Maybe just open new topic with possible alternatives?
And maybe some of core developers say some words about direction of Mautic watching on what people say in this topic?
Yeah I agree with @magician. Let’s keep this topic on topic.
And like @magician I’d also really appreciate a reaction from the devs to what’s been discussed here. Because clearly I’m not alone in my view, and this is standpoint is widespread.
[quote=19944:@magician]Maybe just open new topic with possible alternatives?
And maybe some of core developers say some words about direction of Mautic watching on what people say in this topic?[/quote]
I don’t think they monitor these forums. There is next to zero chance that they are listening. I’ll post a link on Slack to see if people want to share their voice.
That is just plain weird to me if that’s the case. Not monitoring your own backyard.
There is one other company I know who failed to do this. Well to be fair, they were active in the forum occasionally, but not enough to prevent spam posts frequently occurring in their forums…
Either way, they went from being a success (in the beginning they did listen) to now just being a shell of what they used to be. Their users left the company in a massive way. Not just because of the forum spam, but because of their whole attitude of not caring about their customer experience and wishes anymore.
They even closed down the comments on their blog, because all their users were just complaining there.
Ok not saying this is going to happen with Mautic 
I sure hope not! But it’s just an example of how important communication and listening to feedback is.
Hey @Paul999
You have some valid arguments in this thread. Thumbs up.
I was also quite sad to hear that devs don’t hang in here when I asked the same question here: https://www.mautic.org/community/index.php/6664-i-want-to-believe-on-mautic/p1#p19138
Funny. Or not. I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like it.
Fortunately, despite all the bugs I still seem to be able to use Mautic for my needs, so I must be either non-demanding or at least lucky not to hit all those mines.
Best,
D.
Interesting. How do you use it?
OK let’s first start with what bothers me. Actually, I’ve encountered many bugs… maybe just some I can remember now:
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if I even thought of clearing the cache, new subfolders could not be created after this. I’ve managed to eliminate many 500 situations caused due to permission errors by setting up workaround-cronjobs on the server that manually chmod+chown folders/files every minute. Yuck, but it works.
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many times, editing form fields did not allow saving changes afterwards… I think this got solved in 2.5.1., so I did not do anything as it just started working. I still think there’s a bug when I try both editing a form and publishing it as well - it does not get published, so I need to re-edit it and make only “publish form” change without editing anything else. Familiar?
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I’ve had problems with forms that, upon submitting them, they got stuck at “Please wait”. In production. Very frustrating. Finally, I’ve managed to figure out it was related to PHP sessions folder. I took the time to figure it out. But how could a non-programming marketer know this? Which is why I tend to call anything Mautic-related “drip for programmers”.
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I am still not sure why certain leads (contacts) start appearing at the top of the Contact table, yet they don’t have any recent activity. No help was given as well. I have even revised the audit logs in the database, and found out that “attribution date” fields got updated. I have no idea what attribution is
yet it keeps messing with my contacts’ order. -
some problems derived from my lack of understanding how Mautic works… e.g., if I have a non-published campaign where its source are contacts from a segment, I would think that they should be at least populated. Sadly, no - this happens when I publish the campaign and mautic:campaign:rebuild cronjob is called. I wrote about this here.
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I also thought there was a bug in Categories, not being shown across various modules (forms, campaigns,. …) until I found out that I need to generate them as Global. I also commented this here.
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yes, tracking visits sucks big time as it is most certainly not comparable to google analytics, thus wrong. Maybe when FingerprintJS won’t be beta anymore, this improves?
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I am still very dissapointed that I do not possess the knowledge to use “UTM Tags Recorded” event in actions/triggers and noone seems to care and help. I am quite proud of my workaround I have programmed to be able to track if a lead replied to an email using a workaround involving Mailgun and webhooks. I think tracking replied emails is something that is actually missing in Mautic and should be a “must-have” feature. Nevertheless, my workaround is useless if I cannot use this event in campaigns or at least action/triggers. And also, no feedback was given from anyone.
Back to answering @imautic
IDK, basic stuff:
- having forms on webpages to collect emails
- campaigns that are sourced from these forms and send autoresponders or follow-ups in case mail wasn’t opened
- segments, so that when I add contacts manually, other segment-driven campaigns can send them one-time (i.e. marketing) emails
- emails, obviously
- some social lookups using clearbit to get an idea who the lead is (yet I think that the official Clearbit plugin has bugs, since emails are often sent as empty strings… which is why I rather use my own webhook for Clearbit I had written a few days before official Clearbit support was announced)
I do not generate landing pages using Mautic as I have them on my websites. I don’t have double opt-ins or anything similar. So yeah, I think “basic stuff” explains it?
Again, I think you guys on this forum are great. I have ready many helpful threads. I also cannot believe that I’ve read posts from the bald youtube guy - Adam, your tutorials rock. On the other hand, as mentioned before, I am quite disappointed that developers do not take advantage of this community. If I were the creator of Mautic, I would consider it as it could help improve the product.
To sum up - I am optimistic about Mautic and don’t consider abandoning it. I am sure there will be less bugs in the near future.
Best,
D.
Thanks for this discussion! The core dev team is aware of the issues and the bug fix version will come soon.
What I’d like to discuss is how to ensure to release a bug-free updates. The pull requests are tested by 2 developers before merge, but some bugs still get through this process. And some happen when 2 PRs are merged together. Is someone from the community willing to help test new versions before release? Does anyone have an experience with automated testing and is willing to build some for Mautic?
2 Likes
I agree fully with this thread.
My take thus far is that there maybe should be a feature freeze until version 3.0. In the mean time, we as a community (including the devs, as they are absolutely an essential part of the community) need to work together to find and kill the bugs.
Then we need better testing of every new release, along the lines of 2.6 Alpha, 2.6 Beta, 2.6 RC, 2.6 Final. Then with these versions we kill more bugs between the Alpha, and Final.
@escopecz Yes I do have experience with Automated Test Suites and would be willing to help with this.
The main point of Marketing Automation is to be able to track actions to base the automations on. If the page hit tracking doesn’t work reliable, then you don’t have a Marketing Automation suite. Plain and simple.
Page hit tracking hasn’t worked for me for months. Therefore Mautic is just a basic email collection app in its present form.
@Adam , exactly.
- track users,
- register (EASY setup double opt-in / why we need to make some work-around to have this?),
- send email and get bounces
in Marketing Automation software MUST works well.
If not - for me it’s only a something which we can play for test, fun etc. In production those element MUST works well.
For example now in Mautic Amazon SES send bulk emails and manage bounces still need work to works optimal.
Other features - great BUT after core works with no problems.
Especially for beginners.
If I’m a person who start with marketing automation software and if Mautic have to growing user group - those primary functionality - in my opinion should works without any problems. THEN Mautic will be real .competition on the MA market.
And I’m sure, then growing group of users will use Mautic and wait for other features.
If I want to quick start. Suppose I have landing page I want to collect lead. First I must setup special campaign to work around double opt-in which is standard behavior and I’m sure most people use in sell funnels. First problem - waste of time. Ok, I’m use tutorial from other page. Works.
Then I put traffic on page. Second problem - inaccurate page hits. MA software base on tracking users.
Ok. I have leads. Send mail to them.Oh, wait. If I have many of them, then I have problem. I can’t use i.e. amazon ses because in actual transport mode it’s impossible to send all emails in short time. And time based campaign is over time. Next thing - bounces from mail. If I’m not get them correctly and send again and again to same users, then I will be have problems with sender and domain credibility.
I’m REALLY see possible future with Mautic but for me now it’s time to make move in right direction. Implement new feature don’t make growing group of real users.
Maybe good way will be using some voting system or pool to send info from community to devs, which is important to us - real users. New features (which ones), fix bugs (which ones), make core features great (double opt-in, Amazon SES integration, etc.).
Now on git we have over 700 issues and I think maybe lack of vote system make misdirection.
Or maybe developers can get starting users point of view. When they want to have small working well MA system and be prepare to growing traffic and make everything to everything works easy for standard core tasks.
That made me laugh I agree Adam’s videos were very helpful to get started. I also considered making my own tutorials for Mautic when I just got started using it - because I got so excited with the potential of Mautic. But that was before I encountered all those bugs, which changed my mind for now, until and if they’re fixed.
I must have missed that. And yes that made me laugh as well. Yes I am the bald YouTube guy.
The hard part is, I have so many more Mautic videos in me that I can’t bring myself to create because I’m personally frustrated with the platform. When I made my videos initially, I think Mautic was using a different cookie method, so the page hit tracking was working perfectly. Also at that point I wasn’t using the API to create contacts. So with both of those problems, now when I go and look at my contacts and see there’s no page hit tracking, it’s just really discouraging.
And on top of that I have brought in thousands of new Mautic users, one of them is the developer of a new plug-in called Automate Plus. And even him, after having developed deep integration for all types of WordPress plug-ins into Mautic, even he can’t get his github problems any attention.
The frustrating part is, none of us know what the problem is. Is it a lack of financial resources? Is it that the developers are going in a different direction, which commonly happens when an open source product gets funding? If it’s a financial resources problem, maybe they can go set up a crowdfunding campaign, to raise $50k - $100k so they can hire some new development talent to squash these bugs.
That actually sounds like a pretty good idea. I’m not sure how that will work out in practice with an open source software product, but I know it’s how many promising physical products come off the ground and into being.
Wait, you talking about set up a crowdfunding campaign, how about this: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160920006147/en/Mautic-Raises-5-Million-Series-Led-Underscore.VC
?
[quote=19974:@magician]Wait, you talking about set up a crowdfunding campaign, how about this: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160920006147/en/Mautic-Raises-5-Million-Series-Led-Underscore.VC
?[/quote]
Yea I am aware of that, but it doesn’t mean that they received that money and it also doesn’t mean there are not tight controls on what they can use it for.
I know of many PR’s companies release that are full of crap. I worked with one a few years back, they released a PR that they received $200million in funding, but they didn’t receive one dime of it.
[quote=19974:@magician]Wait, you talking about set up a crowdfunding campaign, how about this: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160920006147/en/Mautic-Raises-5-Million-Series-Led-Underscore.VC
?[/quote]
Thanks for digging this one up, it is very interesting to know!
So they do have money, and they do have the resources to fix bugs and to improve core functionalities, but they chose not to focus on those.
In a way, I can see why they might put priority on new and exotic features over fundamental ones, because they sound better in a pitch deck. After all, it is pretty hard to boast about easy to use two-step opt in or solid delivery performance, because every one else already have those.
Problem is, without rock solid core functionalities, it is pretty hard to grow or keep their user base.
I haven’t found an affordable alternative, but, if I did, I would switch in a heartbeat. Mautic is too unreliable at the moment. I have spoken privately with a number of people in the community that feel the same way.
I agree. Some of my thoughts that hold me back from using Mautic (instead of Sendy that I use right now)
- Double Optin is not easy to set up.
- Need better options to see email campaign stats. Like export people who opened, clicked emails, etc.
- API has major flaws. Can’t accurately track users. Tags are vanished.
- Sites get slow when tracking code is added. Need recommendations on hosting configuration.
- Need a better community and communication from the leadership team.
I’m lead a team of 40 developers (Brainstorm Force) and we’ve built several WordPress plugins for integration with Mautic, (like integration with Woo, EDD, LMS, Form Plugins, Membership plugins, etc)
But due to the fact Mautic feels unreliable and unstable, it is holding me back from releasing my plugins.
I see your message. As us you are using and spending lot of time to deploy mautic or to developp some interfaces or plug-in. We belong to a communauty, why we don’t use this way to speak to gether and make with all the team include mautic a strong version. For taht we must to take all the errors and make some priority to fix them.