Broken Forum Notifications Undermines Confidence

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Posted by: mamlin 10/20/2009 10:59 PM

After two years part of the DNN forums' "notification" feature is still not working despite DNN Corp's efforts to monetize DNN by offering "PRO" paid support.  Note to DNN Corp: Paid support isn't an attractive option when the Corp's own website continues to exhibit already-fixed bugs...
 

Broken Forum Notifications: A Brief History
A little over two years ago DNN Corp updated the DotNetNuke.com website with a new version of the Forums module.  Version 4.04.03 of the forums module had a bug that broke the "notify me" feature for individual forum threads.  That is, if you post a question and wish to be notified via email when someone responds you will NOT be notified despite selecting the "Email me when this thread has replies" option.
  
On 10/31/2007 Will Strohl directly addressed this and suggested a notification be added regarding the bug until it was fixed.  Two years later we still have no notification and no fix.  Actually, we DO have a fix in the newer version of the Forums module.  It's just that DNN Corp has not updated their own website's Forums module verrsion in the past two years, thus the bug persists in a very public way.
 
 
Bad PR
Anyone considering adoption of DNN who discovers this "known bug" will likely suspect that DNN could be rife with many bugs, both known and unknown.  Not a good image for the product.
 
Further, anyone discovering that this bug has persisted for over two years will call into question DNN Corp's dedication to improving and supporting the product.  Pointing out that the bug has actually been fixed for over a year won't help much.  How can DNN Corp expect companies to shell out $2,000 for the support that comes with the "Pro" version when the support team doesn't bother to keep the Corp's site updated to the latest version of its own modules?
 
What happened to the idea of dogfooding?  DNN eats what it dishes except for the Forum module???
 
Here's a post from May, 2009, from someone considering adoption of DNN.  This person was savy enough to figure out right away that the notifications were not working.  The bug played a part in giving this person a bad taste for DNN even before the person tried the product.  
  
 
Repeated Questions, No Action
The question has been asked many times:  Why don't I get forum notifications from the DNN website?

It was asked here by Sandro.  It was asked here by Salama.  It was asked over here by Abdu Bukres.  Before that it was asked here by Johan Johansson.  It was asked by SanJolly here more a year before Salama's question.  This past summer Joan asked about the problem here.   It was more recent;y asked here by tknman0700 who was under the impression that the notifications never had worked.  Rest easy, tknman0700!  They've only been broken for two years, not forever...

You get the idea.  The question has been asked far more than what's represented by this sampling of links.  This represents those who figured out that there IS an issue.  Think of the far greater number of visitors who go away from the DNN website thinking their forum questions aren't ever answered (because of no notification emails).  I fear those people probably feel discouraged with the DNN community and DNN in general.  It doesn't matter how good DNN actually is.  Perceptions are reality.  A bad perception will kill a good product.
 
   
Good News(?)
The winter before the winter before this past summer Richard Edwards asked the "no notifications" question here and got some Good News!  From that thread we learn that, as of 2/6/2008, the issue was fixed in Forum module version 4.4.4.  Unfortunately, DNN Corp has apparently not yet updated its site to the Forum module version released in February, 2008.  That's 20 months and counting, folks.  We now have a major new DNN platform (DNN 5.x), a paid "PRO" version of DNN and venture capital funding for DNN Corp.  But, somehow, the support team hasn't been able to update to the new module with the bug fix.  This is simply unfathomable to me.
 
 
Fix It or Hide It
DNN Corp should fix the issue by upgrading to its own latest Forum module version.  At the very least, DNN can hide the issue by altering the appropriate ".ASCX" file.  Just stick a DIV tag around the "email me" link with a style attribute value of "display:none".  Done.
 
Considering all the venture capital DNN Corp received this past year, I'm more than happy to offer my consulting services to migrate the DotNetNuke.com site to the latest Forums module version if the Corp's support team is too busy supporting their new "PRO" customers... (call me!)
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