Do actual Affinity Developers/Staff monitor and answer forum questions?

[cayenne]

While I VERY much appreciate the great replies and answers from other users...I'm curious if actual Affinity employees...developers or staff that have in depth first hand knowledge of the product ever get on here and answer questions...expecially the tough ones that are concern how Affinity (Photo in my case) products function?

 

I've searched their website and their support seems to ONLY point to the forums....so I don't see any way on the site to send in support questions directly to them....or open a case, etc.

 

Anyone?

 

Thank you,

cayenne

 

 

[walt.farrell]

Yes, you'll find them here quite frequently, @cayenne. If you're viewing the forums in a wide enough window, you can identify their posts by a "Staff" notation in their profile information in the posts, and a Moderator notation in red. If you're using a narrow window, or a mobile device, their username will be in red.

You can find all of the Serif staff who are registered for the forums in the Staff listing.

In the Questions forums they tend to get involved if the other users haven't come up with the right answer, in my experience. They're more active in the Bugs forum. They only rarely appear in the Feature Requests/Feedback forums. Usually the staff that appear in the forums are not the Developers, but Quality Assurance (QA) and other staff working specifically on support. But sometimes one of the Developers will post here.

And, yes, I believe the forums are their preferred support mechanism.

[cayenne]

17 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Yes, you'll find them here quite frequently, @cayenne. If you're viewing the forums in a wide enough window, you can identify their posts by a "Staff" notation in their profile information in the posts, and a Moderator notation in red. If you're using a narrow window, or a mobile device, their username will be in red.

You can find all of the Serif staff who are registered for the forums in the Staff listing.

In the Questions forums they tend to get involved if the other users haven't come up with the right answer, in my experience. They're more active in the Bugs forum. They only rarely appear in the Feature Requests/Feedback forums. Usually the staff that appear in the forums are not the Developers, but Quality Assurance (QA) and other staff working specifically on support. But sometimes one of the Developers will post here.

And, yes, I believe the forums are their preferred support mechanism.

Ok..thanks for the reply.

 

I was hoping since Affinity doesn't seem to have on official support links/process....that they'd be chiming in MORE on most all posts in the forum, since that is where the site points to.

Don't get me wrong, I TRULY appreciate help and suggestions from other users....but there are times that really require someone with inside knowledge of the product on how it actually works programmatically for some answers, and I don't see those very often on the forum.

 

But thank you again for your reply.

 

If nothing else, I'd have expected an Affinity employee to answer something exactly like this question.

 

C

[walt.farrell]

46 minutes ago, cayenne said:

If nothing else, I'd have expected an Affinity employee to answer something exactly like this question.

And they probably will. As you say, it's the kind of question that one would expect someonf on staff to respond to.

But there are many topics, posts and users posting them, and a much smaller number of Serif staff, so it can take them awhile to get to everything. And, especially if the correct answer has been provided, they may not see a need to respond to everything.

(This is all from observation of the forums and the staff behavior over time, and occasional discussions with staff. But I have no detailed knowledge of how they prioritize their work in the forums, how many issues they're dealing with, how many staff are working in the forums, etc.)

[stokerg]

Hi @cayenne,

We do monitor the Forums and where the users question hasn't been answered or some wrong advice has been given in a reply (very rare for that to happen from my experience here). 

We also have a direct email address: affinitysupport@serif.com where you can email the Support Team directly and they can help with any questions  

[Mark Ingram]

And the developers do actively participate in the forum too 🙂

[Aad Slingerland]

39 minutes ago, Mark Ingram said:

And the developers do actively participate in the forum too 🙂

I hope not. They should be developing ...

[Alfred]

9 minutes ago, Aad Slingerland said:

I hope not. They should be developing ...

A forlorn hope, as you’ll see if you note that you’ve replied to ‘Mark Ingram, Dev’!

[v_kyr]

9 minutes ago, Aad Slingerland said:

I hope not. They should be developing ...

Developers have better insights than supporters, especially if certain code parts do stem from their hands. So either way for difficult to answer questions the devs will be asked how things work exactly and what is internally involved or not then. - In other words, plain supporters often don't have the internal code insights here and thus can't tell you certain things.

[Aad Slingerland]

PLease don't take my reply to Mark Ingram too seriously 😁

[jmwellborn]

6 hours ago, stokerg said:

Hi @cayenne,

We do monitor the Forums and where the users question hasn't been answered or some wrong advice has been given in a reply (very rare for that to happen from my experience here). 

We also have a direct email address: affinitysupport@serif.com where you can email the Support Team directly and they can help with any questions  

 

6 hours ago, Mark Ingram said:

And the developers do actively participate in the forum too 🙂

And what a wonderful, refreshing change you all are, versus the iceberg chilliness of the Adobe “tough bananas” approach to an inquiring customer.  So appreciated!

[Pšenda]

14 minutes ago, jmwellborn said:

the iceberg chilliness of the Adobe “tough bananas” approach

Thank you for confirming how "by standard" companies communicate with their customers on the forum.

 

Therefore, I was quite surprised by these expectations,

23 hours ago, cayenne said:

If nothing else, I'd have expected an Affinity employee to answer something exactly like this question.

because I really do not consider it a standard procedure (more precisely, I consider Serif communication to be above standard :-).

 

[cayenne]

7 hours ago, Mark Ingram said:

And the developers do actively participate in the forum too 🙂

Thank you Mark and Stokerg!!

The reason I posted this, is that my thread:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/122811-aps-equivalent-to-ps-smart-objectswith-raw-image-changes-after-edits-in-pixel-persona/

I"m getting. a lot of response, but so far, not enough to let me understand how working within AP that doesn't have the equivalent to smart objects....works.

I had a couple questions, the main one was concerning bouncing back and forth between the pixel and develop persona.

And at the end of the thread I added on how AP reacts to while in the Pixel persona....if you are needing to transform a image layer....do you lose resolution if in scale it up and down and back up again, etc.

In PS, the smart object container addresses this problem.

And as I understand it with AP no smart object is required, and so I was wondering how AP dealt with these two workflow scenarios.

 

Thank you VERY much in advance if you guys might could take a look there at my questions and the responses so far.

 

cayenne