announcement Update on Elementary support announcement Hi <!channel>, As you may have noticed, we’ve been less responsive to support questions on Slack. This is due to two reasons: • The dramatic increase in support requests. • Significant growth and maintenance demands of the Elementary Cloud Platform, which is rapidly gaining popularity. This growth is not only exciting; it's essential. Expanding our business and generating revenue allows us to continue supporting and nurturing the open-source project and community. This rapid expansion requires us to re-think our support strategy and how to meet the needs of both our open-source and Cloud users with the limited resources of a startup. Our goal is to focus these limited resources on developing the product and making progress that will benefit all of our users. As a result, we decided to update our support approach. Please read the important updates below: 1️⃣github pink Higher priority for GitHub issues • We have implemented a new support system for the community. This system will prioritize Github issues and contributions, which should improve release frequency and contributions. • Our team will promptly address critical Github issues and contributions, while less urgent ones may be flagged for community support. • This effort will focus on improving the project and solving bugs. Unfortunately, we will probably not be able to assist with local environment issues and deployment struggles. 2️⃣S Community-driven support for our open-source offering • Going forward, the Slack support channel will be primarily community-maintained. • This allows our team to dedicate more resources to critical development tasks while still providing a platform for peer support and knowledge sharing. • We are using a paid plan on Slack, so historical messages are kept and are a support resource for the community. 3️⃣📚 New support initiatives • We understand the importance of support and are implementing additional resources such as scheduled office hours, updated documentation, and incentives for community contributions. • These initiatives are designed to enhance support and foster community engagement. • If you have ideas to share or saw such initiatives that worked well - Let us know 🙏 4️⃣☁️ Support for cloud customers • We are committed to continuing to provide top-tier support for our Cloud customers. This includes swiftly addressing critical issues and ensuring that your experience with our Cloud product is seamless. • If this change is driving you to consider our cloud offering, which includes support with SLA and dedicated personnel, let’s talk. To make this transition easier, we will offer generous migration discounts. We appreciate your understanding as we evolve our support model to better align with our growing user base and business. Thank you for your trust and for being a part of this community! 🧡

so you are just saying that things will be as they are now

@Denis Kokorin the response SLA to Github issues will improve, and we hope consolidating into issues will reduce the number of threads on Slack. The additional initiatives we are working on should help as well. However, we are no longer able to provide quality support on Slack like we did several months ago when the user base was smaller.

for some time I was the only person answering questions in #C02CTC89LAX channel, so I can tell this is not very exciting. It's not because I'm lazy, it's because I don't know all the aspects of Elementary

No worries @Denis Kokorin, I appreciate your feedback and of course the help you provided to fellow Elementary users. We were within our goal of answering threads during the same work week until the first week of April. Then the combination of local holidays (team was in low availability) and load of cloud customers made us take the hard decision of stopping the Slack support and re-evaluate the goal and policy. I agree with you that today Elementary isn't easy enough to use without support. But just keep answering ad-hoc questions isn't the scalable way to solve it. We will dedicate the resources to improving docs and creating content that will help, as well as making changes to the project itself to make it simpler to use. We will use the questions that repeat in the channel to understand which resources we should create. I would love to get your feedback on this as well, as you have been very active here 🙂