Intro Hello Message - HI!

Hello, Everyone!

Just wanted to jump into what seems like a great Community around a great suite of products (ES, EB, ED, etc.). I have a handful of questions for the Forum Community here and will be as clear and concise as possible with them, posting appropriately and individually (and usually in conjunction with Questions already posted on by other Members).

First and Foremost, definitely want to THANK the StackIdea Team & Developers here - I am not a developer by trade, so I greatly respect your work; the work done on the StackIdea products is simply outstanding. Exceptional Stuff! Additionally, the amount of time given and the access/availability of the Developers here to all of us in the Forum is to be commended: this level of quality application development coupled with high level customer support is at the top of the Joomla Community (and I've used a TON of Joomla applications). I am currently testing out the full suite of products for production purposes on some ecommerce sites I support and my immediate reaction here is: WELL DONE!

• One initial point to make here that I've noticed about the Support Forums (i'm an avid reader of posts!): I think it needs to be made more clear as to the function of these Forums. "EasyDiscuss" "discussion" "forums" seem to be more used as a "ticketing/help desk" solution by StackIdeas than as an open community forum. I've read the StackIdea creed/mantra on their approach to Support - i certainly get the approach from a business perspective (in essence, to most effectively resolve an issue, backend/ftp credentials and access are modus operandi). However, I'm finding that a lot of questions that I have come upon I cannot find answers to within the Forum because of this approach. Example: I search the Forums for a particular issue I have (just a generic example for reference here: "which fields from ES are mapped/synced to Joomla User Groups?". Often, a SI Responder has picked up the item as a "ticket", addressed the issue on the Customer's backend/FTP using their private/site admin deets and closed the issue/post as "resolved" and closed it to new replies. That leaves the rest of us, searching the Forums for just this particular question, without any understanding of how the issue was actually resolved. Instead of finding an Answer on our own and applying it (I pride myself on self-sufficiency), we are left to open yet another "ticket" by way of an entirely new post, on the exact same/similar issue. Again, I get/understand the business approach taken here by SI (the shortest distance between two points is a direct line), but I think it creates a "Forum" that isn't really a Forum - it's primary mechanism is instead a "ticketing" system for support. I'd much rather see an open "discussion" as to what happened in the instance so that when I search the Forums for an issue, I can reasonably have a path to fixing the issue on my own based on the "discussion" the entire Forum Community has undertaken. No new "ticket" required
  

How's that for a long, overly-verbose, first post?! Anyway, thanks to the SI Developers and thanks to the overall Community of Users here - I'm off to make a few more observation posts here on the Forum, and looking forward to utilizing these products and seeing them enhanced even further -

CHEERS!!!