Hey everyone!
We here at Wild Me are working very hard to make sure we are serving you as best we can. With that come some process updates: we have to start thinking at scale because there are so many of you leveraging Wildbooks that we can’t keep up!
Going forward, we are going to ask that support requests get posted here, in the Wildbook Community. This has a number of benefits for you:
- There is zero chance of your report getting lost in an inbox on a busy day
- You will be able to search for other reports, some that may already have resolutions in the thread.
And there are benefits for us:
- We have a public record of what problems people are experiencing, making us a bit better at holding ourselves accountable
- We have a public way to communicate to anyone experiencing the issue, so we’re reducing repeated effort of reaching out, and making it where more people can test a suggested solution at one time
- We have a public way to gather information from different angles so we can more easily identify where in our code the issue is stemming from
The process
- Post here with the issue you’re experiencing. Use the template at the end of this post for guidance on what to provide.
- We respond and dig into the issue. If there’s a similar issue another user is experiencing, we’ll get everything into a single thread.
- We resolve the issue, either by fixing the problem or determining the issue is a defect.
Concerns with this process that you’re probably having right now:
What if my issue requires me sharing information I don't want in a public forum?
- We can make the post Unlisted. Only people with the direct URL will be able to access the post (this includes preventing search indexing from search engines like Google). That will enable us to still leverage the group access without having you information outside of the Wild Me community.
- We can switch to private messaging, and at the end of the process, we will provide a generalized review of what was determined in the private conversation.
This feels less personal and like my issue will get lost in the void.
Our number one goal to serve you better. This is our first step towards making a more sustainable, scalable process and give you additional resources to rely on so you aren’t waiting on us.
If you put in a support request and feel that the process isn’t working, please talk to us. We are going to iterate on this and make sure that it’s the best service we can provide to all of our customers, but we won’t know what to fix without your feedback.
What if my issue turns out to be a bug?
We create a ticket in our system and provide you the number. The issue will be published as a known issue until it is resolved, at which point it will be noted as fixed. When we fix the issue will be handled differently based on the severity of the bug.
- Critical bugs are bugs that we will fix immediately and ask you to partner with us in testing to ensure that it’s fully resolved.
- Severe bugs are weighed heavily and will be resolved as quickly as possible without interrupting the current dev cycle. These are the highest priority tasks other than in-flight feature development work.
- Moderate bugs will be considered during our regular cadence work. The are prioritized after feature commitments that are in-flight, but will be considered before beginning any new major work.
- Cosmetic bugs are considered in line with other work being completed. These will rarely be a separate development effort, but instead folded into work that touched the area of the frontend that shows the issue.
Template for support request submission
When using the template below, you can include image, csv, or xlsx files. If you are uncomfortable sharing the data publicly, send the file to info@wildme.org.
What Wildbook are you working in?
What is the entire URL out of the browser, exactly where the error occurred?
Can you describe what the issue is you’re experiencing?
Can you provide steps on how to reproduce what you’re experiencing?