@Anonymous wrote:
Hi @a_c_green, I want to address some of the misinformation you may have received at some point. First, we do test our and review changes prior to releasing them - as with any large scale platform, testing may not catch an issue that appears once a change goes live. This is simply the nature of our technical world, and is not an issue limited to eBay. We strive to address problems that come up as soon as possible.
I appreciate the diplomatic suggestion that this was misinformation fed to me by someone else, but those were my own conclusions, based on years of frustrated observations here about how new-release coding was and was not working, coupled with my own experience of several decades in software design, release and support for a major software company that you have heard of.
We are discussing software updates that come out with not subtle errors but big ones, including some that suggest that whoever is writing the code does not actually use this site, or at best had an incomplete understanding of what the revisions were supposed to accomplish.
Adding insult to injury is a complete lack of any announcement either in advance or during the update, leading users to wonder whether the changes are accidental or intentional. This is especially true in cases where some piece of data simply disappears with no warning, such as line-item price data lost from the Packing Slips (here), or all shipping data lost from the emailed Shipping confirmation notice (here).
To your credit, your team of front-line Support folks are doing your best to find answers for us, and I want to be clear that I'm not blaming you for these software problems. For example, when the problems with Packing Slips were first reported back on May 8, you can see there that Tyler was on it within four hours, and had an answer back for the community six hours after that. The answer was not what we were hoping to hear, obviously, and the question of when the update was going to be announced never did get answered as far as I can see, but any news is better than none at all. Still, the perception remained that the update took everyone by surprise.
In contrast to that eBay upgrade, here's an update from Alan on a Community upgrade, posted on the same day as the update release itself, May 21 (here😞
> Good evening,
>
> We pushed some updates to the Community platform today.
> Here's an overview of what changed.
That opening was followed by a 5-point bulleted list that itemized each of the revisions in detail.
A day later, someone noticed a subtle omission in the attributions line of the posting threads listed on the Contents page (here), where the latest posting timestamp and user ID had gotten lost. Alan posted an acknowledgement five hours later and said he'd passed it along to the relevant people. It has not been fixed yet, but we at least have some knowledge that a fix is in process.
That initial announcement is a key difference between the Community updates and the eBay updates: there's awareness by eBay front-line people that an update is coming, and they have enough notice and detail about the update to be able to announce it and write about it (in detail) at the time it takes effect.
That, in conclusion, is what's so frustrating about the changes that turn up on the eBay site: they're unannounced, they appear to be dumped into Production with no testing, and no one seems willing to take any responsibility for either fixing the resulting errors or even outlining what they were attempting to do in the first place. There's this wall of anonymity in the eBay Engineering area that basically lets bad decisions and bad design go unexplained, unjustified and essentially unpunished, leading to poor coding and inexplicable changes that make it all the way into Production before anyone objects.
This is probably way more detail than I needed to go into for a reply in an existing thread, but this is frustration that's been building for some time, and I want to be clear that this is not any kind of unhappiness with what you, Alan, Tyler and the others are doing to assist. We're very grateful for that, and thank you.
