No more Ionic

Ionic Framework
1

Ionic is a high dependency framework. That is: when you have an issue, you have great probabilities the issue is in the interaction between Ionic and the underlying dependencies, and you’ll find yourself being ping-ponged between communities or from one list of GitHub issues to other.

That could be even acceptable if this community, and I mean staff or involved “high commenters”, would be committed with teaching their users, as they are who can make the community bigger and “spread the word”, more than getting “high reputation” to engross their portfolio/curriculum as they were on a “StackOverflow” cheap copy.

I’ve been paying the “pro” version of Ionic (some time ago) and after some bad experiences at this forum, I just unsubscribed the paid version and went to pure Angular and PWA.

Ionic team keeps sending me mail news (and I will keep that subscription, just to stay informed about) and every now and then I visit the forum… just to confirm the means of some “gurus” when answering newbies questions (just review “sujan”'s answers to newbies and you will “get an idea”).

More often than desired I’ve been reading answers where newbies are even being scolded for their lack of knowledge or not being able to find the answer in the docs.

As long as moderators on this forum don’t understand that IS A MUST to kindly answer newbies questions, even when the answer could be just a link to an existing answer to the same or similar question answered hundreds of times (that hypothetic scenario should deserve a quick action by the staff), I will not use Ionic nor recommend it.

I’ll keep visiting the forum because I believe Ionic is a great tool for coding. And I will not loose hope on the Ionic team to understand that a forum with experts kindly answering (again and again, and sometimes even to frustrated users) will make the difference and provide high added-value to the platform.

Greetings from an ex-subscriber.
Josep.

1 Like
2

Let’s see if, as in business world is a basic knowledge, someone at the team could understand that “where’s a problem, there’s an opportunity” or this post just gets knocked down by who can feel himself being offended…

3

Hi @JosepAlaziz. Sorry you’ve had a bad experience with Ionic and the forum.

Quickly, there is no “pro” version of Ionic Framework. Ionic Framework is 100% free and open source. If you signed up for a paid account, what you are paying for is Appflow, the Mobile CI/CD companion service for Ionic. We do not provide any kind of guaranteed support for Ionic Framework for Appflow accounts. Sorry for the confusion.

As for the forum, we work to make sure all Ionic developers are welcome. However, the only “official” responses are from users with an Ionic logo in their avatar, like mine. We cannot guarantee other community members will adhere to our communication standards, but will step in when there is a clear violation of our community standards.

That being said, we are working to improve the forum and make it more welcoming, so your feedback is very helpful and I hope your experience improves over time!

1 Like
4

Hi @max,

“We cannot guarantee other community members will adhere to our communication standards”

That’s what I was talking about. Time invested here will get more profit than that invested in marketing campaigns. Again, just take a quick tour on some sujan’s answers and evaluate if they are not on “communication standards” of Ionic. Or even on any social interaction standards.

I went on that one as a sample, but you’ll find more who follow that behavior.

And, as one of the possible options I was aware of, your quick reply (a few minutes!) making an stoic defense on the status-quo, didn’t allowed you to take a serene reflection on the main idea in the post.

I’m pretty sure it actually there was an Ionic Pro payment plan on which my company was subscribed. I understand you are talking after Ionic changed it’s plans.

I’m looking on my backups for some mails about the Ionic Pro version and I will recognize my error if I’m wrong; just to avoid any misdirection from the central matter, but I will not go any further on this post.

When someone complains and takes the effort to communicate, it must be some reason, even if he is mistaken. I was wrong expecting your team would appreciate the value of this effort, would invest some time evaluating the causes of the complains and would think about if improvements can be done on this matter.

Really appreciate your time, and sorry as my post wasn’t a motivating one.

Josep.

5

Your feedback is definitely appreciated! I will personally look into this and see what’s going on.

Just a quick point: Ionic Pro was the name of Appflow before we renamed it and had some cloud services for Ionic apps. But we never sold any kind of guaranteed Ionic Framework open source support with it.

Thanks again.

6

I really havent been here long but totally agree with your sentiment. Especially the point around newbies. I mentioned this on Slack the other day.

Screenshot 2020-10-23 at 18.05.42
Screenshot 2020-10-23 at 18.05.421238×412 80.9 KB

1 Like
7

Thanks for the feedback. We want to fix this. Anything we can do to make it less brutal?

8

I think it would be helpful if there was a separate space for people who really need framework-specific support and then one for those who need language-specific support.

There is a difference between being a newbie with Ionic and a newbie with react/angular/vue

There are a fair number of posts in this forum that have absolutely nothing to do with how to integrate Ionic… they are about confusion or lack of understanding around how to properly use react, angular, javascript, or vue - and that is ok.

I also think when asking a complex question that more effort needs to be made to help you get the answer you want, there are tools like codesandbox and stackblitz where you can post your sample project with the issue so it is easier for you to get the help you need instead of posting a few lines of code and hope that someone can eyeball it and figure out what is wrong.

most of the people who are answering questions here are not getting paid to answer the questions and I can honestly say that just as people are frustrated by not getting answers they want as someone who has been here for years and posts a ton about Ionic, in blogs and on youtube, unpaid also, that there are some rude and inconsiderate people hoping in the forum dumping questions without making an effort and then getting an attitude when they don’t get the response they want…

A forum is a two-way relationship and there is always some good and some bad, but it is a work in progress with constant iteration. I have been on StackOverflow for answering questions for almost 12 years… and you still see the same challenges there. I think for the most part though this is a good forum and there are lots of folks doing good work for free to help the community

@max @JosepAlaziz

4 Likes
9

I honestly dont have a direct answer to that. A don’t attack first. make people understand how to use the forum culture needs to be cultivated. I saw a banner with something like “user_so_and_so posted for the first time. Let’s welcome them to the community” today. I dont know if it’s always been a thing or its new but that is a step in the right direction.

Good point this one…

2 Likes
10

Just for your quick point… If there wasn’t an IonicPro plan with Ionic Pro Framework Team support, I can’t understand what was I paying for.

If there’s any concern I will keep on searching for archived e-mail messages and try to find what explicit services I was paying to… well… i don’t know who I was paying as those are the strangest invoices I’ve ever seen!

IonicPro1
IonicPro1617×676 25.5 KB
IonicPro2
IonicPro2984×527 15.3 KB
IonicPro3
IonicPro3810×453 11.3 KB

11

Well, Aaron -and please take it as friendly as this communication channel doesn’t allow me to express- it seems your nose has become comfortably insensible to the smell in the room and can’t appreciate how much people isn’t here anymore to reply your post. At least three of my colleagues at my country would let you know their feelings. And as I’m not in contact with too much coders, this sample is very alarming.

About the difference you bolded, “the difference between being a newbie at ionic” or at any js framework (or library or whatever it should be called), and create separate forums, you will need to start with some kind of triage, as Ionic is well promoted as an “extremely easy tool to use” so it attracts newbies that are even unaware about where, in the stack, is their issue rooted.

I feel I can point that more than a few times, even the development team doesn’t have an idea about the layer that’s causing some issues. Well, just take a look at “GitHub issues” and you’ll see how many times you find cross-references between Ionic, Angular, React and Vue teams.

But that was not the point. I was wandering how a newbie friendly forum will help spread the Ionic word and how harmful to Ionic and shameful for new users are some of the “big responders” answers.

I don’t know if it has the same meaning in your language that in mine but brutal is a good adjective. And the answer about how to get rid of those behaviors I think is clear. Isn’t it?

But I was suggesting even more: a radical change to make this community a good place to start a coding career. It will take a bunch of good care, kindness, good habits and lots of links to previously answered questions or external specific frameworks with no regrets. Just more “pedagogic” if you wish.

I know, I know, some “gurus” doesn’t want to dirt their hands with nerds and dream of the perfect and high-tech answer that will give them fame, hundreds of likes from the top gang of the forum, a good bunch of reputation points and badges and create a good reference for their LinkedIn profiles.

Tired on the effort of writing this post and frustrated but not surprised about the answers. More justifications than actions, one try to put the blame back to the new members and one try to get the work done by “external and eventual collaborators”. Monetized team members maybe so busy…

Sorry about the complains. I better like to write grateful posts.
I’ll still keep an eye at Ionic from time to time.

Josep.

12

Kind regards from this side of the fence.
Again frustrating but not surprising answers:

  1. This is not a forum for newbies (get them out of our way).
  2. I’m too busy now, would you do my job?

Maybe this way it’s easily understood what “brutal” does mean.

Josep.

13

There was Ionic Pro, but it was for cloud services (cloud build, our old push service, etc). We never sold guaranteed open source support under that subscription. Sorry for the confusion.

14

Indeed it is been a month still i am waiting for resolution. Also company started moving to another stack slowly slowly as they realized ionic support isn’t great.
link: bug: click listener taking time to respond · Issue #22177 · ionic-team/ionic-framework · GitHub

Look at Picker Component, ion slide dependency, virtual scroll (still buggy since ionic 3), You can not programmatically open keyboard with ion-alert that has input field.

1 Like
15

Reviewing the issue, Liam has been providing multiple updates, so I’m not sure it’s fair to say that “support isn’t great.” It might not be fixed just yet, but we’re working on it.

In the last update, he mentions needing to work with the Angular team on the issue. While not ideal, that does happen occasionally. Thanks for your patience.

16

@aaronksaunders

That’s the point.

Then you must be aware of your coder’s limitations and "(…)difference between being a newbie with Ionic and a newbie with react/angular/vue(…).

17

It seems to me I never stated that me or my company were paying for that support. This is the only reference I’ve found on the matter on my firt post:

We were engaged with Ionic to the point on using paid services, It was the attitude of your forum’s “savvies” what kicked us out of any Ionic dependency from our code and, indeed, from any payed service or subscription.

BUT If you don’t understand that every cent that every member of the team earns, comes directly or indirectly from how the documentation is written, how issues are solved and how the forum answers are managed, then I will not teach you that. I really get payed for my lessons and support and I started feeling other people better deserves my “pro-bono”.

But yes, you could keep playing this kind of misdirection and putting words on my message I’ve never wrote just to avoid the main question:

Your company, your team, your framework, your forum, your moderators, your “high responders”, your users… - MY time.

Greetings from Barcelona.

18

We will take this feedback and improve. We hope you come back, you are welcome here!

1 Like