Demo 4.4.1 Latest Release with Surge.Media

General Discussion
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Hi Mauticians,

4.4.1 was released yesterday. If you would like to check it out Surge.Media has an instance setup that you can login to and check things out.

You can access it via: Enterprise Digital Marketing Campaign Automation Platform and Agency | Surge.AMS Demo

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I would not tell someone to check out our companies test instance here on the forum.
There are lots of Mautic hosters here and all or many of them contribute to the project one way or another.
Maybe this is ok, but I find it a bit odd.
What do you think @rcheesley, @joeyk, @adiux ?

If we all start doing this, the forum becomes an ad-space for us hosters. I think this is not the way we should fish for clients.

@mikew please do understand me here. I love the competition. But the forum is kind of a sacred space (ad free). There are plenty of ways to advertise your product. I think you did a great job with i.e. the metabase integration to Mautic.

Please don’t get me wrong here.
Cheers,
Alex

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Hi Alex,

I think maybe you misunderstood the intention of providing the latest instance for people to check out.
Firstly we are not asking people to check out our “test instance”, we are providing them an easy way to Demo the latest release.

From my experience over the past few years we have seen many problems with upgrading and people are very hesitant to do so, what Surge is providing is the latest instance where people can actually go and see the latest updates and bug fixes for themselves.

I personally do not think that the forum is the best place to pick up new business and that is not our intention over here. The intention is to provide support and contribute to the community (as we have done with the SMS plugin and provider we have recently released), the numerous tutorials we have released on using the referral plugin, creating a super useful dashboard with Metabase and a full tutorial on how to actually install Metabase.

I myself spend a good few hours every month answering questions and providing support to community members both here, on the slack channel, private messages, emails and many times jumping on calls with community members that are stuck in a fix - all gratis.

Surge along with myself are big supporters of the Open Source Community and will continue to contribute wherever and however we can.

I do hope this clears some things up.

I am open to continue discussing this topic with the rest of the forum :slight_smile:

Regards,
Mike

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Anything that could help broaden the Mautic user base is a good thing imho.

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I haven’t looked at the demo, but I personally find confusing for new users to look for a Mautic demo and find a branded, non-vanilla version. If it’s decribed after the opt-in, then never mind.

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I think (or thought) we made it clear that this is a demo of the latest version of Mautic provided by Surge.

My idea here was not really new people looking at Mautic, but rather the greater community that already uses Mautic and is interested in seeing new features of bug fixes, and many of these people either do not have the time or resources to go and update or install the latest version, or are reluctant to do so as they do not want to break their current instance.

I must say that we have seen quite a high number of accounts being created in our Demo system so we kind of get the feeling that there are people enjoying the opportunity to see the latest version the day that it comes out.

I do appreciate all the feedback so far.

Regards,

Mike

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Hi folks,

This thread has sparked some discussions within the community leadership team and council, which I will outline below.

We do absolutely accept that the links were shared in good faith to help folks in the community, however we do not want to set any precedents that could open the floodgates for less well intentioned companies trying to gain leads by sharing their trials and landing pages in the community.

Specifically about the post that was shared:

  • The post above was unsolicited - it was not in response to someone asking how to test the latest version of Mautic earlier in a thread - which is quite a different situation and comes across as being much more about corporate promotion and lead generation than responding to a current need from someone in the community.
  • The link shared has a heavily branded lead capture landing page which folks have to complete before checking out the latest version, which really does lean towards corporate lead capture being the intent (even if that was not the genuine intention, that’s how it comes across - why would a lead capture be needed if it was just to kick the tyres of a new community release?).

To the point of allowing people to take the latest version of Mautic for a test drive and that not being offered, it is actually really easy to check out the latest release of Mautic now that we have Gitpod. You can go to https://gitpod.io/# and add the URL to anything on GitHub (eg a pull request, a branch, a tag) to spin up an instance of that, for free - you just need a GitHub account.

For example https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/mautic/mautic/releases/tag/4.4.1 will spin up a Mautic instance with this tag applied, the latest release (which you can always check at Releases · mautic/mautic · GitHub). So this functionality does already exist in the community, plus it is how we test PRs so it is in our interest to make folks aware of Gitpod, so that we can increase the awareness of just how easy it is to test PRs and help the community merge things faster.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that we want this community to be a place where folks come to learn, share and help each other, and to minimize the corporate influence on that.

Here’s what we are doing to address the discussions in this thread:

  1. Add a line in the unacceptable behavior section of our Code of Conduct which specifically calls out corporate promotions including trial/demo/landing page sharing, making it clear to all that this is not allowed except when specifically requested by a community member earlier in the thread - the PR to add this is here. We will communicate this change to the community when it is merged.

  2. Making it clearer how companies in our ecosystem can promote their products and services - for example, they can become a partner and promote on their partners page, post in the Commercial forum where there are opportunities relevant to community members (this forum has every post moderated), and can share plugins and themes in the third party plugins category.

  3. Look into ways that we can support Community Partners in showcasing their products and services in a way that does not detract from the community experience. This may also help us to grow our Community Partners - organizations who both financially contribute to Mautic, and who are practically contributing to help Mautic grow - which benefits the community greatly.

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback both publicly in the thread and privately, it has been very helpful.

We hope that this makes it clearer for everyone in the community and that it helps to contribute toward making the Mautic Community a better place for all of us.

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