SketchUp support is supposed to help with downloading, installing, and activating SketchUp. I’m not sure who you got through to who would not know to tell you that the downloads page is here:
Support will send people to the forum at times when they are making a feature suggestion, or if they are asking a “how to” type of question. The Sages are often the first people to answer questions, but a lot of non-Sages do answer questions as well.
I’m not positive about the number, I may be forgetting someone, but I think that two of us who were already Sages went on to be members of the SketchUp team (me and Christina Eneroth). I try to answer questions where it clearly needs someone from SketchUp to help on the problem, or if I think of a suggestion that hasn’t been covered after the topic has been going for a while.
I thought about him, but don’t see a Sage badge for him. Also, he may have been made Sage after being an employee. Jody comes and goes as a Sage as well.
Isn’t it odd that there is no landing page for this forum?
Like no description or introduction about what the forum is, what Sages are, etc. Maybe that would help.
There is a Technical section (not sure what that is, never noticed it before!). Maybe the Categories need cleaning up, becuase Inot even clear where I am supposed to post half the stuff I do.
under SketchUp Pro there are tags for Technical, Extensions, etc… But there are also categories for these? How does it work? Does tagging something (eg with Technical) automatically place it into both Category forums?
I found this post about Sages. Indeed, ThomThom is there, as well as me:
I see all messages and don’t mind where they are posted. Some people do take the time to move a post to a better category. I would take a guess as to what category you think it should be in, and someone else will redirect it if there is a better place for it.
I think also Chris Fullmer was considered a sage (even a SketchUcation) before he joined the SketchUp team.
There is and you have control over what it is.
On your Preferences page, click the Interface panel (in the navlist on the left,) …
… the landing page control is labeled Default Home Page.
I suggest (and had suggested in this category before,) that the default be changed to Categories.
(It lists the categories in left column, and an abbreviated Latest postings list in the right column.)
It makes it better for newbies to learn their way around all the categories.
Now why is there not a traditional “home page” ? This forum is run by Discourse, which is actually a big database. The interface pages that you see across the top bar are really just filtered lists from that database. Same with categories, … they’re lists of posts that have a categorical property attached. (Anyway you can get more information at their site.)
When each member joins they are sent a private message explaining the basics of how to use the forum. For an interactive lesson send a private message to discobot.
No. Tagging is sort of like keyword tagging. It is simply a way for people looking for something to further filter the listing.
Categories and tagging are two different things. When you happen to see the name of a category used as a tag, it is either that the poster didn’t know that there is a category with that name, or the topic could have predated the creation of that category. (Ie, excessive use of a certain tagword is a clue for Jody to create new categories or sub-categories.)
I wondered about Chris too. I don’t see him in that initial list. Something to explain is that in the Google days they had what was called Top Contributors. I was one of those, and as the forum was transitioned over to sketchup.com, the TCs were made Sages. I can’t find my original invite email from Tommy, but the oldest email of that type is from 2011.
I have never, ever had a bugsplat reply, despite sending what must have been hundreds, over the years since it was implemented. I used to add a description and my email address but only include email nowadays because I don’t see the point in sending typed descriptions into what I assume is some unnamed database that might be read in months or years.
Jody tried that, but went back on it after watching me cry for an hour. We settled on me having SketchUp Team as my tag, but I still have the Sage hat.
When I talked about “sages” above (and at SCF) I meant in a general “guru” sense.
The badge names differed historically from forum platform to platform.
I think that is right… internally at Trimble, Sages are community members who get “perks” overtime… things that team members would not need or already receive.
I don’t know of anyone who has had a response. I do still report the nature of the problem in the forlorn hope that it is being read by someone and maybe being acted on in some ways.
There is an old story about an office in Whitehall that used to (still does?) exist with just a telephone in it and nothing else. When civil servants wanted to get rid of a caller, they diverted the call to that office in the knowledge that the phone would ring but never get answered. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if all corporations employ similar techniques!
There is typically no direct feedback on Bug Splat reports intended because this is not a support medium but rather serves the software developer as telemetry for getting information on issues the user has encountered.
In that case, why do you get taken to a web page that purports to tell you if it is a known issue? I have never had a problem that was apparently known. Which I find a little hard to believe.
For the Mac crashing issues I was able to show which stack key was most likely to be affected, and we did edit the bugsplat page for that type of crash to have it point to my Known Issues post in the forum. But you’re right, that doesn’t happen for many bugsplats.
It’s quite hard not to come to the conclusion that a lot of this is, well you know, kinda like window dressing? Maybe it’s my natural cynicism surfacing but it’s not beyond imagining that corporations sometimes fanfare their technical support when it maybe doesn’t really deserve it. Still, I guess that would be marketing for you. Might fool a newbie but wouldn’t cut much ice with long term users.
Won’t stop me subscribing when I see a new super duper SU version hoving into view but it certainly does nothing for early adoption. For me, old and grizzled as I am, it falls into that category defined by “you can fool all of the people some of the time,…” But come on someone, prove me wrong.
