I just wanted to create a post for a couple of feature ideas. Instead I wound up wasting 30 minutes poking around the site and googling, looking for HOW to create a question, and for reasons why I might not yet have earned the privilege to do so.
I read the welcome message, checked my email, looked for sticky posts, read the entire FAQ. Zip. Nada. Finally, the right google search linked back to a similar question in this forum.
I appreciate forums moderated with an iron fist. They tend to be much more pleasant. But treating your customers like criminals before they even join? Without so much as a heads-up?
Extremely poor user experience. I’ve been very jazzed about Topaz products, but this poor experience has - in spite of the forum and products probably having little to do with each other - soured that enthusiasm.
Electronic forums have been around since the 80s. And policies for managing new user content as long. Why is Topaz reinventing the wheel? This nut has been cracked repeatedly. Just do what reddit does: Allow new users to create posts - maybe have to confirm email and do robot check first which is reasonable. This isn’t exactly StackExchange is it. But if you want to go that far, then fine, implement a points system - but BE UP FRONT AND CLEAR about what it takes to post a question or feature request.
I design software for a living, and have been a photography enthusiast for 40 years. All I wanted to do was make two simple, specific new feature requests that I think would make a huge quality-of-life improvement to Topaz Gigapixel AI. Instead, as completely irrational as I recognize this to be, I’m kind of pissed.
