Really disappointed with wappler

#10

Everyone needs to take a step back and answering a request with a community pile-on is not at all helpful to anyone!

@ray you are not alone I have previously raised the issue about documentation.

I wish I didn’t have to ask the community for help, because I know as soon as one of the team gets on I know I am about to get a lecture about how great Wappler is and any issue are my fault because I should have known xyz - sure I completely agree, if the documentation was complete and up to date!

No doubt for posting this I will get another lecture about how the documentation is just fine.

Wappler is a great tool, but unfortunately the small team no matter how hard they work (and I can clearly see how hard they work) are just far to close and emotionally invested (rightly so) to provide proper support.

This is not DMX zone, and we can clearly see it is a close knit community - but it needs to grow!

I really hope that the Wappler team bring on board community support specialist and trained help desk provider who can see everything without the rose colored glasses, update the documentation is able to provide feedback they will allow themselves to listen to and help grow the community.

I also hope that the Wappler team in their growth bring onboard outside advisors who can keep them on track, shift the cultural paradigm so they can see what many of us newbies see. Why? Well because like you I too want to be able to keep using Wappler, but I also want to know that it will be here in 2 years time when myself and my team will need it the most!

3 Likes
#11

Hi Steven

Well, let’s talk about it. It seems to me that you are looking at the problem exclusively from a consumer point of view and therefore do not see a solution. Are you trying to solve a problem from the series “how to live with only one hot dog for a whole year and not starve to death?”, the answer is “this is impossible!”.

You partially disclose the problem in your message. You write:

And this is true. Wappler is good, not even that, he it’s damn good. It is better than many solutions that are in a different price category. It provides a lot of opportunities. And all this for 50$ a month.

But it turns out that this is not enough for some. We need more. People say: “While maintaining all existing technical capabilities, please provide uninterrupted, first-class technical support. And Yes, don’t forget about discounts!” But all this is not possible purely economically.

What are the possible options?

  1. On the market there are products with outstanding technical capabilities and incredible technical support. I haven’t tried it myself, because they I can’t afford them, but I think if you ask them for technical support, they can even call you instead of an alarm clock in the morning. These products cost 2000$ a month or more. Are you sure you want Wappler to Change course in this direction? I’m definitely not.

  2. There are products that attracted investors for the rapid development and active expansion on the market. Such companies are quickly moving to corporate tracks. Everything is planned. Everything is in order. Managers count every penny. Updates are issued once a year, maximum once every six months. To avoid missing a single client request, an army of trainees is sent to technical support and given a script book. And on your problem, the dialog starts like this: “hi, don’t worry, I’ll help you solve your problem! Let’s start from the beginning, check your computer is turned on?” Just forget about direct communication with the development team that you have now. All according to corporate standards. Are you sure you want Wappler to Change course in this direction? I’m definitely not.

Economics is a stubborn thing. In order for the balance to converge, someone always has to pay.

What can be done?

I think the solution lies in the conscious community. And this conscious is manifested in your voluntary choice. You voluntarily decide to use Wappler. You can voluntarily help another member of the Community when you have the opportunity. You can voluntarily stop using Wappler if you are not satisfied with something.

What are the costs of this approach?

The learning curve is steep. It can be difficult at the beginning of training. You may not get an instant answer to your question or a solution to your problem. You’ll have to be patient.

But all this is pays off by a powerful tool at the price of 50$ and the incredible speed that you will get in everything after you master the tool and establish communication with the community.

It’s up to you. I made my choice.

7 Likes
#12

Hi @Mr.Rubi

First of all, thank you for thoughtfully responding with consideration! Some good points made here.

Not quite sure I agree with the assumption that you have to have one option but not the other. All organsations grow to survive and I assume this is what Wappler wants to do and inherit with that are some of the challenges they may now be experiencing. Conversations like this are an indication of growing pains and paradigm shifts that happen occur because of new market growth.

There are great examples where both are done very well and evolution always occurs because of growth.

I would like to see documentation improved and it goes without saying it reduces the burden on the team to have to answer questions or respond to support request.

I am, like most user, cognoscente that really we are using an app which is only 3 years old and is evolving weekly, and in many respects is still in startup mode where bootstrapping guides many of the decisions. I am sure documentation will occur once stabilization of features established.

But thanks again :smiley:

Cheers!

Steven

1 Like
#13

I don’t think you would want any of these. The closer connection and communication you have with the developers in the community the better for the product.

See what happened to Bubble when they got some investments - no more you can see the founders in the community helping people. You wait for small feature integration months after months and hope they add it in the next updates.

I think people at Wappler (DMXzone) know what they are doing. They’ve been doing this for the past 20 years after all.

Totally agree with what @Mr.Rubi said.

5 Likes
#14

Without wishing to contribute to a ‘community pile-on’, I think the comment about ‘proper support’ is a little unfair. From time to time I make use of the support teams of various software companies. Typically there’s a ticketing system which will result in a reply within 24 hours or so, usually from a trained and polite support staff member. If you’re lucky, the issue will be resolved efficiently; if you’re unlucky, it may take several days or week to resolve the issue (or before you give up in frustration). There are other companies (typically larger ones) where direct suppot is almost non-existent.

There are certainly times when questions here get overlooked or prove difficult to resolve - perhaps because of misunderstanding or lack of clarify - but generally I think the support is the best I have experienced from any software company. The Wappler team go to great lengths to solve issues, demonstrating exceptional knowledge of a huge range of technical areas.

I daresay there will be come a time when a ‘proper’ support system is put in place, but I’m not particularly looking forward to it. Ideally, a solution would be copy+Teodor+paste, but we’ll probably have to wait a few years before that’s possible.

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#15

I think everyone just piled on :crazy_face: but hey getting used to it now.

But coming back to the original topic of this post, a little more time on up to date documentation would be :+1: great for new users!

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#16

This is a natural growth progression for an business the founders can’t be everywhere all the time, unless of course you decide to stay small and niche, there is nothing wrong with that either. In fact AwareIM is another node / low code java app builder which has stayed small but has a dedicated group of customers and advocates.

But yes Bubble was great when you could sponsor plugins and talk to the founders about the requirements. But I wouldn’t hold it against them if they want to grow to exit, there is nothing wrong with that. After all a few of us here building apps with that very intention.

Doesn’t have to be onerous and If done right can eliminate the frivolous requests with a pointing to existing documentation. My team having been using a certain support desk for 8 years now and over that time we have built a cache of common requests and solutions which can be quickly delivered within the hour. But it does take time to build that documentation and store it in a central location.

Did I say documentation again :thinking:

Early adopters of products always get nostalgic of the good old days. As @williamj pointed out with Bubble early adopters miss the good old days, but businesses move on.

Hey who know few years from now I may miss the gold old days when I could have a good old robust discussion with Teodor :crazy_face::sunglasses:.

#17

I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this… LOL

Bring back Miro! I loved that guy!

#18

Haha! I don’t think he will ever work support agent again :wink:
He left DMXzone for becoming a front end developer. Will tell him you miss him next time I meet him.

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#19

Thanks! We still stay in contact on Facebook. He saved me so many times on DMXzone days. Great guy!

1 Like
#20

@Ray I have posted something very similar last week and I’m curious. Almost a Year after this message, how you finally ended up learning and being confident with the tool? What has been your process. Return of experience are very useful.

#21
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#22

I would say the first thing was to unlearn what we were used to. We had the habit of comparing Wappler to Vue - our preferred framework at the time - and focusing on only what was missing between the two. Now we find working in Vue and React tedious and incredibly slow.

Once we focused on what was available in Wappler and the terminology used by them and what each part does (We had to manually figure this out by searching the community forums} it became clear what we can do and can’t with wappler. On the can’t do side there is very little you can’t do with Wappler but you can expand it yourself to cover your short falls.

Secondly was understanding how to expand on what is already there. Example: we use mainly mongo as as a database and we were able to create our own libraries in Wappler for Mongo.

Third is we stuck with it and wappler a year ago vs today is two different things. The improvements and functionality that the team is constantly rolling out is worth sticking around. Plus version 4 is a great improvement.

What is sorely needed is free boilerplates by the team or community to help new users to get up and running fast, similar to what is available in bubble via the marketplace. In fact it would greatly help existing users as well, and make using Wappler even faster. Or even just a similar marketplace were we can list our boilerplates (git sources) where other user can see and use them.

We have created boilerplates for ourselves around what our clients need and it speeds up the process tremendously. We can spin up a new instance with login, register (3 different approval processes) in less than 10 minutes. Vue takes around half a day. Big difference.

Lastly we learnt to ignore the self righteous ambassadors in the community (that would attack anyone asking a sensible question on what is not working for them) and only respond to the team and other users who give valuable input.

If you need any help just ask.

Ray

10 Likes
#23

There. Fixed :wink:

For the rest, I think it’s a great answer.

1 Like
#24

Ouch. I really hope I’m not among that.

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#25

I am pretty sure you are. You are an awful person :joy:

Without the ambassadors this community wouldn’t be as supportive as it is and the team would have exploded long time ago.

Every person has bad days and having the ambassador badge is completely irrelevant to that fact.

The truth is that the ambassadors are the most helpful people here besides the team. But obviously some snowflakes get butt hurt with people having different opinions and expressing them.

It’s easy to blame people that are more involved in the community when the only thing some users do is just pass once in a blue moon demanding for help and never helping others.

I take the same approach as Ray. I have a blacklist of users that I will never help even if they paid me. Does that make me a bad ambassador? Not at all as I am not getting paid to give support. I just promote the product when I can and give free support to educated and nice people that deserve it and that I see they pay it forward to other users. That’s what a community is about.

Just to make it clear Ray is not in that group although I don’t agree with his attack on some ambassadors. I just think he had a bad day and got butt hurt for some comments someone made(maybe it was me who knows). I don’t keep tabs on who got offended by the things I say.

But he has already made some extensions available to the community and that is enough for me to know that he deserves support from my side when and if he asks for it.

5 Likes
#26

This is awkward. I humbly apologise.

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#27

Thanks

1 Like
#28

Actualy Ben if we take all your posts and combine them into a catalogue most of the questions needed by newbies would be answered.

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#29

Just to clarify I am not saying all ambassadors are evil, only a few, the rest are stirling and always help out.

ps. I knew mentioning Ambassodors would put the cat amongs the pigeons.

Valid point to newbies: I you want to get a lot of replies to a question mention the word amabassodors in your post :slight_smile:

2 Likes