For nearly 6 years, we’ve handled all of your support requests in the DIYthemes forums. Countless words have been written back and forth to resolve everyday issues, and that’s worked fairly well for everyone so far.
But I think we can serve you better—a lot better, in fact.
That’s why I’m happy to announce a new, email-based support model that will enable us to reply to you directly in the most accessible place of all—your inbox.
(Although we will continue to operate the forums just as we always have, all official support will be moved to this new system.)
Let’s take a quick look at our new support model and see why we’ll be able to serve you faster and more reliably than we could through the forums.
Some Shortcomings of Forum-based Support
While we’re proud of the assistance we’ve provided in our forums over the years, there are quite a few things forums just don’t do very well.
First, the transient nature of forum requests means that we answer the same questions over and over again, because people have no easy way of knowing their question has been answered before.
This costs us time and energy, but more important, it costs you valuable time that you could have spent being productive instead of waiting for a response. After all, why wait for a response if your question has already been answered in detail?
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that vBulletin, our forum software, has a terribly inadequate search function and no reasonable way for us to mark certain posts as good answers.
Ultimately, we need to turn all good answers into easily-searchable resource pages on our site.
Second, the signal to noise ratio in the forums is quite low. A single post may generate any number of responses, but in the best case scenario, only one of those responses is an official, dead-on-the-money correct answer.
This means you end up sifting through a bunch of forum posts just to find one that exactly answers your question.
I don’t think it’s right when you have to work that hard to find the answer you need. The bottom line is simple:
I want you to benefit from more signal and less noise.
Benefits of Email-based Support
An email-based support model allows us to solve some of the major problems of forum-based support.
First, you’ll receive reliable, official responses from DIYthemes in a timely manner. No more checking back into the forums every few minutes to see if your question has been answered—with email support, the answers you need will arrive directly in your inbox.
Next, we will be able to organize all our support interactions in a way that simply isn’t reasonable with the forums. Thanks to this enhanced organization, we’ll be able to distill our responses into high-quality tutorials and resource pages on this site.
(And let’s face it—these new resources will beat the heck out of searching through our forums and hoping you can find a suitable answer to your question.)
Because of this, we’ll be able to deliver more accurate responses faster, and this means you’ll spend less time dealing with technical obstacles and more time focusing on your site.
The Forums Aren’t Going Anywhere!
In fact, our new support model is going to help us improve the quality of the forums.
Now that we will be creating official responses to common questions (in the form of resource and tutorial pages in the User’s Guide), the entire community will be able to link to these documents with confidence.
The forums have always been the best place to meet and interact with other members of the Thesis community, and that isn’t going to change.
But now that everyone will be on the same page regarding common issues, the quality and accuracy of every interaction in the forums will improve.
In short, no matter where you go for help with Thesis, you’re going to get more precise answers.
Introducing the Customer Support Center
You now have two great ways to get help with Thesis, and you can access both through our new Customer Support Center (login required).
From here, you can send our staff a support request, and we’ll send you a detailed response via email.
Alternatively, you can visit our members-only forums and see what the Thesis community has to offer (or share your knowledge with others).
And no matter where we interact in the future, we want you to know that we are committed to helping you build the website you always wanted.
