Trello is making its users think we're a bug tracker or place for feature requests

Question

If you've been watching the bloody shores as much as the rest of the regular users, you'll notice the uptick in trello questions since their launch.

For the general, "how do I make this work" things are fine and on topic.

Mixed in with those are an all too increasing set of "it would be great if you did this" or "You should include this feature". Questions asked pointedly as if Trello and Web Apps are the same being. We know they're not.

But Trello users don't know this. Why? Because they're told it's okay through unclear instructions.

Case in point, Dragging cards in Trello, can there be a distance threshold? is a feature request/bug report about how the cards move.

Voted to close and left this comment:

Bug reports and feature requests should be directed to [email protected] or their development board.

The person asking responds:

No. They shouldn't. trello.com/help

And the first paragraph happens to be:

Stack Exchange
Your question may already be answered! The Trello development and Fog Creek support teams are regularly watching the Web Applications Stack Exchange and responding to questions tagged trello. Stack Exchange is an excellent way to get high-quality answers to all sorts of questions.

Without an explicit call, Trello is giving the cloudy impression that Web Apps is a fine place to throw their feature requests and bug tracking. That's wrong. It's neither fine nor dandy.

Two things need to happen:

1. Trello needs to be clearer about what type of questions should come here and what should go direct to their board/email.
2. Web Apps users should continue flagging, or voting as off topic, questions that are either feature requests or bug reports.

What more can be done or what more could we do?

Answer 1

Thanks for bearing with us while we refine our support protocol. It's our hope that the end result of this will be a blog post on how to leverage webapps.stackexchange.com to support your newly launched free application without running afoul of the current community. Our intent with directing users to webapps was to highlight the community as well as leveraging it. We are not looking to take more than we give.

The blog post here has been edited to point people to the http://trello.com/help page, not webapps, so we can continue to refine the messaging there.

We're changing this. It's unclear.

Stack Exchange

Your question may already be answered! The Trello development and Fog Creek support teams are regularly watching the Web Applications Stack Exchange and responding to questions tagged trello. Stack Exchange is an excellent way to get high-quality answers to all sorts of questions.

Problems:

• It describes Stack Exchange, not webapps.stackexchange.com
• It conflates our team with the community.
• It doesn't clearly define what kinds of questions are appropriate here.

This is the text I've come up with. We're happy to iterate if this doesn't stem the flow.

How do I...?

Your question may already be answered! There's a wealth of information on how to do stuff in Trello on the Web Applications Stack Exchange community. Web Applications Stack Exchange is a free, community-driven Q&A for power users of web applications. It's a great place to learn how to use Trello (or Gmail or Twitter or YouTube) well.

If you want to know how to do something, feel free to ask a question there and tag it trello. The community will be there, and the Trello team is there regularly, too. (Note, this is not a way to tell us about ideas for future Trello features or to report bugs. See below.)

Please stay tuned for future updates while we refine the messaging on the help page. This is likely to be an iterative process, so we'll keep checking back to see whether quality is improving.

Answer 2

As noted by Rich Armstrong,

I've also edited the tag wiki to direct people to the appropriate support streams for bug reports and feature requests. At some point relatively soon, we'll be pushing a new help page with a reference to webapps, at which time, the organic traffic will likely provide a question for us to answer, rather than us having to move them over from customer contacts.

So one problem is that users are not reading the tag hover cards.

The tag wiki excerpt has the following

Project management tool by Fog Creek Software. Bug reports and feature requests should be directed to [email protected] or their development board.

Though on the commonly asked questions at Trello.com

Where should I ask more questions? Try the webapps stackexchange site!

So it is bit unclear here, which type of questions? I would say to at least update the blog post to read

Where should I ask more questions? Try the webapps stackexchange site! Though, bug reports and feature requests should be directed to [email protected] or the development board.

On the help page

Your question may already be answered! The Trello development and Fog Creek support teams are regularly watching the Web Applications Stack Exchange and responding to questions tagged trello. Stack Exchange is an excellent way to get high-quality answers to all sorts of questions.

Somewhere in there needs to be a line stating that feature requests and bug reports stay on Trello website.

This seems to be a similar case of Facebook.SO and StackOverflow but on a much smaller scale. So for now, I will just be closing where appropriate and hope that Trello's team will keep in constant communication with WebApps. (Hopefully someone from Trello will give an official response soon)

Continue flagging if you see a problem or ping the mods in the Chat Room (it is empty but don't worry, mods are around) for further discussion.