Disappointed with customer support

I would totally agree with this, the courses are excellent and I have learned a ton of stuff.

But when you get stuck it is in general very difficult to get the help you need.

I have also posted up on the forum, however my question went unanswered and as said above the e-mail support is much the same.

I have been told to even submit the code I have been working on a couple of times and still received no answer.

In summary, great tutorials and challenges but the support is just too thin on the ground at the moment.

I'm very sorry to hear that! Our customer and community support is something we pride ourselves on. Right now it's hard for us to provide 24-7 support because of our relatively small staff, so I understand timely assistance can sometimes be lacking. I'm sure it is frustrating to be stuck on a problem or having trouble with a video late at night or other off-business hours.

We would like to add functionality to the video page to enhance real-time support and consolidate issues and solutions related to specific videos, but I don't know when that will be available. Just know that helping you all and keeping you happy is of the highest priority. The forum will continue to improve and be more useful as more people use it and as we add functionality like search and points.

@Matthew, I'll search for your unanswered question and see if I can find someone to follow up with. EDIT I'm having trouble finding it...if you can, paste it in here or reply with the tags I can use to filter. We need search! :)

Hi Ben, it isn't a case of wanting 24-7 support. If I got a response within 24 hours I'd be pretty happy as I know the challenges of managing support. However I've had requests for help that have gone several days and still no feedback.

What is frustrating is that requests about issues relating to lessons aren't being responded to, this one that was negative towards support was answered very fast.

So while I've got you ... I have been doing the ruby training and I'm working on tests (https://teamtreehouse.com/library/programming-2/build-a-simple-version-of-facebook/writing-tests/fixtures). I'm getting an error to say that I don't have a 'password' column in the database. I tried removing all the code for this section and 'validating uniqueness' and still the same error.

So, how do I query the database (assume it's the test one) to check if the password field is there firstly?

And secondly, what do I do about it?

Thanks

Another feature we want to implement is notifications based on tags, so in the future when you post a question about "ruby" then our ruby teachers (and whoever else subscribes) would be notified for a more timely response. I'm afraid I can't be of much help, but I'll let Jason and a few others know to check this post.

Anyhow, this is important feedback to hear - know that we take it seriously! Thanks for posting.

Hi Chris,

I take personal responsibility for this. The ticket got assigned to me, and I thought I forwarded it to Jason immediately, because I wasn't quite sure of the answer. It turns out it didn't get forwarded, so he never got it, and that's how it fell through the cracks. I am truly sorry.

I am having Jason take a look at it, because he's really got a good grip on the section you are referring to, but I'll give my advice, and hopefully it's in the right direction.

The way the authentication works, there is no column called "password", instead the model handles a password from code, but stores it encrypted, in what I believe is the "crypted_password" column in the database.

If the password is defined in the fixtures, you will likely get that error, because I believe fixtures map to the database. You should be able to remove the password from the fixtures file, and continue, but Jason can advise better I'm sure.

I'm not familiar with fixtures too much, since I use factories in my tests, which are slightly different (and will probably be covered in the future). I'll do my best to dig in and see if I can figure it out.

I'm sorry if that doesn't solve your problem, and I am super sorry that I failed on handling the ticket.

-Jim

Hi Jim,

No problem, I understand how that can happen. Jason has been in contact and advised what you have suggested (I did wonder if that as the issue myself). Anyway, unfortunately it doesn't seem to have helped as I had already deleted the entire fixtures file as part of trying to roll back.

Hopefully Jason can help me.

Chris