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Over 6 years ago, we started providing a few simple add-ons publicly. Over the course of that time we have grown to offer 20 different add-ons — many of which are complex — and have grown today to serve over 10,000 developers representing over 50,000 websites from around the world. I’d like to say THANK YOU to everyone that has purchased our software over this time!

We also recognize that over the past year, the ExpressionEngine® Answers site emerged, and it has become a very favorable place for the ExpressionEngine community to come together to ask for help, and help one another.

In 2007, we chose to run with a discussion forum style approach for providing support, and it’s been running that way to this day. I think it’s very fair to say that this approach didn’t scale well, and we’re a little behind today on how we provide support.

Today, that changes.

At Solspace, it’s very important to us that we offer quality software and provide quality support to go along with it. We are very pleased to announce two changes to the way we provide support for our add-ons.

As of today, we are no longer providing support through the Solspace support forums (we’ll continue to finish up assisting customers with open issues, and the forums will continue to be publicly available as read-only). Instead, we’re embracing the ExpressionEngine® Answers site as the official site for posting “how-to” questions you may have regarding Solspace software. We will be actively engaging in the ExpressionEngine® Answers site and assist customers where we can.

We’re also excited to announce the immediate availability of private support tickets! After careful consideration, we’ve transitioned to use Freshdesk to provide a robust support ticket system and better manage Twitter and Facebook questions. If you think you’ve encountered a bug in our software, are having issues with our software, have a pre-sale question, need a refund, or if you have account/purchase issues, just create a new private ticket and we’ll take it from there!

Requests for new features or enhancements to existing features are now handled in our Feature Requests area, where they can be tracked, and other users can vote up the ideas as well, helping us prioritize features to add to upcoming versions of our software.

We have also started a Solutions knowledge-base section, where Solspace staff will post solutions to common issues reported by customers. As we build this up over time, we trust this will be a great resource for our customers.

We think this approach combines the best of openness and transparency with the many benefits of private, dedicated, one-on-one support. In fact, we have found that some of our customers shy away from asking good questions when they know they are taking part in an open forum.

Thanks for your time, and your understanding as we make this transition to better serve you!