Bubble Staff: Can we please get the Community Forum sorted into Feature areas?

The big problem with not providing support ticket help to paying customers and only using this user forum is that ultimately there is almost no point in providing the User Forum due to the unorganised nature of it.

We are expected to search through completely unrelated problems in order to find an answer or to just create a new topic because we don’t have 5 hours to read through possible answers. Doesn’t this frustrate even yourselves when you know someone has asked the exact same question but no one can find it because it has no keywords in the title or is buried in existing questions?

Can we PLEASE get the forum sorted into feature areas so that we can quickly go to a forum section for help.

Some suggested areas are:

Search
Forms
ECommerce
Database
Permanent Bubble Examples
BlockSpring
Responsiveness
Images
Pages
Videos
Floating Groups
etc.
it could even go right down to certain elements eg.
Dropdowns
Radio Buttons

Jess

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It is often hard to find what you are looking for in the forum I agree, even when you know what you are looking for.

But I wonder if “tags” for feature areas would not get just as complicated, particularly as they are open to interpretation.

Maybe some sort of Wiki/FAQ organised along the lines you have described ?

Probably the fastest thing for you to do is to divide the forum into feature areas for users, otherwise you have too many disparate places to go to for help (lessons, videos, user manual, forum, wiki/FAQs) - I have to search through each one?

The next fastest way for you would be to just curate the forum weekly - pick 2 or 3 good questions/answers and record a short interactive lesson for the Documentation > Lessons tab. You would still need to categorise the Lessons tab into feature areas so that Lessons are easily found.

Users are just not getting the full picture with the User Manual entries where there are no examples, repeat the same questions in the forum, and can’t find answers in the forum.

Isn’t the support ticket help support@bubble.is? Every time I’ve used it to file a help ticket, they get back to me pretty fast with a response.

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It is but when I emailed support I was not given an answer, instead I was told to ask the question on the User Forum instead so that everyone can enjoy the answer. I agree that it’s a good idea to use the user forum as much as possible but it was mildly annoying to have to type out the question again on the forum along with the screenshots before anyone would respond to me. If the User Forum is going to be suggested as a means of formal support for paying customers instead of the publicised email address, then customers deserve the respect of actually having the User Forum easily categorised or curated. At the moment it’s just a giant question bucket - so forcing me to use the User Forum is not actually benefiting other customers.

How about having some sub categories in the need help category, and push users to pick a sub category when they write their post?

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There are a number of database searching / FAQ providers that use machine learning to give correct answers and make it simpler for a person to find an answer. I know the guys at https://goresponsa.com/en, something like this could be a ‘first level’ resolution and if the answer isn’t there then check out the forum or support ticket

Not sure how easy/difficult it would be to put forum knowledge into it

I have to say, I’ve been very pleased with the searching capabilities of the Forum.

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Yeah, I’d agree. I’m not sure I feel the pain the others have felt, but following along on the thread to see what comes of it.

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Yes, this is the solution I’m personally after if the alternative of curating the forum is not viable time-wise for the staff.

With Nigel’s suggestion, historically tags are not widely used by customers to either tag their post or search for a topic. Look at the analytics of any tag cloud widget to see the zero number of customers using it. I remember LinkedIn used to have a tag cloud widget once and two of the tags were ‘love’ and ‘bugs’. So useful. :slight_smile: . Anyway, I’m off on a tangent…

Regarding search. If it is the only means of finding information in an uncategorised forum, it is actually anti-customer. (No Customer I’m not going to divide this question bucket up into logical areas, instead I’m going to make you search the entire forum for it.)

Here’s a simple search I’ve run:

How much better it would be to have the top result be a formally curated ‘Dropdowns - FAQs’. Or to curate it by having a staff member re-title posts with solutions so that it always starts with ‘How to [specific problem]’ so that Users can quickly see which posts have definite solutions to specific problems.

The results are only of posts that mention drop downs and many are more complex, unrelated questions that happen to have a dropdown mentioned.

Anyway, my 2 cents. Jess

Even if Bubble added more categories, it’s still up to the person posting their question to select the proper category or the forum moderator would need to go behind every user/post and correct the category afterwards.

While adding additional categories may provide some additional ease in browsing I don’t see it ever being so granular as to find the exact details you’re looking for. It may be better to work on improving your search fu. :wink:

Try searching with just one or two keywords and leave out the modifiers – try just “dropdown”. Most search engines are not good at natural language. Looking at your screenshot you can see it’s matching on “a” and “in” which are not helpful in what you’re looking for.

Absolutely agree with this.

With what specifically?

As a paying customer having support or an expanded version of sample apps, scenarios and training. There are partners popping up with paid coaching and Bubble app development services which is awesome but that doesn’t fit the majority.

If there was another option with support (not forum) and expanded training that’s the option I would go with.

Honest feedback.

Just want to echo @spotyourlocal on sample apps. The meta_public Bubble app has been one of the most helpful resources I’ve come across (https://bubble.io/page?type=custom&name=header&id=meta_public&tab=tabs-1). I check that every day, and it’s been especially helpful for getting the hang of responsive. I think including that somewhere near the learn Bubble videos would be really useful (**Edit: I now see it is already there!). Studying that gives a really great idea of what it takes/everything involved to organize and build a large, great app like Bubble.is.

In my opinion, sample apps (forum pages, widgets) have been easier for me to learn from vs. videos because you don’t have to pause, rewind and re-watch. You can really go slowly through the entire app at your own pace, see the exact workflows, data structure, and focus only on the parts relevant at the time you need it. They’ve also been really helpful in learning about data structure with ‘parent’ fields–which I now know is very important to understand. I think adding more ‘project-style’ read-only apps like that would be really awesome for users, especially ones that incorporate Stripe, Zapier, Blockspring. :slight_smile:

Does it really have to be a staff member ? Or can we curate as a community within the forum ?

So a “sticky” post that has function headings and links to useful posts and external help ?

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Yes that is a good idea.

I was also thinking about how to improve help and knowledge base for a couple of weeks but never had time to create a topic about it… So lets try it now:

I thought of two things we could do

1. Create a topic called FAQ (Curated by us the community. It could look like this for example:

1. Database

  • [Titel of Topic/Question as a link to the corresponding thread]
  • [Titel of Topic/Question as a link to the corresponding thread]
  • [Titel of Topic/Question as a link to the corresponding thread]
  • [Titel of Topic/Question as a link to the corresponding thread]

2. Responsiveness

  • [Titel of Topic/Question as a link to the corresponding thread]
  • [Titel of Topic/Question as a link to the corresponding thread]
  • [Titel of Topic/Question as a link to the corresponding thread]

etc. etc.

2. A topic called something like "Community asks - Bubble Team answers"
This would be a topic about frequently asked questions and helpful insights into bubble. The focus here would be more on questions which cannot be answered by the community. Examples:

  1. Where are the bubble-servers located? Does this have any impact on speed of apps (Servers located only in US, app-users located in XYZ)
  2. Do you make backups of our apps (disaster recovery)? If yes, how often?
  3. etc. etc

just my2 cents :slight_smile:

Also, I am with @fayewatson.
More apps, more examples and more tutorials would be great. Especially regarding responsiveness I found out important things just by accident or by reading on some topic. For example, how groups have to be layered (if they are layered) in order to still be responsive.

But in general I have to say that bubble support is great. Especially when I compare it to other services (which cost the same or more).

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