General cPanel migrated from XenForo to ZenDesk...

[Cedric]

... and boy, everyone's hating it.

There's some harsh comments posted in the few pages on their new forum, which is hardly a forum to name really. Lots of old content is just gone. BIG mistake. It seems cPanel isn't making themselves much popular ever since they announced their price increase.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Welp they just shot themselves in the foot yet again. Like someone mentioned in that thread "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." They were much better off sticking with Xenforo or at the very least if they wanted to move platforms Invision or Woltlab would have been good choices over Zendesk. Hell I would even say that MyBB or SMF would have been better than Zendesk. It looks so primitive now, and the software apparently doesn't even have a private messaging system according to a post in the thread, and a community like cPanel needs a private messaging system IMO.

 

[⭐ Alex ⭐]

The category icons dont even load

 

[⭐ Alex ⭐]

This sounds kind of nuts. I bet someone could have made their own redirecter in idk, 2 hours tops using cloudflare workers for free as a small example.

Edit: Okay maybe not, their post system seems unpredictable.

Edit Edit:

"UPDATE - we are currently importing threads going back to September 2013. This means that if you are watching an area in general, such as Backups, you are going to get a notification of every new thread that is created. Unfortunately we don't have a way to stop that behavior on our side."

Whaaaaaaat???? LOL Does that mean someone will wake up with 5124 new emails in their inbox?

Edit Edit Edit:

"
The inablilty to disable email notifications is vastly becoming a big problem.
I was just greeted with 1100 email notifications in one day just from cPanel"

 

[Mike30]

@⭐ Alex ⭐ , for a second I thought it was a joke. It's really concerning the technical capability demonstrated by cPanel

 

[Arantor]

Which begs the question, somewhat, of “if this is how they manage a migration between two platforms, how will they manage my server”. But it’s only a “somewhat” because the honest reality is that this is a skillset they don’t normally need.

But the lack of testing should be a huge red flag.

 

[Cedric]

Which begs the question, somewhat, of “if this is how they manage a migration between two platforms, how will they manage my server”. But it’s only a “somewhat” because the honest reality is that this is a skillset they don’t normally need.

But the lack of testing should be a huge red flag.

Indeed. Can't believe how poorly they have handled this and keep handling this situation even though their community is literally begging them otherwise. This is really a shame on cPanel's part. BIG mistake.

 

[Arantor]

I can - clearly cPRex is a mid-level person with some technical skill tasked with making this happen. He or she will have been given the directive from above and told to make it happen, likely because “forums are old hat now” and “something something ZenDesk fresh experience”.

The C-suite will likely have been sold on unifying forums and tickets so for them it’s perceived as an improvement that there’s one less external factor and they probably even believe the lies that this will improve the customer experience.

Everything else is the natural consequence of these things.

 

[Cedric]

Probably yes. Hopefully they see how dumb they've been. How I wish I could see their faces and the fact how this has hit them in their face.

 

[Arantor]

I’m almost certain the decision makers will neither know or care. Reports will be fed into a shredder somewhere between cPRex and the C-suite by an overly bureaucratic middle manager who doesn’t want to deal with the headache.

At least that’s how my experiences of such changes always play out unless I’m the one doing it...

 

[Cedric]

Good point.. Does seem that everyone stops caring about their community and products and it's just all about the profits. Sad times.

 

[Arantor]

It's a corporate, acting in the typical corporate way.

Any forum run by a company for the company's implicit benefit should be assumed to have a business owner who will, at some point, need to justify its existence whether as a vehicle for support, customer advocacy and/or community outreach.

Companies do not do this sort of thing out of the goodness of their heart. Some of the more laid-back ones might be on the fence but even then they're still going to weigh up the costs of licences, hosting and time cost of moderation against whatever benefits they feel exist (imagined or otherwise)

I think the most unicorn example I have is one forum I'm on. There is a company that sells a product. They also run a blog that is... very tangentially related to their product, but the blog has enough traffic on its own to sustain advertising income, not to mention feed an amount of traffic to the originating company and its product. The blog also has a forum but it has always been a digital hellscape of some level (there is no advertising in the forum whatsoever, and the least-worst eras of the forum could be described as a digital jungle, it used to be much, much worse).

Some people come for the blog and that's it. Some came for the blog, found the forum and eventually joined (much as I did). Some... came for the blog, stayed for the forum and ignored the blog sufficiently that the blog not being real is now a forum meme because the blog consumers and the forum residents have a less than perfect overlap now.

The company bears the hosting cost, the licence is free, and the forumites themselves moderate for the most part - and there's enough perception that the forum generates traffic for the blog (and thus advertising and revenue) that the forum remains as-is, despite the fact that by all normal metrics it shouldn't exist.

 

[MrChris]

it looks like they streamed line there customer portal with there forum to make it easier for customers based off the information I found.

 

[Arantor]

That's always the reason given for making the customer's experience worse, though, that it's done 'to make it easier for them'.

 

[⭐ Alex ⭐]

To be fair, the person making the decisions probably isn't the programmer who makes cPanel the product everyone likes.