Open Source & Free  

Clarifying our Support

Clarifying our Support

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For years we treated support with a “we’ll meet our developers where they are” attitude which is problematic
now that we have more than 6 free support channels!

Notice that we didn’t include the email/phone support for pro/enterprise users in the list of 6 channels…​

We try to respond to every query within 24 hours in stack overflow and the discussion group:

  • StackOverflow – please try asking any technical question here.
    We know it’s sometimes challenging but the payout is great as the site is very searchable and provides a
    treasure trove of Codename One information thanks to your questions!

  • Github issue tracker – If you are new to Codename One I would
    suggest asking in the discussion group first and reading the blog post linked here

  • This blog – the comments section in the blog posts and even in the developer guide is a
    good place for questions relevant to a specific entry

  • Discussion Group – Our venerable Google group isn’t an ideal tool but it works as
    a last resort. We prefer stack overflow but we still provide support there

  • Intercom – You can chat with our moderately technical support team live by clicking the chat button at the bottom
    right side of the screen. If you have problems with the site, your account or similar issues/requests please send
    them thru there. Notice that it’s not a good place for technical questions about programming e.g. “how
    do I do X” in Codename One

  • Facebook, Twitter &
    LinkedIn – While you can ask some things in these channels
    the structure of the response makes it very hard to answer. We occasionally get questions on twitter and fitting the
    answer into a tweet is impractical. LinkedIn recently updated the group interface and
    our group on LinkedIn might become more active but currently
    it doesn’t see much interaction

Often Googling things like Codename One followed by your question would produce answers, you can
also search stack overflows codenameone tag by prefixing your query with the tag in brackets e.g. [codenameone] my search query

What you Shouldn’t Do

Please don’t send us personal emails.

The reason we provide free support is to help the community as a whole. When you send us a personal email
you are undermining that.

Since pro & enterprise users effectively subsidize our free version one of the benefits they get is private support

Please don’t post/send attachments that aren’t images: APK’s, IAP’s or whole projects. We can’t really run these
apps as our devices aren’t jailbroken, even if they were it probably wouldn’t tell us much…​

It’s hard dealing with all of these projects, in the past we used to let pro users send us their project sources but
even this is now impractical as our community grew larger.

If you need to send us a test case you should do this thru git as explained here.

Please keep in mind that what you see in terms of our support is the tip of the iceberg. Besides dealing with all
of these channels we spend a great deal of support resources on pro/enterprise & corporate accounts. So if our
responses are brief or hasty it’s due to the work overload

What about Pro Support?

Pro developers also have the ability to send private support email.

Some pro developers started submitting their questions to stack overflow and just sending us a support email
with a link to the question. This is great as we can answer the question quickly but still provide the community
with information that might be important to other developers.

If you can do that as a pro/enterprise developer that’s great but it’s not required.

Please Ask for Help

This is a bit of a long post so it might be intimidating to some but that is not it’s goal!

We want to help as much as we can which is why we have so many open channels and we understand that this
might be confusing.

Don’t be afraid to ask in the wrong place!

At most we’ll just refer you to the right location for your question.
We think support is the most important thing we can do as a company and I hope that’s the message that we
are getting thru.

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