Hello all,
Thank you for all of the hard work you Thunkable staff do. As some recent bugs have been worked on recently, I have been able to review some of the processes and speeds of the Thuankable Staff. There have been a few things that were a little discouraging.
Next is how forum topics are related. I think it would be really helpful if there was to LINK TOPICS TOGETHER. Over the past few days, there have been a few threads that are all revolving around the same issue. It would be great if we could link them together, and you can easily see what topics are related, and move between them. Also when there is a solution for all of them, Staff can make one post or announcement and it goes to all of the linked issues. This would help keep threads with the same issues from duplicating.
Another thing would be making sure that when there is a bug fixed, users are informed, that way we can test and make sure everything is working. Also on the GitHub page, it would be great to get more feedback on the process. The people who post there are usually more knowledgeable than the average Forum users, more data could be useful.
@bnice , there is an ability to merge forum threads. Iāve seen Dom do it. I donāt know if any non-staff have the ability (although I know @tatiang can close threads, so maybe he can do that also).
Yep. Actually, itād be great if when thereās a major breaking bug identified users could be informed, too. Lots of people who eventually posted on forums had wrangled with the bug for hours before realizing it wasnāt them when they read the forums. The mechanism exists to do a pop-up on the block/designer page, and thereās also email.
Itād be really useful if there were an accurate status page for all Thunkable blocks, documenting known bugs. It could be community maintained ā I donāt think current staff are in a position to take on anything else. Iāve contemplated starting one. Having said that, this week has really reminded me that any programming I do on Thunkable is completely held hostage by the company. If Thunkable breaks something and my apps are inoperable for days/weeks/months, thereās not anything I can do about it. I canāt just move my (no)code somewhere else.
There are a lot of things I really like about Thunkable and I have a lot of respect for the Thunkable staff members who engage with the community on the forums. BUT the fact that broken code keeps getting rolled out makes me think that something is pretty fundamentally wrong with some part of their process. I know nothing about Thunkableās processes, but new bugs that break important features in big ways (weeks of no sound on iOS, this weekās datasource bug, the day of no label text) make me think thereās not any acceptance testing going on before deployment. Add that to the lack of communication, and yeah. Iām aggravated.
I like āno codeā, but Iām not wedded to it. I might go put my energy into learning React Native for a while. Itāll be fun to see if I can re-implement some of the stuff I built for previous WDCs in code.
@catsarisky I hear your frustration and often share it when things arenāt communicated and/or resolved in a timely way. I do have the ability to merge topics but I donāt because Iām hesitant to mess anything up on the forums. Iām not entirely clear how the merge function works.
And just to put this out there because sometimeās thereās confusion about my role here: Iām a user just like 99% of the people on the forums. I donāt work for Thunkable but I do volunteer my time to help others and Iāve been given a moderator role on the forums which I take seriously and do my best to enhance the experience for other users here.
I know I donāt need to explain that to you but this seemed like a good time to mention it.
I hope you stayā¦ you make a big positive impact around hereā¦ but I get that you might need to move on.
Thanks for your kind words, @tatiang. I think youāre a huge asset around here, too! (And I knew you were also ājust a userā, but I know folks get confused about some of us regulars sometimesā¦)
I share you the same feeling specially @catsarisky is the dynamo of this community but in all honesty, applying untested/unapproved modification to production is alarming. If it is actually tested/approved it would extremely alarming and Thunkable really needs to look into the application of changes procedure and the roll-back procedure in similar cases to this incident.
Agree! Without @catsarisky (and you, @muneer and @tatiang ) I would be sitting at the computer everyday , stuck at every 5th block. But at this point, GitHub bugs arenāt being addressed and there are so many bugs with Thunkable (the visible absolute-positioning on Android is a huge disappointment since I have to create āset size to 0ā and āset size to 50% or whateverā functions ). I donāt ask anything except that these long standing bugs be addressed quickly (I donāt use iOS but I found the wait time for the no sound issue quite long) and GitHub requests also be addressed. I have a 19/20 day old Data Viewer bug in GitHub and I havenāt received any response.
@catsarisky As someone who has benefited from your presence immensely, the community would be at a major loss if you were to leave, but as @muneer said broken code is problematic. Regarding what was brought up in a different topic, do we want features or working blocks? I personally feel that working blocks that are working at high constant performance is more important than new features rolling out quickly. I do not feel risking old blocks for new blocks is a wise idea for Thunkable at this time.
I think youāre a huge asset around here, too! (And I knew you were also ājust a userā, but I know folks get confused about some of us regulars sometimesā¦)