Dealing with the freetards?

[andrea_r]

Yikes! Five minutes per question would take me about four hours per day to answer all the free support questions I receive on a daily basis. I try to keep mine to an average of 60 seconds. I guess my maximum time can spike to a lot more than five minutes though which is what you were referring to there.

yep, MAXIMUM five minutes. And this is for people who ask me directly, not me finding voices crying in the wilderness. :D

I read fast & I type fast, so I can plow through a lot quickly.

[jakebarnes]

Darren and I are hoping to do our part to support the community via WPQuestions.com. We need to iron out the details this weekend, but on Monday we plan to announce some kind of fundraising effort, aimed at plugin and theme developers. The basic idea is to give some small percent of our revenue to the developers.

[Cais]

... 5 or less. Meaning, if I can hunt down what they need in less than 5 minutes, it's free.

That is part of the basic philosophy behind my Five-Minute-Fix idea, too.

[andrea_r]

Yeah, I have a ton of answers right at the forefront of my brain, you know? I'm not mean & stingy enough to deny people the easy ones. ;P

[hallsofmontezuma]

Yeah, I have a ton of answers right at the forefront of my brain, you know? I'm not mean & stingy enough to deny people the easy ones. ;P

I hear that, but when you get enough easy ones a day, they add up. I could do nothing but answer simple questions about my plugins full time, which obviously isn't practical.
Even though all the generic questions are answered in the FAQ, once or several times in my support forums, people still email/call/tweet/etc them.

[andrea_r]

true, and fair enough when you;re a person who has an insanely popular plugin. ;) I know I could spend literally all day answering any questions about MU that I can find. So there's a definite balance there. I'm scaling back now while I can get a handle on it.

[MiroslavGlavic]

true, and fair enough when you;re a person who has an insanely popular plugin. ;) I know I could spend literally all day answering any questions about MU that I can find. So there's a definite balance there. I'm scaling back now while I can get a handle on it.

If you have a plugin then you should support it.

I don't mean this towards you Andrea: I hate people who are in it for the money and not the spirit, forgetting that the free software they know and it's community that helped them out to be where they are.

[andrea_r]

Yeah, I know what you mean. :)

But I think the questions raised here is how much support? If you've posted FAQs, have detailed readmes, written tutorials, and still have people asking simple basic questions that they could have had answered in (sometimes literally) 30 seconds if they had bothered to read the instructions who then take fits of epic proportions if you don't hand those same answers to them on a silver platter while thanking them profuslly for even looking your way?

yeah. those people. :D

And while people should support plugins, they are not, not even by that three letter license that I won't name, obligated to support it. ;)

[Ryan]

I wrote my first plugin as a way to REDUCE support requests. But I just seem to have lowered the barrier for entry enough that any old muppet can start messing with stuff and so I get quite a few extreme noob questions.

I have found though, that by slowly providing more and more services directly intended to reduce support requests, the total number of support requests has plummeted from around 500+/day at their peak to whatever it is today, despite the plugins popularity escalating quite rapidly since then.

I've also found that by making things cost money up front, ie: you can't really miss the fact that you need to pay for certain services, it makes people a whole lot less likely to go asking you about such things. They know it costs to do w, x and y, so they figure that z will also cost money. By making it obvious up front how much things cost, and going out of your way to make things as retardedly simple as possible does help quite a lot (see my CSS generator for menus as a crude example).

Despite all this, I'm still considering doing some video tutorials and I spent a decent proportion of last night writing up a consistent instruction set on how to do the most common tasks. I'm sure this will reduce support requests even more, but as we all know, there are always those who will STILL need help.


@hallsofmontezuma - Providing technical support for SEO morons must be like stabbing yourself in the eye with a needle! I imagine you receive lots of stupid questions/suggestions about SEO. The SEO world seems to attract a lot get rich quick scammers who know nothing about SEO (but think they do).

[jakebarnes]

I get this part:

* Draw a line in the sand (so to speak) and never cross it when it comes to free users. Even if I could answer the question in less time than it took me to direct someone to my support forums, I hold my ground.

I agree that I could gain a lot by doing less free work for people. But this I'm not sure of:

* Be extremely active in community forums, blogs, and all kinds of things. One thing I even try to do on my own blog is reply to every, single person that leaves a comment. It's tough to do, but I still try to get around to most people (even if it's sometimes a month later).

I have tried that in the past, and I find it very time consuming. I only have a limited time to invest, and I'm not sure spending my time on community forums has always been the best move (depends, sometimes, on the forum). I suspect my return on investment, in terms of time, is low. Seems like there has to be a time when work relationships get a bit more defined.