Never seem to get an answer on Gitlab forum

Hi,
I received a summary gitlab froum email. And my question was first. And, as usual, no replies. But looking at the others in the list, no replies on those either.
So, do Gitlab employees look through the topics on this forum?
I can’t believe I and others ask such difficult obscure questions that no one in gitlab has an answer.
I must admit, I don’t answer questions on this forum either unless it is to answer my own questions.
Regards,
John

I wonder about the same thing.

My apologies to all who feel this way. I get the emails too, and it’s frustrating.

GitLab CE is free and open core. Many people in the community, and many employees, put in a lot of their free time helping others and improving GitLab. I wish we could read and answer every question, but it’s just not realistic.

I know you already know this, but your answers to your own questions have probably helped others figure out their problems. I believe the forum exists to help the community help itself.

From our handbook, on support: https://about.gitlab.com/support/

Thank you for your contributions.

Mike

My (very few) issues have been hit or miss, usually met with crickets, but I’m already getting a whole lot for free and can’t really complain. I do hope, however, that GitLab’s community keeps growing and that the forum becomes a livelier place!

It is good to know that it is just me that is concerned by the lack of answers on the forum. In fact this has been the most popular topic I have ever raised!
While people are interested, I will break the rules and throw in a technical question too. I did raise it a few weeks ago.
When I try to use the boards / lists feature, it does not work. No existing lists, no new lists though I do have labels attached to issues.
Using CE, 8.11 plus. So I am obviously doing something wrong.
Any ideas?

I can’t speak for anyone else, and I’m not a GitLab employee either, but I just don’t usually have time to do much on this forum. Occasionally, I spend half an hour to an hour and just try to go through as many posts as I possibly can in that time.

I’ve got the same problem as well. It was even a fairly simple question yet I got no reply even after a polite bump a week later.

Same here.

Hey all! Sorry you feel that way

I try to answer as much as I can, but there’s simply no time. Same goes for all GitLab employees afaik.

In the end, this is a community forum as stated in Welcome to GitLab's Community Forum, so I’d expect people to answer each other.

I agree - it is up to all us to respond and funnily enough this is probably the most responded to topic on the forum.
I think the problem may be that the rest of us do not know the answers. This particular topic does not need any technical knowledge to reply.
For instance I asked in a separate topic and this one about boards and that my CE instance was not giving me the same results as the docs.
But no replies on that.
So I do not think that forum members do not care but that they do not know. And of course, the more topics never get a single answer, the less people will look or post to the forum. And it will slowly die.
No idea how important CE is to Gitlab over EE - lets face it, EE pays the bills. But without CE, will companies buy EE?

Agreed. I’m just looking for answers, doesn’t have to be a dev who answers but I do think that there are a lot of questions that, at this point at least, only the devs have the answer to.

Trying not to offend anyone, but I often see people complain about not getting replies on their questions but are they themselves replying to others’ questions? Some of the questions like those dealing with gitlab.com can only be answered by gitlab staff but there are many that can be answered by others especially since it’s open source so all source codes are available.
I think GitLab is great especially since other git services are non-open source. I hope it’ll remain open source.

Also kind of agree here…
Thats community-driven forum, true. But, it deals with product of the - legally created - company, so it’d be extremely nice if an employee could come here and answer questions on scheduled basis.

Don’t you guys think?

Is there a Gitlab forum for the EE users with actual answers from Gitlab employees? If yes, do you think it would be possible to open it up to the community as read-only at the very least?

@snorkelbuckle The vast majority of our EE customers contact support directly and are assisted there, as their license and/or subscription allows it. Security and privacy are two big reasons that support for those users is not done on a publicly accessible forum. However, the bugs that are reported and then fixed as a result of that support along with changes to documentation and the product itself trickle back down to the community.

Personally, while my primary responsibility is to our GitLab.com subscribers through our support portal I try to allocate as much time as possible for helping out on this forum as it does hold a lot of value for our team.

@Tristan Thanks for the quick followup. I do understand what you are saying and thank you for your time in the community forum.

I’d like to add that the product which I see through the CE version is absolutely wonderful in terms of quality and features and the work GitLab puts into this is very much appreciated.

Considering how fast employees jump on some topics (like this), it seems somewhat unlikely that the reason is just that they seldom find time to come by.

But given that this is a community forum, it doesn’t bother me much that employees doesn’t answer here more than they do. What does bother me somewhat is the lack of care/interest I feel from employees both here and in issues on gitlab.com, especially with anything not concerning features developers might want . i.e. anything that people who has to maintain a GitLab installation would care about.

As a long time believer in open source, and realising that means I should try to give something back, I try to answer a few questions here, but as I’ve basically never found anything of value here, it’s hard to justify (to myself and my boss) to spend much time here.

GitLab is nice product, but I fear that the continued ignoring of issues with adminstrating it, will eventually alienate everyone in the world capable of doing it, causing installations to be poorly maintained and replaced by something else.

It’s a community product and this is a community forum. I’m just a community member.

But I don’t expect free support for non-paid gitlab instances, either. Maybe it’s just me.

We are developers, if we have a problem administering gitlab, if we’re smart developers, we write our own tools and scripts to help administer it.

I have even checked out gitlab’s sources and built a dev instance so I can debug gitlab’s ruby and go codebase. I’m a developer. So are most gitlab users, I bet.

Warren