Cake-wiki?

I'm posting this in response to Katie_Katie's post to Noel, Brandon and Seth.

I think it would do much to have an easy to find consolidated and acknowledged list of bugs, I think it would be better for Cakewalk and for its users. 

It would assure us users that bugs are acknowledged and are being worked on.  

I took some courses while I was at university regarding government policy and the environment and risk. In all the case studies I can think of, people do not like being left in the dark, and it often would nip those responsible on the bottom in the end. What I am saying is, TRANSPARENCY

I think we as a user base and the developers would have an even BETTER relationship if Cakewalk would ease some of our concerns by having a list of acknowledged bugs, and bugs that are being worked on for registered users. 

Perhaps along with a list of feature requests... 

In fact!

Here's an idea for those at Cakewalk.

How about having a Cake-wiki?

A single place where registered cakewalk users could consolidate bugs, offer tips and suggestions and feature requests. You guys could include a rating system so registered cakewalk users could - like - or -dislike - feature requests, etc... 

Every registered cakewalk user could post or modify a post, and the moderators could review the posts ensuring they are contributing and not taking away. 

I think adding a wiki-type page to the forums would go a long way to boosting Cakewalk users morale and offer a more organized and centralized way to deal with feature requests, bugs and tips etc.. 

Cakewalk forums (up until recently) have been a beacon of hope and helpfulness among the DAW community, why not continue to spearhead this reputation and implement a more streamlined way for customers to relate with and communicate ideas likes and dislikes to Cakewalk?


My last contract at the provincial government I was involved in working on a wiki for the Ontario Public Service intranet. I think it is a great idea that Cakewalk should seriously consider!

i love the idea of publishing a list of acknowledged bugs annd keeping  track of feature requests and their popularity.  i,m not sure that it is wise to do this outside the existing forum tho.  that would make it less centralized and i'd have another site to "keep up" on.
cant we do all that great stuff right here?

But woudn't this be helping to make sure that X1b is bug free?

IE, a checklist these 30 problems have been fixed etc, we are good to go, let's release.   Also helping with the debugging I assume.

Jesse G


There is already a Cakewalk Sonar Wiki page and the current owner is looking for someone to take over the Wiki site. 


http://sonar.sonarama.com/index.php?title=Main_Page


Peace

Never knew it was there - it would be a waste for this valuable tool to be lost....

The problem with a forum or a wiki or a facebook page or painting on the side of the local water tower is that there is no confidence that the problem reported is reproducible, not due to user error or not specific to some very weird installation of software and hardware.

Cakewalk has a process to confirm that bugs are bugs i.e. that there is a problem with the software not working as it is described in the documentation. To go through that process and then hide the result as a trade secret is to force your users to go through repeating the process over and over again, because they can't just verify that it is a known bug.

Whether Cakewalk wants to call it a "bug list" or a "known issues" or a "problem referred to development" is irrelevant, so long as a user can find an official acknowledgment on the Cakewalk support website that the problem he is encountering is not his own personal problem, and it will not get better no matter how hard he tries to fix his system/installation. Many users do not even know about this forum, let alone the wiki, and in any event a search of this forum is a plain and simple nightmare if you are trying to find a real solution to a real problem.

If Cakewalk wants to use its problem report form as a "poll" to see how many users are finding the already known bug, there are far simpler and less frustrating ways to do that poll. If they are trying to hide problems to avoid scaring off new customers at the expense of punishing current customers, then it is plain and simple unethical behavior. And it is endangering the potential for repeat customers.

As to the need to conserve the resources at Cakewalk for fixing existing problems, how is that served by having to use those resources to read multiple reports of the same known bugs from users who have encountered them for the first time? Nothing could be more labor saving than to keep an up to date "knowledge base" with known bugs and workarounds to keep the technical support people from getting the same reports over and over again.

This is not unheard of. "Known issues" links are commonly found on hundreds of software support sites. The Microsoft "knowledge base" is huge and frequently consulted.

If the software were perfect this would all be irrelevant. Since the software is not (and probably cannot be) perfect, then I will accept the excuse that a Cakewalk is doing its best only if it is also being transparent in this area.