Steepster Problems
I fully expect to see this place shuttered with no warning. I am making backups of my notes for that reason…
Please ask all your favorite Steepster tea suppliers to encourage Jason to fix the longstanding website issues w/o further delay.
Thank you for being part of the solution! :-)
But Jason is trying to sell tea, so do you think that he really cares whether his competitors continue to use the forum to promote themselves?
Yes, that’s true. However, if Steepster membership declines over time due to website issues, that will impact all tea suppliers on the forum including Jason. Thus, I suspect at least of some of the tea suppliers would be willing to assist Jason in making Steepster more reliable as it’s also in their own self-interest to do so.
What ideas do you have?
It’s not that difficult to maintain a functional website. This one was until about six (or was it eight?) months ago. What’s missing here is only the will.
To be perfectly frank, I have no idea why anyone would have joined over the last six months. Everything that made this place fun has been compromised. Why attempt to set up a cupboard here when it is obviously broken? Why attempt to post a note or comment, when it may or may not appear? My general impression is that Jason et al. are out to lunch. As Dick Cheney would say, they have “other priorities”.
Honestly, how many times do these simple requests have to be repeated, and by whom, exactly?
Hi All,
I wanted to take a moment and respond to the comments in this thread, hopefully giving insight into our situation and helping people better understand what to expect for the future. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to respond sooner as I’ve been traveling without consistent service, but hopefully I’ll be able to explain myself in the window I have now.
First off, let me thank everyone for using Steepster and making it the destination for tea drinkers that it is today. As people have said in this thread and others, and as we’ve always reinforced, the community makes this site what it is, and we couldn’t be more grateful that over the past 6 years people have chosen Steepster to share their passion for tea.
We started Steepster with a simple idea and not much else: to help people develop a greater love for tea by logging what they drink and interacting with other experts. From there it grew into something we never expected that consistently amazes us today. We are deeply dedicated and invested in Steepster, both emotionally and financially. Steepster was the first product we built as a company (emotional investment) and as of last winter I switched from our consulting work (with Disrupto) and have been working full time on Steepster to continue it’s growth (financial and time investment).
The reality of the situation though is that we still have other business commitments and areas of focus that we depend on for our livelihood. While that hasn’t prevented us from freeing my time to work on Steepster (I’m not a developer), it has limited the amount of time, money, and other people (like developers) we can commit to Steepster. What this means in real terms is that we don’t have consistent resources to keep moving forward all elements of the site (ex: fixing bugs, fulfilling feature requests, etc). We do our best to advance it when possible, but as some of you have seen, it doesn’t always move forward in the areas that you may want, at the speed at which you’d hope.
With that said, this doesn’t mean we’ve given up on the site or that we do not care. Far from it, we are invested in Steepster and I have been fully committed to advancing the site to the extent of my skills for many years. As painful as I know it must be for people experiencing issues using the site, I can assure you it is equally painful for me to see people complaining about, criticizing, and openly questioning our dedication to the product given everything that we have put into Steepster. We love the site, we want it to be the future of tea in the US and beyond, and we want it to be our future. That certainly doesn’t mean we don’t understand any and all frustration though.
In order to address these technical issues, and the greater picture of moving Steepster forward, we are in a period of actively pursuing a means of financing the site, so that we can get the consistent resources we want and need. I really wish I could give you an exact timeline for these things, when features would be fixed, etc (I would love knowing just as much as you), but unfortunately that’s not the nature of these things. What I can say though, is that one way or another we will find a way to make this work for Steepster and everyone using the site.
I hope that gives you some better idea about where we are and what we are working on. I have a number of other points I’d like to respond to, but I’d like this to be my main message here so I’ll do those responses in subsequent replies.
The one last thing I would like to say though, is to purpose a way to keep everyone better updated on the status of site issues, as I haven’t done a great job with that so far. I purpose that I create a sticky-ed thread listing the major issues that have been brought to my attention (significant features that would affect a large number of people and that I have been able to recreate) and list the status of the issue. Admittedly, most will simply be “acknowledged” for a while until we have the consistent resources we’re looking for, but at least people would be able to see the issue is known to us and others. As port of this I’d also ask that problems be submitted to me directly ([email protected]) in order to prevent discussion threads about steepster bugs from distracting from tea content in the forums. Getting bug reports and information about how to recreate the issues is hugely important in helping us diagnose and fix any issues, so that is always a great help.
How does that sound to people? Do you have a better suggestion for how I might communicate issues like that? If so, please let us know here.
Sorry this is so long. If anything, hopefully at the very least the length of this is some evidence that we take this seriously and will continue to fight for Steepster :).
For those of you considering other ways of sharing your love of tea, we hope we can re-inspire your dedication to Steepster. For those of you who continue to support us, thank you so much for helping us carry the torch, we couldn’t do it without you.
Please respond if you have thoughts about the method of communicating the status of certain features. I don’t want this to be a forum to debate other parts of what I discussed (our commitment, our situation, etc). Thanks!
- Jason
+1 for having a sticky thread about known problems and current status of each. +1 a million times, if I could. I imagine that this is the reason many of us had the “nobody cares at all” mindset, because it appeared that all of the problems were just being ignored due to no ‘official’ documentation. Creating such a thread and having you keep a presence in that thread (keeping us posted on the status, responding to questions, etc) will definitely help clear the air. Keeping an ongoing list would be helpful to members regardless, and as you mentioned it would also save space so that members don’t make a new thread every time they encounter a (probably already known) problem. So I just cannot see a single reason why creating such a thread would not be a great idea.
Jason – thank you for taking the time to explain things to us but mostly thank you for the resource that is Steepster. I’m with you 100%. I understand and I can be patient.
If you made it this far, congrats, I didn’t bore you to death with my lengthy note above (or maybe you just skipped it). Regardless, I’d live to respond to a few of the other comments that have been posted here and in the thread asking why this one was locked. Here I go…
Feedback:
Honestly, we love feedback and always want to get your opinions. While we may know a lot about the site from having built it, your perspective and opinions are hugely valuable. Where the issue arises with this, is in the fact that we don’t have the consistent resources we need to act upon the feedback (see above). So, in practice, any feedback you give ends up feeling like it is being ignored because we aren’t able to act/react quickly enough, and I’d like to assure you that this is the only reason why it may seem like we aren’t listening. We are listening.
Another element to consider when giving feedback, making suggestions, etc, is that we often have to look at Steepster on a more global level, considering the site as a whole and the larger goals vs. being able to look at specific features and functionality. What this means is that, for example, to add a button somewhere, that button has to be more important than other potential things we could do, because now we will commit a certain amount of time, money, and people to make that happen. So while it may seem easy enough to add a little feature here and there, we are burden with the responsibility of moving Steepster forward in the best way we know how, and that may not always align with any specific feedback/comments someone has. Again, this isn’t to say we don’t want that feedback, it’s just to give context to why we may make decisions that don’t perfectly align with the public feedback that’s been put forth.
The difficulty of fixing technical issues:
Some people have questioned our dedication to Steepster given the assumption that it’s not difficult to run a function website. While I agree that, given the right circumstances and resources you should be successful, it’s not a trivial task (especially if you don’t have consistent access to the people that can fix the issues you have). I consistently have issues (as I’m sure everyone does) with major websites/apps that have far more resources than us (google docs, Facebook, twitter, etc) because having technical issues online is simply a given. I wish it wasn’t the case, but that’s the sad truth I’ve begrudgingly come to accept over my many years of working on the Web. Even if you think you’ve triple tested everything and fixed all bugs, there will unavoidably be something you missed and that will break, that’s the nature of the internet. Things move so fast now you have to make quite an effort just to keep up.
Also, like I mentioned in my previous comment, it’s a issue of having the availability of the right people to work on the site, not an issue of having the knowledge/capability to understand what is wrong and fix it. We’ve done web products and apps for many years and have been successful doing so (you are welcome to check out some of the things we’ve worked on at disrupto.com). We can build great websites. Steepster, was built 6 years ago and hasn’t had consistent development resources since then. So as other technologies advance (browsers, etc) things on the site have become problematic. Had we had the resources and opportunity to work on Steepster for that entire 6 years, I wouldn’t be having this conversation now :(.
Please trust that, given the right situation and resources, we have the capability to resolve (mostly) any issues on the site (like I said, it’s not a 100% thing).
Crowd-funding/raising money from the community
After reading about our situation above, many of you might be thinking “if we all just pitch in a little money, Steepster can get a developer to fix the problems and we’ll be good.” That idea has actually been suggested a number of times. While I can’t fully express how happy it makes me to have people in a community opening and without prompt offer to give you money for building something they love, we do not currently believe this would be the best course of action for Steepster. Given our understanding of the system as a whole, in our professional opinion we think this crowd funding, while a inspiring idea, would not be able to raise sufficient funds to accomplish our goals. We also believe that doing so would put unnecessary burden on the users, and without the confidence that the end result would satisfy the reason for donating, we can’t move forward with it.
Trust me, if it was as easy as hiring a developer to just fix things as they come up, I would do it in a heartbeat. But, the process is more complicated than that (technically and priority-wise) and our current hosting situation makes that solution ineffectual until we are able to move our our current host.
The overall point, and related to what I said above about keeping the larger Steepster goals in mind, is that we appreciate your offers but, in our opinion, do not currently think it is the right thing to do at this time. We recognize this means certain features will continue to be broken until we are able to arrange for the resources to fix them, and in light of this, that further emphasizes how seriously we believe it would not be the right course of action at this time. I know there are some of you who may not agree with this conclusion, but hopefully you can at least believe that we are always seriously considering the options to the best of our abilities.
Current issues saving notes/commenting on mobile/tablets:
I’ve definitely heard numerous people mention issues of tasting notes not saving, comments not posting, likes not sticking, etc. It’s possible that given certain times when the server has experienced issues things like these could crop up, but I haven’t been able to consistent recreate these issues (nor have the people that report them). This makes it extremely difficult to diagnose and figure out exactly what is happening.
What I did notice in one of these threads though is that people mentioned having these issues on mobile and tablets. I can say that, given when Steepster was first built and knowing the technology, if you’re using mobile, tablets, or other non-modern browsers you will likely have issues using the site. I STRONGLY recommend using a modern, generally standards compliant browser (updated versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer version 9+) with a reliable internet connection. That is your best bet for things going smoothly on the site.
This is probably good for now. If there are some other general ideas you’d like me to discuss related to these threads, let me know here.
Also, I’m still traveling so I might not be able to respond super quick to new comments. So please just try to keep it classy as always while I struggle to get wifi connection :)
Jason:
I appreciate you taking the time to provide this information. Speaking just for myself, as a formerly VERY active participant in Steepster, I want to say I appreciated very much having this community and the people in it which make it by far the best place to discuss/learn about tea. Steepster has the BEST people period. Polite, welcoming and everyone is ready to teach, share and help new folks learn about tea. It has been wonderful.
However. Something changed. I was very happy with Steepster JUST the way it was. I personally didn’t need any new bells and whistles. It functioned perfectly for me. Others may disagree and want more. I liked being able to discuss tea, have a cupboard and track my tasting notes. It worked fine. But then it didn’t. And because it didn’t, I began to spend much less time here. I’m curious about what changed. Was it the desire and requests that users made for enhancements that made the site become so unreliable? If that is the case, can we just go back to where it was when Steepster worked? That would make me VERY happy and I would love to be able to spend my time here again as I still believe it would be the best place for tea people to gather.
The perception that folks have that Steepster might not have been much of a priority was the sometimes very long time before an issue was responded to. And I don’t just mean with a fix, I mean even acknowledged that, “hey – we hear you and we’re working on it.” The incidences of the site being frozen for some days where people would ask questions with no response and long threads with discussion about it with not much, if any, input from Steepster very much led to that perception. I will say this for my fellow Steepsterites though – the level of POLITE discussion about it, even through the frustration, was amazingly high and says a lot about the people who come here – you don’t find that many places on the internets. I don’t go to other places (Teachat – I’m looking at you) because of the lack of civility. People here watch their manners for the most part.
My response is very long as well and I apologize, but the passion you see is very much indicative of the level that people care for this site and this community. I will add again, that I would prefer a functional site, even if it means a less “enhanced” site. Back to basics – being able to save the tasting notes we spend a lot of time to write and not have them disappear, a cupboard that works (I myself don’t even need it to be fancy, even down to sorting it, I just want it to be there) and the ability to have the discussions is all I need.
Thanks.
I’m going to second the thought that something changed – it was working and then it wasn’t.
I too don’t need new bells and whistles – I just want it working the way it was.
My “wish list” is all about just fixing the broken. I don’t spend anywhere near as much time here as I used to, because I just find it frustrating.
Jason
Thank you for the respond. I didn’t skip any word. I cannot write a lengthy respond since I’m on iPhone. I agree with MzPriss and Dexter. I want the Steepster the way it was, before changes and new server. It was perfect …
Heh. I’d have to 4th this as well. While some of the changes were interesting, i don’t use half the new features, and would rather have old reliable…if that’s even a possibility.
Just curious, what are some of the new features that have been added? I’m pretty new to Steepster so I’ve only seen it the way it is now.
+1 It worked, and then it didn’t. Seems like a simple solution: undo whatever was done!
I do not need to add into what others say other than I agree! Fancy new add-ons would be pretty cool, but really I just miss the steepster I fell in love with when I first started using it.
I appreciate all the hard work you have done, and even though I have the FB group, my blog, pinterest, twitter, tumblr, and all other other outlets, they are not replacements for good ol’ Steepster, just other outlets for my obsession.
Happy holidays! Thank you for taking time out of your apparently very busy schedule to address these problems. Hehe, I read all of this right before I went to bed early this morning on my kindle fire, it made me happy before sleep :)
And I will also say, this isn’t meant as a personal thing. I really and truly appreciate Steepster and I know keeping a nice site going is a lot of work. And I have no idea whether going back to before the upgrade or whatever is even possible. I’m am the least tech savvy person EVER so I’m glad there are those who are good at it and can make a wonderful thing like Steepster. I just want to spend time here like I used to. I miss it.
Thanks for your comments here. I’m finally back from travelling and over my holiday flu so have some time to catch up here.
I agree 100% that the people on Steepster are awesome. Having experience on other sites/message boards, i’m consistently surprised and delighted by how polite everyone is here. I’ve seen it be much worse in other places. That certainly isn’t lost on us :). And as much as we may instinctually want to take complaints/criticisms personally, we know they aren’t and always try to keep a cool head about it. We know we’re all on the same team working towards the same goal: total tea domination!
As for the idea of “bringing back the old Steepster that worked”. I really wish that were the case. We did update the system a while back (about a year ago?) and that did dramatically decrease the load times and, at the time, didn’t have any conflicts with our hosting service.
Where the root problem comes from is that our hosting service also updated their system after that (as they frequently do), and in doing so, changed something that now conflicts with our system, causing lots of the loading and updating issues you see today. Unfortuantely, we don’t have access to their system to see where/what the conflict is, so that is the situation I’m referring to when I say we’re not able to resolve many of the site issues until we move off our current hosting provider.
If it was as easy as rolling back to a previous version of the code, we would definitely do that. But unfortuantely, it wouldn’t resolve the main issues people see today, and would actually cause the site to be slower (because we’d miss out on the speed increases we added to Steepster I mentioned above). Hopefullt that makes some sense.
Overall, we want to move the site forward and add new features/functionality. But at the core we want the site to work, so if at any point new stuff is getting in the way of the site working we’ll do our best to address that properly.
As part of my tea blog routine, I make a post on my blog then write a review on Steepster. I was going through Steepster looking for ratings I’ve given my teas throughout the year and found a bunch missing. I’m 100% I posted them, a number of them missing from November, with a few missing around September. Within the same teas there are missing tasting notes that only seem 1 or 2 posts from others when I remember there was much more than that. Not sure how I can prove it, and I delete my steepster email comments.
Maybe the tasting notes are there but in server limbo, but it really sucks for the tea companies since I do reviews for them too here on Steepster.
I’ve definitely had people report this, but haven’t been able to recreate it and pinpoint the issue ourselves. It could be related to the server stuff, but we’d like to look into it more to make sure. If there’s any info you can send about the situation (lnks, content, etc) you can send those to me directly. And that goes for anyone who sees this!
I’ll be adding this to the list of issues on the stickied thread.
Mike has given us a little holiday gift and put in a lot of extra hours over the hoidays to work on the Steepster issues. He’s made some good progress on moving us off our current hosting platform and setting us up for our own environment.
While he was working on this, he also took some time and fixed the sorting issue on the profile pages! So now you should be able to properly sort the tea ratings, wishlist, and cupboard tabs!
If you’re not seeing it, it’s possible you still have the old version of those pages cached for your profile. If that’s the case, just contribute any content to the site (like a tasting note, comment on a tasting note, reply in the discussions, etc) and it should clear your cache and show you the updated version of your page.
Is anyone seeing it working?
OMG!!!! It’s working – thank you!!!! thank you!!!! thank you!!!
I can now send out care packages and look at wish lists, cupboards etc. YAY!!!!! This makes me sooooooo happy
OH MAN!!!! THANK YOU!!!! yes that’s right, multiple exclamation points. best.night.ever.
The discussion pages are also sorting now! The only page I couldn’t sort was the one listing search results in the discussions.
Thanks again for working on this for us. It makes things so much easier and I really appreciate that.
I haven’t caught up on all the replies (and Jason’s messages) but I just came here to say SORTING IS WORKING!!! Apparently a few others have figured it out! :D
Jason,
Many thanks for moving the website issues up the priority list and for today’s wonderful results! Major KUDOS to Mike for all the extra tech support hours over the holidays to make these results a reality!
Happy New Year to you both!
Re: http://steepster.com/teaware
The sort function for Teaware needs some of Mike’s excellent troubleshooting skills also. For example:
- http://steepster.com/teaware?sort=new
- Sorting by any of the 7 “Type” choices results in the black “Nothing to see here…” page.
Thanks again!
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