Urban Giraffe

If you've visited the site in the past few days you might have noticed several additions. I've been trying to reduce the maintenance overhead of managing upwards of twenty plugins, as well as reduce the support of answering emails for these. This has resulted in:

• A support forum
• An issue and feature tracker
• A newsletter
• Site registration

Support forum & Issue Tracker

I am very aware that some of my more popular plugins have comments in the region of 500 or more, and this does not make it easy for people to navigate, nor does it make it easy for me to sift through issues. The first addition is that I've created a support forum which should now be used as the primary source for support related questions. This forum is subscription only, but this is more a case of the software (bbPress) not allowing anonymous posts than my wanting to force people to subscribe. Saying that I think I don't think it's unreasonable that if you want some support you can go to the effort of registering.

I've installed Google AdSense on the forum to try and recoup some of the time spent, and I've also added a priority support service whereby people can pay to jump to the front of the support queue. I'm not expecting this to be big business, but some people's problems are more urgent than others, and it invariably takes away a lot of time I could spend elsewhere.

Eventually I will stop answering support questions in the comments and may either disable the comments entirely, or simply delete any support-related messages. I'm easily spending one solid day a week answering questions, and I need to do something to bring this amount down.

The second new feature is that I've created a bug/feature tracker. This does allow anonymous reports (although if you register you can more easily keep track of bugs you've reported) and also should be the primary source for bug reports and feature requests. There's no reason not to file bug reports here so as of today I'm going to move bug-related comments there myself, and then eventually just delete bug reports from comments.

Plugin pages have been updated to reflect these new features and also show the current outstanding bugs and feature requests.

Newsletter & Site Subscription

When you register for the support forum you also get a site-wide registration. Currently this gives you access to a plugin newsletter, which I intend to send out with news of plugin updates. This is a very-low volume newsletter, and can be enabled or disabled from your profile page.

On top of the newsletter, when logged in you will have access to pre-release software. Currently I've added the next version of Redirection, and this is likely to include updates to existing plugins as well as new software.

Note: The tracker is very slow and this will remain so until I get FastCGI figured out.