Feature Suggestions

[agentblack]

2 hours ago, WHMCS Nate said:

As I read the criticism here, it's not as much a criticism of the feature request system as it is criticism of the pace of feature development and the prioritization choices we have made in implementing new functionality. All three topics are valid things to provide feedback about; but when one sets about trying to solve them, being clear about which topic is problematic is critical to actually improving things.

The feedback Ive gotten from customers is that they want major new features, and quality of life refinements, and bug fixes, and on-going maintenance, and back porting fixes, and documentation, and engagement. Implementing feature requests and new ideas we have is balanced with these other priorities. If there are areas you feel like we need are imbalanced, that is valuable feedback. My experience has been that majority of our customers want an 'all of the above' approach, not just one or two elements.

I think that seeing a lot of feature requests being generated is a sign that WHMCS is a useful and important product. When you have a tool that solves some problem for you, it gives you space and time to notice new problems that the tool might be able to help you with. This happens to all software programs of a minimum level of complexity. Jamie Zawinski summed up this trend with his maxim: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones that can." The number of feature requests coming in reflects the many different and innovative ways people are using WHMCS, the dynamic nature of this industry, and how central WHMCS is to our customers business.

The idea that if WHMCS were working as fast as it should, the number of open feature requests would go down, does not match my experience of how software evolves - for any product Ive ever worked on. Software where the number feature requests go down over time is typically software that is dead or abandoned.

Ultimately our company leadership has to take all of the information they can gather and make choices. Feedback from the community is an important part of the information they consider. That feedback comes in many different ways. The feature request system is a medium we have found helpful. If your feedback is "we want more new features", we hear that. If the feedback is: "these four features requests are really important to me and here is why" - that is also helpful. If you can order them by priority - even better.

If you have suggestions about how we could improve the communication through the feature request system, that is also something we want to know. Hopefully Johns earlier clarification of what Under Consideration means and the workflow for requests will help set expectations better. I think Brian's last reply pointed to a major difference between how the feature request system works in practice and how some customers expect it to work here:

I also appreciate the feedback on the difficulty in finding specific ideas that has come up. Sorting through 1000+ items is not a simple problem. Feedback on how we can make that easier would be great. 

Im not sure this is a defence of the feature request system, but I hope that it does work as a defence of interaction and communication. As an employee, I am most successful when I deliver high quality software that adds value for my customers. WHMCS as an organization is best off if we provide the tools our customers need. Our customers are better off when WHMCS solves problems. The most effective way to get there is collaboratively.

Regarding this: "being clear about which topic is problematic is critical to actually improving things"

Let me make it crystal clear for you: the rate of development to add features that users truly need or want moves at the pace of the United States Congress. It's slow, it appears to take no input from the user base, and needless features are being added to the software that likely the majority of people don't use.

Regarding this: "The feedback Ive gotten from customers is that they want major new features, and quality of life refinements, and bug fixes, and on-going maintenance, and back porting fixes, and documentation, and engagement. Implementing feature requests and new ideas we have is balanced with these other priorities. If there are areas you feel like we need are imbalanced, that is valuable feedback. My experience has been that majority of our customers want an 'all of the above' approach, not just one or two elements.

I think that seeing a lot of feature requests being generated is a sign that WHMCS is a useful and important product. When you have a tool that solves some problem for you, it gives you space and time to notice new problems that the tool might be able to help you with. This happens to all software programs of a minimum level of complexity. Jamie Zawinski summed up this trend with his maxim: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones that can." The number of feature requests coming in reflects the many different and innovative ways people are using WHMCS, the dynamic nature of this industry, and how central WHMCS is to our customers business."

Forgive me while I contain my disdain for this response. Any software development company would tell you that customers want enhancements/features, QOL improvements, bug fixes, maintenance, and improved documentation.  I believe your statement is a generic canned response and shows the general lack of understanding of what your user base wants.  Looking over all of the feature enhancements requested the majority of it appears to be administrative back end enhancements needed to make the product function as needed/expected.  Yet there are many requests that have been pending for four years or more.  The lack of response from WHMCS to these issues really shows that WHMCS is out of touch with its userbase and isn't paying attention to the ongoing requests from it's users.

You've started down the right path on ending support for older versions, which takes  care of back porting fixes, however this is overshadowed by the fact the product is somewhat stagnant. There hasn't been many "ground breaking" enhancements for the back end user. No ticket priorities, no easy way to duplicate product add on's, no way to discount only the base product not add on's, etc.  The only thing that might be considered "ground breaking" is the annoying feature of entering your admin password every time you enter a sensitive area.  And even this feature is annoying at best with no option to let us turn it off.

The documentation for the product leaves a bit to be desired and generic canned responses from support like "its your server configuration, sorry." does not lend itself to being helpful in allowing your users to troubleshoot their own installations.  Want less support tickets? Give us documentation that allows us to walk through the issues of your software and gives us a direction to go when trying to resolve something your software broke or isn't compatible with (i.e: PHP7).  I can't tell you how many hours we have spent removing bloat from WHMCS to get it working properly with PHP7 and most of it stems from all of the integrations with things, generally payment processors and control panels.

A suggested list of focus areas for WHMCS should be:

1) security issues
2) compatibility with newer technology (php7, etc.)
3) Bug fixes
4) On-going maintenance
5) QOL enhancements
6) New features as requested by the user base not those who likely pay a handsome sum of cash to WHMCS.
7) documentation.
8 ) Tighten up on your supported versions. 1 Major previous release support as LTS, and current tree only. Older versions are no longer supported and no longer receive security or bug fixes.

Regarding this: "Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones that can"

Your product is on the verge of being replaced. I wouldn't hang your hat on that quote by Jamie.  Your failure to listen to the feedback and needs of your customer's is becoming your own undoing.  We are asking you to innovate, asking you to improve your product so we can continue to grow and be successful partners, and yet I'd have better luck talking to the dust bunnies in my CPU fan. Your user base is passionate, dedicated, and growing frustrated by the lack of innovation from WHMCS.  You have years and years of requests in the feedback forum and most are "under consideration" or "declined", the vast majority of which have zero comments from WHMCS on an idea of when we can expect it or if ever.

We need functionality today to fix a pain point that has been evident even when we were a client many years ago.  We left because you didn't have that functionality.  We came back because we outgrew our previous CRM/Billing system (ClientExec for those curious), and yet a feature we requested four years ago, still hasn't been considered or even given an estimate of when it will be added.  To get that functionality, we will need to spend several hundreds of dollars to outsource the work to ModulesGarden.  Would WHMCS like to chip in to those costs we bear to make your product functional? Would WHMCS comp the annual renewal of maintenance for us? How about the ongoing costs back to ModulesGarden every time you have a version change? These types of issues are going to be the undoing of WHMCS.  I'd be happy to pay more to our ongoing maintenance if I knew it was going to get us the features and enhancements we desperately need.

Regarding this: "I think that seeing a lot of feature requests being generated is a sign that WHMCS is a useful and important product. "

Let me pick up my chin from the floor for just a minute.  Feature requests or product enhancements being generated is one thing, but when you do nothing with that information, it makes your product no longer useful or important.  When dozens of people "up vote" a request, do you still see this is a feature request, or a deficiency in the software?  If it's the former then I'd kindly ask you to rethink that.  If it's the latter, then why haven't you moved on it yet? If dozens of people are telling you its a pain point, when does it move from a feature request to a product deficiency that probably deserves some time or at least a response from WHMCS?  Your product is no longer useful or relevant when you stop incorporating features that are requested by your user base, especially when dozens of them ask for the same feature.  Is the only way to get development in the product is by breaking our the Amex Platinum and getting cozy with someone? Because if that's the case, let me know who and I'll be on my way to England.

Regarding this: "The idea that if WHMCS were working as fast as it should, the number of open feature requests would go down, does not match my experience of how software evolves - for any product Ive ever worked on. Software where the number feature requests go down over time is typically software that is dead or abandoned."

Really? Because that's not been my experience.  My experience has shown me that when customers are happy, they tell others.  Others join the ecosystem and bring new ideas along.  If there is a decline in requests over time, then that generally means you've made your clients happy or the next new shiny thing hasn't happened yet.  Aren't happy client's what we are all after in the first place? 

And if WHMCS works as fast as it should, I'm pretty sure you'd accomplish more work than the United States Government at the moment.  However, we all know that you are doing something on the product, as evidenced by the Weebly and SSL features recently released, but I do not believe your attention is on the right subjects at the moment. Attention needs to be paid to requests made by your users.  I looked in the requests forum and I did not see a Weebly topic or SSL integration that jumped out at me.  Could you share with us where you received feedback that those two pieces were worth of the scant developer time?

Regarding this: "Ultimately our company leadership has to take all of the information they can gather and make choices. Feedback from the community is an important part of the information they consider. That feedback comes in many different ways. The feature request system is a medium we have found helpful. If your feedback is "we want more new features", we hear that. If the feedback is: "these four features requests are really important to me and here is why" - that is also helpful. If you can order them by priority - even better."

We have already done this for you by the numerous "up votes" people have attached to the feature requests and yet those requests have fallen upon deaf ears.  Again, if someone needs to break out the Amex Platinum to finally get the attention the users are asking for on the product, tell me when and where, I'll be on a plane.

Regarding this: "I also appreciate the feedback on the difficulty in finding specific ideas that has come up. Sorting through 1000+ items is not a simple problem. Feedback on how we can make that easier would be great. "

Easy. Set honest and realistic expectations of time on when/how features can be implemented.  Can this feature be implemented in 30/60/90 days? Does this require a major rewrite of code?  Where WHMCS is dropping the ball is by not talking to us. Not letting us know realistic expectations from a development side. Have some different status' other than "under consideration". Assign some time expectations to the requests. Easy, moderate, difficult to implement and where it realistically falls on your roadmap. I get some things require far too much development time to be practical, however if a third party developer can knock something out in a few weeks, why would we expect you to take four years to do it?  Your lack of communications back to us is your own worst enemy.

Regarding this: "Im not sure this is a defence of the feature request system, but I hope that it does work as a defence of interaction and communication. As an employee, I am most successful when I deliver high quality software that adds value for my customers. WHMCS as an organization is best off if we provide the tools our customers need. Our customers are better off when WHMCS solves problems. The most effective way to get there is collaboratively." 

I must respectfully shake my head at this response. I appreciate where you're coming from but when only one side of the equation is doing the work, that is not a collaboration.  We've given you everything you need to let you know where customers stand, and yet talking to my CPU dust bunnies would accomplish more than expecting WHMCS to proceed on user feedback.

WHMCS needs to spend some serious time reviewing the requests already in the system and begin to map these out for users. Let us know when we can expect things.  The lack of communications from WHMCS is one of the biggest frustration points to date.

[sentq]

3 hours ago, brian! said:

by definition, surely if you're using x times more files, to do a similar thing, then that's bloated... v5 and v7.3 are not the same, but they're not so vastly different that it needs to be 24MB vs 116MB !!

it's also going to increase the time/effort of maintaining and updating it.

totally true, with the number of the dependencies they have currently it means more risk

[ptmzr]

On 9/30/2017 at 6:10 PM, brian! said:

bring FR into these community/forums

This seems best. It'd allow easy discussion/contribution by all members, no second forum for FRs, and repeated FRs could be immediately folded into one, etc. Is this doable @chrisdowns ?

[yggdrasil]

2 hours ago, ptmzr said:

This seems best. It'd allow easy discussion/contribution by all members, no second forum for FRs, and repeated FRs could be immediately folded into one, etc. Is this doable @chrisdowns ?

I think I suggested this before more than once. The current Fr system requires a separate login (awgh...) it is slow, messy and disconnected from the rest of the community. I'm very sure that many features are not looked by WHMCS either because it just creates more work on WHMCS side as well having to look and babysit new features, decline them, update them, and so on.

They could potentially solve a lot of problems by integrating FR on the forums. The forum has ways to vote things or polls, or categorize them, etc. It would work very well and I think that almost half if not more of the features would actually be resolved for the simple reason that some newbies post features request for things that WHMCS can actually do and they are not aware. Other users would point them to the correct way. And other features, we could post a code example on how to do that. Sharing is important if they really want FR to be some sort of feedback from customers. I think that 80% or more of features could be auto-resolved just by the community itself. If you don't count for bugs that are on encoded files I think if the FR is here, It will help WHMCS as a company as well.

Even bugs should be here so we can track them or report them and WHMCS would avoid having to deal with duplicated bugs reception.

[bear]

On 9/30/2017 at 4:15 AM, yggdrasil said:

We all know but I guess most don't hang there anymore. It's a dying community based on the quality of the posts and users.

Wow, I leave off the name because it wasn't relevant, and you feel the best thing to do is disparage it?
Any chance of you being any less negative in any of the posts here?

[yggdrasil]

10 minutes ago, bear said:

Wow, I leave off the name because it wasn't relevant, and you feel the best thing to do is disparage it?
Any chance of you being any less negative in any of the posts here?

I'm not negative. I'm realistic and numbers don't lie unless you want to account for spamming participation and other fake accounts. WHT is like kitchen nightmares today so no wonder most of the valuable users are gone or rarely ever participate anymore.

[agentblack]

@yggdrasil I appreciate your comments on this thread but lets keep it to the topic at hand.  Mr @bear has generally always been fair and respectful, even in the face of rudeness from folks.  The current state of WHT is not the topic of this thread. If you wish to take that conversation offline with Mr. Bear please feel free.

Thanks.

[bear]

14 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

I'm not negative.

If you say so. I disagree. 
Moving on. 

[yggdrasil]

13 minutes ago, agentblack said:

@yggdrasil I appreciate your comments on this thread but lets keep it to the topic at hand.  Mr @bear has generally always been fair and respectful, even in the face of rudeness from folks.  The current state of WHT is not the topic of this thread. If you wish to take that conversation offline with Mr. Bear please feel free.

Thanks.

I was merely replying him as he quoted a specific part of my previous topic. I was never rude or disrespectful to anyone unless someone feels triggered.

[WHMCS ChrisD]

Hi Everyone,

Please take a moment to reflect on section 2.1 & 2.2 of the WHMCS.Community Rules & Guidelines and keep these in mind when posting 

On 07/09/2016 at 8:55 PM, WHMCS ChrisD said:

2. Behaviour on the Community

1. We expect all users to be friendly and polite. While we understand that users will disagree and have different points of view at times, this can be communicated in a civil manner
2. Please do not post rude, insulting or inflammatory posts. Personal attacks, name-calling and insults will not be tolerated on WHMCS.Community.
3. Profanity and inappropriate images (including porn or gross violence) may not be posted anywhere on the WHMCS.Community.
4. WHMCS.Community Staff & Moderators use their sole discretion as to what is deemed unacceptable behaviour in the community and may remove content at any time.
5. Your posts assist other users, please do not delete content if you find an answer, please share this solution to help other users.

 

[twhiting9275]

I can't say that I disagree with the entire course of this thread. WHMCS, as developers have utterly failed their customers over the past few years. How long did it take to get Stripe in, again? Perfect example of that.

As far as development / bugfixes / communication

As @brian! mentioned, we absolutely know there's bugs that've been there for years that have been ignored. Hell, I know of at least one that you claim "isn't a bug", yet functionality is not as advertised. I'm sure that this isn't the only one. Then again, nobody actually got back with me on that, and I'm just tired of the fight any more. 

What needs to happen here is quite simple:
After 7.3 is fully tested and released, there needs to be a feature freeze. That's right. Nothing new added.
Go through that backlog of bugs that we all know is there, fix them all. Then we can have new features.

I realize this is not exactly the 'fun' approach (everyone hates catching bugs and fixing them), but you, as a company need to put yourselves in your customer's place (something that you should have started doing a long time ago). Stop rushing releases, start fully testing and vetting them, get the bugs (yes, even the ones you refuse to admit exist) fixed.

Just my 0.02, of course

[brian!]

6 hours ago, twhiting9275 said:

Then again, nobody actually got back with me on that, and I'm just tired of the fight any more. 

oh I hear you... i've reported serious bugs/failings to the very top... yet what happened? nothing... after a while, you just give up trying to help them.

as for the rest of what Tom says, I fully agree.

[yggdrasil]

16 hours ago, brian! said:

oh I hear you... i've reported serious bugs/failings to the very top... yet what happened? nothing... after a while, you just give up trying to help them.

as for the rest of what Tom says, I fully agree.

And users/customers should never feel like this. The main reason some companies go open source is exactly for what you stated. To receive massive amounts of bug reports, feedbacks and code suggestions (for free). 

I have said this to WHMCS and other software companies in the past. Users feedback is precious. It costs money as data has value, yet WHMCS considers it as someone bugging them. When people send bug reports, criticizes something or gives feedback, regardless if it is bad or good. That information is priceless !!! 

It makes your software better, the more eyes, the better it gets over time. Let me put it like this. I would pay people to report me bugs if it was my product. I would even pay beta testers as their time is not free either yet software companies expect all that feedback for love to the company/product. There is no love when you are paying for a product or service as it's a business transaction, you are not getting it for free, so the same should apply the other way around. I'm not saying WHMCS should pay users for this, but they should take that information as gold and not a complaint. 

I also personally think that bugs should have top priority over anything else when it comes to software development. Even new features, excluding security bugs, that should be panic mode where everyone else stops doing whatever they are doing and start working on fix first. 

At least in that regard, WHMCS does take security issues seriously now, releasing quick patches. But I feel they are not taking other bugs too seriously over releasing new features. A bug should not be in a non-fixed state for six months or a year. Why are you releasing new features instead of fixing existing ones first? That is an entirely messed up objective when it comes to how developers invest their resources (time). Keeping customers is far easier than getting new ones (and less expensive). Fixing bugs is what keeps existing users using the product.

I also agree on the freeze new feature suggestions made by twhiting9275. Bugs should be fixed first before anything new is released. I'm not saying all of them at once, but having bugs for months or years is unacceptable. That means start with the oldest ones first and go from there.

Edited October 3, 2017 by yggdrasil

[Matt]

I think one of the fundamental problems that we have, and that are demonstrated even within this thread, is that everybody has different priorities.

 

Brian has the bugs he's reported, Tom has his, yggdrasil I’m sure you have yours. 

 

Similarly Agentblack has feature requests he wants that are different to the ones Brian wants, and different to the ones Tom wants.

 

In an ideal world we would love to be able to implement every requested feature, and fix every reported bug, but that simply isn't reality.  As a software company, we have to pick and choose what we work on.  And we use a number of factors to help us decide what we work on.

 

Firstly, we look at how many people have reported the issue.  Issues that are reported by multiple people are obviously prioritized.  Other factors that affect the decision are what is the impact of the issue, how many people are using the area of the product it affects and do workarounds exist.

 

Looking at the changelogs from the past year of releases, there's been over 700 cases addressed that related to bugs and reported issues.  That's not the number of a company that is ignoring bug reports.  Now are there some we haven’t fixed?  Sure.  Your’s may be one of them and we know that’s frustrating.

 

New features in that time have included things such as support for Premium Domains, New Product and Domain Statuses, Product Addons Module Support, API Tokens, Module Queue, Automation Insights, Improved ACL Controls, Direct Debit Support, SSL Automation, New Payment Gateways including Stripe and Accept.js, and soon features including MailChimp integration, More Backup Options, Social Sign-In Integration and more.  These are all big ticket features that have a real positive impact on the businesses of our users, allowing them to do more, sell more and ultimately we hope, be more successful, which is always our goal - enabling our customers to be as successful as possible.

 

We have these forums so that issues can be discussed, and a healthy discussion is welcome. We do read the forums and do have discussions internally based on the issues raised here. We’re always on the lookout for issues gaining a lot of traction. The new community forums are the first of a number of projects we have planned to grow community involvement and deliver a more integrated experience between us and our customer base.

 

At the end of the day we will always have to prioritise and we know that will end up disappointing some users some times. But we are always happy to revisit anything our users bring to our attention.

 

Matt

[yggdrasil]

The number of people that report or use a bug is the wrong approach for several reasons. Bugs are bugs. They are not less or more important based on how many people say they are. It can mean a lot of things; some users don't bother to report them anymore. Some expect other people to report them and that they will get fixed, or some are hidden so they other users didn't hit them yet except power users.

When I first started to use WHMCS, I was impressed by how stable it was. Some releases later I had some bugs, mostly not so important. Now I don't upgrade to latest two versions because there is a bug which would render my domain sales useless. Actually, three which I consider important, one a security risk in my opinion when it comes to ordering (new bug as it was not there on older releases). Isn't this a strange thing? The more I adopt WHMCS they more I find them....and this also happens the more new releases come out.

The reason is that the more advanced your usage is, the darker the bug will be, like a hook not executing if another one is active, or in the wrong priority or some other strange behavior.

Even if nobody has reported it yet, its there, so why not fix it before other users find it? 

Fixing bugs based on how many people report them seems like a popularity contest and is just wrong. Bugs should be fixed by how they come into to the report system. Older bugs first, newer ones pending. That way WHMCS could always give customers an estimated guarantee that bugs will be fixed in XX max time, for example, six months. As old bugs get fixed, the closer your bug comes to the fixing position and date. This will also prevent many new bugs that could be related to the fact that an older one was still not fixed and is causing a relationship problem with a new feature. Playing catch and seek with random bugs seems like more work for your developers. You can always skip this procedure and fix a very critical bug first (like security) but then go back to the pending line. Like a factory, bugs should be killed by order. Personally, I think that only the ones classified under security should get preferential position and to the top right away.

Also, you said it yourself. That WHMCS does not ignore bugs, but somehow users here have that impression. And the reason is precisely because of the approach. If someone points out a bug that is two years old, its a slap in the face to WHMCS. Would you argue the bug was not important? It surely was for the person/s waiting years, and it gives an awkward impression to new users in case they ever have hit a bug. We would never have this discussion if bugs were fixed by oldest date first. Most bugs in software have dependencies. This is why you start with the oldest one first unless you want a complete mess with new features and bugs reappearing.

Once this is done you create categories like the following ones:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/306914/bug-tracker-priorities-and-policies#2015123

Then again, start with oldest one first in each category. Even categories have preferences in order and for a reason. Of course, WHMCS can adopt whatever model they prefer, but the date is always a priority on every bug system I know because having old bugs not closed makes the whole process and company look bad.

Just my 2 cents.

[agentblack]

11 hours ago, Matt said:

Firstly, we look at how many people have reported the issue.  Issues that are reported by multiple people are obviously prioritized.  Other factors that affect the decision are what is the impact of the issue, how many people are using the area of the product it affects and do workarounds exist.

I shouldn't be expected to use a "work around" for years just because one exists.  This is just laziness upon the devs.  A bug in the software, is a bug that shouldn't be there.  Looking at how many people it affects before deciding to fix your product is again, laziness.  You just effectively said with your statement that, "oh we know our product has bugs, but we have your money now, so bugger off, we don't care."  If I am having a defect with your product, I expect that defect to be fixed. Be it security, bug, bloat, whatever.  I don't expect you to turn a blind eye to it and expect me to continue to pay you 100$/year for software that you knowingly won't fix.

11 hours ago, Matt said:

Looking at the changelogs from the past year of releases, there's been over 700 cases addressed that related to bugs and reported issues.  That's not the number of a company that is ignoring bug reports.

700 out of how many reported? How many bugs older than 1 year remain outstanding? How many bugs older than 2 years remain outstanding? How many critical bugs, how many security related bugs? 700 bugs could be as simple as a missing . in a sentence or a poor language translation.  Some clarity to this statement to give us more context upon what actual bugs you've fixed would be helpful.

 

11 hours ago, Matt said:

New features in that time have included things such as support for Premium Domains, New Product and Domain Statuses, Product Addons Module Support, API Tokens, Module Queue, Automation Insights, Improved ACL Controls, Direct Debit Support, SSL Automation, New Payment Gateways including Stripe and Accept.js, and soon features including MailChimp integration, More Backup Options, Social Sign-In Integration and more.  These are all big ticket features that have a real positive impact on the businesses of our users, allowing them to do more, sell more and ultimately we hope, be more successful, which is always our goal - enabling our customers to be as successful as possible.

and a great many of these features had to be stripped from our install as it errors out with PHP7.  Could you at least update your software and bring it to current release of PHP before you muck it up anymore?

 

11 hours ago, Matt said:

We’re always on the lookout for issues gaining a lot of traction.

Oh really? Have you looked at your requests section lately? Don't feed us a corporate line of muck, we're not falling for it.

 

11 hours ago, Matt said:

The new community forums are the first of a number of projects we have planned to grow community involvement and deliver a more integrated experience between us and our customer base.

While the new forums are a good start, how about keeping your customers happy so they continue to recommend your product?  Selling based upon reputation alone is only going to last you for so long before it runs out. Then what? We are left with a product full of bugs that have been reported and not fixed. Thousands of enhancements to make the product better and yet they're ignored.  Why should we utilize our precious time every day to report things to you if you won't do anything with them unless you deem it worthy? What benefit do we get? If your feedback/requests forums are any indications, there are no benefits to reporting it since, as you say, "everything is evaluated." and "always on the lookout for issues gaining a lot of traction."  How much traction does a feature enhancement require before you'll give it a look?  I'm sure I can pay a bunch of people to start upvoting things to finally get the attention needed to fix the product.

Matt, I appreciate where you're coming from, but most of your statement is corporate banter. Your customers want to see action. We want to see outstanding issues resolved. Bugs shouldn't take years to fix just because two people are inconvenienced.  There are some universally understood priorities with product development and I'm sure most would agree:

1) Security issues
2) Major bugs
3) Enhancements to product
4) Minor bug fixes

It may be high time for WHMCS to take a step back from number 3 and focus your attention on 1, 2, and 4.  Polish up the product, make it shine, then get back to adding user requested enhancements.  Note I said user, not those with the biggest Amex Platinum cards.

 

AB

[Matt]

18 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Fixing bugs based on how many people report them seems like a popularity contest and is just wrong. Bugs should be fixed by how they come into to the report system.

 

9 hours ago, agentblack said:

I shouldn't be expected to use a "work around" for years just because one exists.  This is just laziness upon the devs.  A bug in the software, is a bug that shouldn't be there.  Looking at how many people it affects before deciding to fix your product is again, laziness.

You've both picked up on just one element of how I said we identify high priority bugs. Every single bug report that comes in is reviewed by a dedicated group within the development team, considered based on all the factors I listed above and more, each is then assigned a priority ranging from Critical to Trivial, and then moved to one of various queues. There is no single factor used to determine the priority or necessity of a bug being addressed.

9 hours ago, agentblack said:

and a great many of these features had to be stripped from our install as it errors out with PHP7.  Could you at least update your software and bring it to current release of PHP before you muck it up anymore?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. How do you strip features? All releases of WHMCS are tested and confirmed to work on both PHP 5.6 and 7.0 so you shouldn't be having any issues with PHP7.

9 hours ago, agentblack said:

Oh really? Have you looked at your requests section lately? Don't feed us a corporate line of muck, we're not falling for it.

Yes, we review it regularly. The feature requests site plays an integral role in every product planning meeting we hold. Looking at the requests site right now, if I sort by popularity and take the top 60 requests, I see 21 have been implemented, 9 of them declined, 9 are currently in Investigation status indicating we need more info or research, and 2 are in progress. That's 70% of the top 60 most highly requested features with positive action.

9 hours ago, agentblack said:

Matt, I appreciate where you're coming from, but most of your statement is corporate banter. Your customers want to see action. We want to see outstanding issues resolved.

We come back to the issue of priorities.  Issues are being resolved all the time, another 60 bug fixes went out in yesterday's 7.3 release.  But what *you* actually want is your issues resolved.  Somebody else wants different issues resolved.  Another person wants other issues resolved.  We have to select the issues we believe will help and benefit the most people, and that's what we do.  As I said before, we know sometimes this means disappointing some users, but it's shortsighted to say issues aren't being addressed.

Matt

[ptmzr]

On 10/4/2017 at 8:12 AM, Matt said:

 

You've both picked up on just one element of how I said we identify high priority bugs. Every single bug report that comes in is reviewed by a dedicated group within the development team, considered based on all the factors I listed above and more, each is then assigned a priority ranging from Critical to Trivial, and then moved to one of various queues. There is no single factor used to determine the priority or necessity of a bug being addressed.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. How do you strip features? All releases of WHMCS are tested and confirmed to work on both PHP 5.6 and 7.0 so you shouldn't be having any issues with PHP7.

Yes, we review it regularly. The feature requests site plays an integral role in every product planning meeting we hold. Looking at the requests site right now, if I sort by popularity and take the top 60 requests, I see 21 have been implemented, 9 of them declined, 9 are currently in Investigation status indicating we need more info or research, and 2 are in progress. That's 70% of the top 60 most highly requested features with positive action.

We come back to the issue of priorities.  Issues are being resolved all the time, another 60 bug fixes went out in yesterday's 7.3 release.  But what *you* actually want is your issues resolved.  Somebody else wants different issues resolved.  Another person wants other issues resolved.  We have to select the issues we believe will help and benefit the most people, and that's what we do.  As I said before, we know sometimes this means disappointing some users, but it's shortsighted to say issues aren't being addressed.

Matt

So, what is the record of last month re these:

#1 How many existing/reported security holes have been fixed?

#2 How many existing/reported bugs have been fixed?

#3 Which is the top rated feature to be implemented and what is the progress on it?

Thank you,

Your customer

Edited November 4, 2017 by ptmzr