Chirp! Your new Community Management Team

  • Hello everyone,


    As one of the new comers to the Perch team, I'd first like to say a thank you to all the members of this community for the support shown to each other and to us.


    I and my team will be working to support the community by liaising with our development team on any technical issues, communicating with you, our members, and overall moderating the forum.


    I'd also like to take this opportunity to collate any problems, requests, or the like that may at current be spread around the forum, or have not been discussed in some time. In short, if there is anything you would like to raise regarding Perch as software, please feel free to do it here.


    Thank you once again.



    Kind regards,

    Gareth :burd1:

  • Hi ex-jedi


    Good to meet you and thanks for reaching out!


    I know this has been raised in past with little concrete information to follow. I'll raise this with our teams and see what the current state of play is and update you as soon as I hear back.

    Quote from Gareth S

    I and my team will be working to support the community by liaising with our development team on any technical issues, communicating with you, our members, and overall moderating the forum.


    I'd also like to take this opportunity to collate any problems, requests, or the like that may at current be spread around the forum, or have not been discussed in some time. In short, if there is anything you would like to raise regarding Perch as software, please feel free to do it here.


    Thank you - understand transitions can be tough, and though this one seems to have gotten off to a bit of a rocky start ... speaking for myself I look for ward to the future growth and development of Perch and Runway.


    One thing I do think would help right off the bat is making sure that any posts to this forum get approved for publication ASAP, because there is a vast community of Perch devs that are always willing and able to help each other in a pinch, and in the past getting posts approved for viewing on this discussion board has been unbearably slow.

  • Quote

    Could you also tell us a bit about yourself and the Perch team please?

    i echo that, I have asked before but with zero response.


    Call me an old cynic but you projecting the existence of quite a large team, which to me at least does not fit well with a pretty cheaply priced product. All these “community managers” , support people, development teams, etc need to be paid for and your coming across as some corporate entity. Perch could not even support a lone developer how do you intend to fund the infrastructure your projecting from Perch?


    Of course you may have other things going on and good for you if you have, but from where I sit, pretty much given up on Perch, the noises coming out of Perch HQ do not seem viable or realistic or gel with the products profile and market position.


    Really I think what we all need now is some concrete information, who are the Perch team, what’s the plan, both in development and future licensing costs. If you want people to give you their money and put their reputation on the line with your product you need to cut out the flummery and platitudes and give us some hard facts.

  • Hi All,


    To address the two above points:


    fatheaddesign The current aim is to have a member of my team monitoring the forums Monday through Friday, for both approval of posts and monitoring as above.


    ex-jedi  TheOldDesigner For myself aside from my role, I have worked with Perch separately in a fairly limited capacity, creating and updating a knowledge base, and I've worked in technical and customer support for a number of years.

    As for the questions regarding the wider business, I'm not really fit to speak regarding the financials or the larger business plans. At current the timeline we are working to is to release v4 by the end of June, beyond that I don't have any specifics to share with you currently.

  • Thanks for your response Gareth S. It's good to see forum posts being answered by the team.


    Are the technical team planning to respond directly to forums posts? Can we ask what the make-up of the team is? Any chance you all might put up profile pics instead of anonymous avatars on the forum?


    Also, is there a chance of ditching the 'really little CMS' tagline? It gives the wrong impression of Perch's capabilities and once clients see that it becomes a tough sell. Something like 'the really lean' or 'the really nimble' CMS might be better.

    Gareth S Thank you for the response but it does not, at least my satisfaction, address my concerns and at this very late stage I personally feel it is still too little to late.


    It's probably best I remove myself from the forum and just move on, rather than press for answers I do not think I am going to get and potentially cause upset. Having been with Perch since V1 it seems a shame to part company but I can not continue dealing with a business on the basis I am being expected to at the moment.

  • Hi both,


    ex-jedi At current our development team won't be responding directly in this fashion, however may get involved in future. My team has 4 members, hopefully everyone will get to know the others over the coming weeks, and we can certainly look to sort out some avatars! I also appreciate the suggestion on the tagline, I'll pass that up.


    chopperoon I don't currently have release notes for V4, however as soon as we're able to we'll share them.


    TheOldDesigner I do apologise that I can't give you the answers you're looking for at this time. Delivering V4 is our priority right now, and the lack of communication, and active channels, was something highlighted previously, which we're trying to address.

  • What is your strategy for replying to more technical questions here in the forum? If the dev team is not responding directly?


    Whilst other developers can answer forum posts, I'm not sure that this will be sustainable going forward because you are relying on the goodwill of other Perch users ... and people won't always have time to reply to posts here (speaking for myself!)

  • Do you seek or need input for version 4 from the current resellers of Perch?

    (Resellers = most of the forum members and members of the Perchology Slack)


    As the members in the forum have more experience in using and implementing and selling Perch, I can imagine you turn to these members to determine the look & feel and functionality of Version 4.


    Or is this a strange thought?


    René

    This seems like a not strange thought 😄. And I hope that this thread is partially an invitation to do this. Perhaps a separate v4 requests thread might be a good idea?

    Hi both,


    Clive Walker This is something we'll be evaluating as we go on, we greatly appreciate all of the customer to customer support and we don't want to take that for granted. If at any point we, or all of you, are seeing delays in getting the answers you need we'll look at how best to resolve this. Whether that be having technical resources direct on hand or another option our side.


    Rene Banus  ex-jedi This is absolutely an invitation to give us any suggestions or requests you may have for Perch's future, if it would be easier I'm more than happy to create a stickied thread for that purpose, or you can do it here, I'll be monitoring everything in this thread, v4 specific or more general.