Surprised?

Have you ever felt surprised in a 1-to-1 chat or in a chatroom?

Until now, you could express your surprise by typing o.O in a message. (You can see that this means surprise in WikiPedia's list of emoticons.)

7 Cups would automatically display this as an icon, . But it was the wrong icon! That doesn't mean surprise! Well, yes, that's the way it was.

Now this has all changed. If you express surprise by typing o.O in a message, you get an emoji instead, 😕. But it's the wrong emoji! That doesn't mean surprise! Well, yes, that's the way it is now.

The point of posting this in @EvelyneRose 's Quality Gazebo is that it's a more serious quality issue than it appears.

Many, if not all, of the discussions we have in the community about quality could be resolved in a positive way if only 7 Cups provided effective tech support. An example is the recent discussion about blocking and reporting, which echoes another unresolved discussion a year ago.

But 7 Cups resists providing tech support to the community. Instead, 7 Cups wastes its time on projects like fiddling with emoji…and doesn't even get the emoji right. No one in the community asked 7 Cups to fiddle with emoji, as far as I know. We have more important concerns that are not being addressed.

A couple of possible solutions come to mind:

1. Create a steering group made up of active members of the community to determine tech support priorities, and to provide quality control when changes are made to the website or the app. Prevent tech support from spending their time on their own pet projects when the community needs important things to be fixed.

2. Outsource tech support to a specialist company, similar to the way the Help Center is outsourced. Ensure the outsourcing contract means they only get paid for work they were asked to do to support the community, and that effectively meets the community's needs.

Charlie