CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Several months ago, I began experiencing a CiviCRM problem which caused an error to occur whenever I tried to set the administrative smtp settings.  I asked for help on this forum and tried various suggestions (such as "upgrade" etc.) which proved fruitless. 

Finally I contacted several CiviCRM professionals as listed on this site.  Each of them said that they would be happy to fix my problem, as long as I was willing to spend hundreds of dollars (estimates ranged from $300 to $600+).

I told each of them that I wasn't expecting them to do all of the work in solving the problem, but just to point me in the right direction.  I would have happily paid a reasonable amount of money for some reasonable help, but spending hundreds of dollars didn't seem reasonable.  So I lived with the problem for months, occasionally going back and trying to figure out how to solve it.

Through the use of some debugging tools, I finally was on the verge of solving the problem (having just found a reference to mailing_backend) when I came upon a post here today which referred to solving a problem by setting mailing_backend to NULL (it previously contained "N;").  I had dealt with config_backend previously so I was familiar with the concept, but I didn't even know that a mailing_backend existed before.

Having been a C++ programmer for many years (but having not yet learned PHP) I am not clueless but needed some help.  It seems to me that if the CiviCRM community wants to be a "self-help" community and wants to encourage more contributors in the future, the community should do a better job at helping to facilitate reasonable solutions to problems like this. 

Fixing the problem took less than a minute, but it cost me months of frustration and countless hours of debugging (of course, it helped me to learn more about CiviCRM, Drupal, and PHP, so it wasn't a complete waste of time).   

Many times on this forum I find what appear to be simple problems presented by members, with no reasonable response.  This does not speak well of the community.  I hope that someday soon I know enough about CiviCRM to help provide some answers to people like me who may not have a huge budget to work with but who have real (and simple) problems to solve.

With the CiviCRM community centered around free software and high-priced professionals, it seems obvious to me that we are missing something in the middle.

i checked some of your forum posts: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?action=profile;u=14721;sa=showPosts

and the ones i checked there was one or more responses and attempts made to debug and give you enough clues to help fix the problem

I'd be curious to see a lot of examples (urls please) for your statement of: "Many times on this forum I find what appear to be simple problems presented by members, with no reasonable response..."

As a FREE and OPEN source project, a lot of us spend a LOT of time and energy on support. I dont think we can fix everyones issues (since there are a lot of different system configs etc). Expecting folks to pay professional provider to help sort them out is not unreasonable IMO

In your case u made the decision to trade off months of frustration and countless hours of debugging in exchange for $300-$600.

Looking forward to seeing you support other folks in the upcoming days/week

lobo

Please understand, I am not trying to put down CiviCRM or the community.  I think it is a very robust package which will transform our data management procedures (with a ripple effect that will, I hope, eventually transform our whole organization).  I have been looking for something like this for years (and have tried and given up on some other systems) and from my analysis it appears that CiviCRM's features surpass the features of even some very expensive CRM programs (which I could never afford to try anyway).

The concept of having a cooperative community working together to improve CiviCRM is great too.  But my comments were intended to be constructive, pointing out that while the elite CiviCRM professionals who know the system inside and out have every right to charge hundreds of dollars for their services, I'm sure there are many CiviCRM users who, like me, are willing to do most of the hard labor of tracking down bugs and solving problems themselves, if only we are pointed in the right direction.  I would hope that the community could encourage people like me to work on our own problems, as a learning experience (and, ultimately, a community-building experience), and that some of the professionals would be willing to spend a little time giving us some direction on what to look for (with the professionals being paid for the actual time they spend providing such assistance).  I didn't want someone to solve the problems for me, I just wanted someone to point me in the right direction, and I am willing to pay a reasonable amount (not hundreds of dollars for a quick fix) for such pointers.

Something like setting mailing_backend to NULL seems pretty obvious now (of course, hindsight is 20/20) but I don't even see where anybody really explains what mailing_backend is.  (My assumptions about what it does are simply based upon examining the code and data.)  I am not going to waste your time and mine by providing a list of URLs; it's not hard to look through the forum to see old unresolved issues.

The question I am really trying to ask is this: What can we do to promote more of the middle level of CiviCRM community members who may not know the system backward and forward but are willing to learn?  I think this would be necessary for the health and sustainability of the entire CiviCRM community.

My experience is only of the latter, but I also request help in that way. As a sideline: in my experience the professionals do too easily assume that things like mailing_backend are familiar (no idea myself :-)). However, I do not think there is a lot to do about that apart from me continuing to ask questions and spending time finding information, testing and playing.
Erik

Thanks for the suggestion about IRC, Kurund!  I'll try that next time.

I don't want to discourage constructive criticism or risk getting too defensive --
But I'm not sure your perception is on target. Just take a look at the forum members list sorted by number of posts and you'll see that the top 20 or so contributors are all core team developers or consultants. More than any other forum I have participated in, CiviCRM has a stable, active community engaged in *giving* support -- not just asking for it. But I'm biased, so take that with a grain of salt.

To engage your original description of the issues you experienced --
I think there are two things to keep in mind:

1) this is free, open source software. you are not purchasing a support package with the product. so *how* you go about obtaining support will be different than if you by a box off the shelf from Microsoft and are given a phone number to call. you can use self-help resources (documentation/book/forums); you can reach out to the community for assistance while trying to figure out yourself; or you could hire someone to assist you. my point is just that you need to accept some responsibility for possible costs (time or money) associated with the software. I realize many people see "free and open" and think there will be no cost. there's always cost. it's just not in the upfront product acquisition.

2) debugging is not always trivial. it's one thing to say in hindsight that you wish someone had suggested clearing out the mailing_backend field months ago -- but maybe no one had run into that issue before, or didn't connect your description of the problems with potential solution. or maybe the problem to begin with is somewhat unique to your hosting environment. there are so many variables to consider -- the forum discussions can sometimes nail it on the spot, but other times are simply insufficient to solve the problems -- which is where someone with experience and the opportunity to actually dig into your system may be the best solution. and yes -- we have bills to pay -- so taking time to go beyond forum support and look at your specific situation to try to resolve the issue does take time and should be compensated.

again -- i'm not trying to discourage the constructive criticism. but there may be a lot more going on out there than you're aware of (in terms of people supporting issues). i'm sorry it took so long to resolve your issue. but some of that just comes with the package, especially if you're doing all the debugging yourself.