up vote 6 down vote favorite

As a SmugMug user, I have access to all kinds of information, support and otherwise:

What should I look to this site to provide me? (AKA, what is the mission/purpose of this site?)

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This was migrated from beta, but I still maintain that this is a worthwhile question to ask on the main site, and that meta is not where I believe this question should be answered. I believe that there should be other scoping conversations had in meta, and subsequently used to accurately answer the question posed in beta. – Cody Bennett Feb 4 '12 at 7:25

migrated from smugmug.stackexchange.com Feb 4 '12 at 1:33

3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Great question! One by one:

Dgrin: Will continue to be a place for folks to share photos, talk about photography, and also ask support questions. Many questions are one-off in nature and we handle them. We also handle the routine stuff that would be great questions for Stack Exchange, too. Then there's the sticky problem about customizing, and the code behind lots of hacks, and the sometimes-very-individual nature of customizing help that's given on Dgrin. I don't think the latter will ever change, and it's not something that Stack Exchange is suited for anyhow.

http://help.smugmug.com the place for all things help-wise from SmugMug. Our official help pages. I think that many posts on Stack Exchange will reference pages on our help site. But in no way is SE intended to be any form of replacement. Also you can chat real-time with SmugMug Support Heroes via our help site.

http://news.smugmug.com - our official blog site. We make promotional announcements here, we announce new features, and we instruct here.

http://sorcery.smugmug.com - our Sorcerer's blog, a place for geeks to geek out.

http://getsatisfaction.com/smugmug - another (very little used) avenue for folks to get in touch with SmugMug Support heroes.

http://www.smugmug.com/smugs/info/ - promotional (what, where, why, how) and also news reporting about SmugMug User Groups.

http://wiki.smugmug.net/ - most stuff from our wiki has been ported to our help pages.

http://twitter.com/smugmug - a way for tweeters to get our attention as they need to - still always better to email us or chat with us, but we monitor Twitter every day and respond there as appropriate.

http://facebook.com/smugmug - big social presence, and we use it as an avenue to alert customers to site issues, new features, things on our blog, general photography topics, contests, promos, and more. Including peeks inside SmugMug. And it's surprisingly, a great vehicle for folks that want help - and so we're wired directly in from our Facebook page to our Support system - if someone posts on our Facebook page, it's shown to all heroes on duty as a support ticket.

SmugMug on Stack Exchange will become, I hope, a place where API guys will do their thing (deep dive technical issues) and also discussions around best practices and practical answers about customizing, using SmugMug, sharing photos, and printing, selling and marketing.

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up vote 1 down vote

This site will serve a few niches.

  1. A place where developers can get help. By developers I mean site customizers and API developers.
  2. A place where the community can ask questions which will benefit the community as a whole. By this I'm talking about best practices, how to use the Smugmug format to do stuff, etc.

I suspect that what we need to do is to find people for the first group. While the second group in the end will be extremely valuable, and it will be quite possible to help them out, I think the first group is where we can take an early lead.

As an API developer, I'm going to try and do more work towards development so I can remember what kinds of questions I had about the API, and help out with this site.

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I like the Best Practices approach, though there will be quite some variability between the types of users and intended use of their SM sites... With regards to the idea of developer support, I would expect there to be many threads available at dgrin - is that tool not well suited to the needs of customizers/developers? – Cody Bennett Feb 4 '12 at 1:21
@CodyBennett: It is, but different formats allow for different kinds of interactions. I suspect this will work well where some things have been lacking. If you want to see how successful this format can be for that kind of question, see stackoverflow.com – PearsonArtPhoto Feb 4 '12 at 1:23
up vote 1 down vote

I do agree that this site has to find its niche, and something Cody pointed out well is that there are many ways to get information, is there a need for another one. My guts says that yes there is a need for this site. I have found that the other Stack Exchange sites have a higher signal to noise ratio than some of the forums. I am hoping that some of the community problem solving can occur here without as many basic questions.

I know I am guilty of asking basic questions, but I do think that some of the questions on DGrin can be fairly basic such as "How do I upload a photo?" I am hoping that questions here will be more challenging and informative. But I do agree that this site is needing some definition to understand what goes where.

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Two weeks later, I am still struggling to determine what questions go in which forum. I do believe that some of the confusion is that this post lists what the other forums are for, but it does not define well what this forum is for. Andy's description of SE as a place for API discussion does not match the impression that I am getting based on some of the questions. It is not a derision it is an expression of opinion. I think we still need to better define what goes where or the same problem that was had with the help files will happen with sites & forums. – Bradford Benn♦ Feb 20 '12 at 4:28

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