Home → Questions →

Status of multi-language support / Problem accessing eu.tenderapp.com / General feedback

• Edit

RockSolid Themes

09 Apr, 2013 03:06 PM

We can't access http://rocksolidthemes.eu.tenderapp.com/dashboard no matter if via http or https. Could this be something similar as 'le v' expierienced in http://help.tenderapp.com/discussions/suggestions/905? Apparently you were able to fix it for him. We would be glad if you could take a look, please.

Also, you're talking about this feature for quite sometime now. As you can imagine it's quite annoying for your international users to wait for such crucial feature over nearly two years. Tender doesn't seam to move so fast (out of the customers perspective) that other features could be so much more important on the roadmap (again: customer perspective).

So whether you aren't communicating great (invisible) updates you roll out enough or you've decided to just manage your success. We've evaluated Tender and Freshdesk a year ago and you won the race back then since you seamed more mature and driven by ease of use and stability than by features. Which is a good thing for the most part. Oh, and cause we thought you will roll out the multi-language support quite soon.

But your competitors products really start to grow up. They now support some of the most requested features I also see in your forum. Custom fields (not only via API) and quite extensive possibilities to customize CSS and HTML (liquid templates). If they manage to implement multi-language support in a way that makes sense (they are working on it), Freshdesk will be the #1 solution for every app and site that deals with customers in more than one language. I don't get why you miss this opportunity to stay competitive. You can still compete on ease of use, but you seam to deal quite lazy with (good) feature requests (again: customer perspective).

– Alexander

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Courtenay on 09 Apr, 2013 07:20 PM

   

   The eu site is actually a sandbox site with a blank database, which is why you can't see it. We have a few reasons why that feature hasn't made it into production

   • we never had enough demand to justify a full internationalized site-- maybe one or two requests every quarter
   • it requires any change to be translated into all the languages which holds everything up majorly. Every single change needs to be translated five times.
   • we also have had an institutional split - half the dev team hated it, one person was pushing for it (me, the boss), and the rest didn't mind one way or the other. Since I run the company as somewhere between a benevolent dictatorship and anarcho-capitalism, and the feature hasn't had a champion, it's languished.

   I totally understand how you feel like we're not updating anything. It's just that we're not updating the things that you specifically care about. We try to strike a balance between servicing the thousands of existing customers we have, new customers coming on board, essential system upgrades, and crazy new toys.

   For example, we rolled out color themes and logo uploads in December, which took our lead dev 3 months (css refactoring, ouch); it means people can change their colors without knowing CSS. We also added full js scripting to the dashboard and frontend. We recently moved a bunch of servers to a new data center and doubled the capacity of our search (that took about 1 month). We're currently in the process of tripling (!) the reliability and size of our database cluster by rearchitecting a bunch of backend code. We rewrote our spam handling system which saw spam drop from 60% of our new comments to around 2%.

   So, yes, lots of work is going on, just not in the areas you're aware :)

   Freshdesk looks like they're implementing a bunch of cool stuff, though. Their full plans are about double ours ($40 vs $20/agent/month). They're going to (if they haven't already) hit that point where the ui and all those features get in the way of a clean interface. Like you said, it's a tradeoff.

   Thanks for the feedback.

   • Edit

2. brandi closed this discussion on 09 Apr, 2013 08:23 PM.

3. RockSolid Themes re-opened this discussion on 10 Apr, 2013 06:58 AM

4. 2 Posted by RockSolid Theme... on 10 Apr, 2013 06:58 AM

   

   Thank you, Courtenay.

   I'm sorry to hear that. Just to make sure that we are on the same page here: You don't have the intention to roll out the multi-language support anytime soon? I'm confused since you (as a support team) were referencing the beta until now in every question about it.

   • Edit

5. Support Staff 3 Posted by Courtenay on 10 Apr, 2013 10:19 AM

   

   We have the beta site (*.eu.tenderapp) running on our current codebase; but
   we've had zero feedback from anyone who beta tested it. So it's there, and
   current, but needs work based on actual usage.

   • Edit

6. 4 Posted by RockSolid Theme... on 10 Apr, 2013 10:22 AM

   

   Well, we'd love to give you feedback. But we can't use it, right?

   • Edit

7. 5 Posted by Julien on 10 Apr, 2013 09:16 PM

   

   Hey Alexander,

   You can totally use the EU server, you simply need to create a new site on it, since it runs completely separate from the normal Tender: it has a different database, etc. Simply go to http://rocksolidthemes.eu.tenderapp.com/ for example, and create a new site.

   Let me know if you have questions.

   • Edit

8. brandi closed this discussion on 10 Apr, 2013 11:43 PM.