped in a single, well known place and making it clear how the release, feedback and contribution processes work together. I think we managed to improve that with the new site. I'm writing a blog about it with more details. What you are talking about is issues with how those process work (or don't) in practice. And I agree with you this needs to be improved and we as company should stick to our commitments to the Open Source community and treat contributors better. Sadly this is easier said than done and requires cross-department changes that are way beyond the DevRel team's competence. As comments to a blog post a hardly the best place to discuss this, I would like to ask you (and everyone else who have similar feelings) to summarize your experience (the one you mentioned above plus most recent one) in an email to developer-relations@liferay.com I promise you to look into each of those cases and bring them to the attention to the people who are in a position to execute on such feedback. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Oliver Bayer Milen Dyankov 4 Years Ago Hey Milen, it's been 4 months since you've announced the "new big thing" for contributions of all kind. As said it's not just the beta program which is affected. Do you made any progress in this regard? I can't see much improvement e.g. in the response time to tickets or mails until now ;). Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel Milen Dyankov Oliver Bayer 4 Years Ago Hey Oliver, The changes I was talking about were regarding the need to have all the information grouped in a single, well known place and making it clear how the release, feedback and contribution processes work together. I think we managed to improve that with the new site. I'm writing a blog about it with more details. What you are talking about is issues with how those process work (or don't) in practice. And I agree with you this needs to be improved and we as company should stick to our commitments to the Open Source community and treat contributors better. Sadly this is easier said than done and requires cross-department changes that are way beyond the DevRel team's competence. As comments to a blog post a hardly the best place to discuss this, I would like to ask you (and everyone else who have similar feelings) to summarize your experience (the one you mentioned above plus most recent one) in an email to developer-relations@liferay.com I promise you to look into each of those cases and bring them to the attention to the people who are in a position to execute on such feedback. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Milen Dyankov Oliver Bayer 4 Years Ago Hey Oliver, The changes I was talking about were regarding the need to have all the information grouped in a single, well known place and making it clear how the release, feedback and contribution processes work together. I think we managed to improve that with the new site. I'm writing a blog about it with more details. What you are talking about is issues with how those process work (or don't) in practice. And I agree with you this needs to be improved and we as company should stick to our commitments to the Open Source community and treat contributors better. Sadly this is easier said than done and requires cross-department changes that are way beyond the DevRel team's competence. As comments to a blog post a hardly the best place to discuss this, I would like to ask you (and everyone else who have similar feelings) to summarize your experience (the one you mentioned above plus most recent one) in an email to developer-relations@liferay.com I promise you to look into each of those cases and bring them to the attention to the people who are in a position to execute on such feedback. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel