Blue Iris

I have paid for extended support since the support on my initial purchases (two BI installs) ended, and on Jan5, I e-mailed support and have e-mailed several times since, but have gotten no reply.... Does anyone have a phone number for them, since there doesn't seem to be a contact number on their site?

I recently emailed them using the method of going into the app control panel and grabbing the special text to paste into my email.

It took them several days to get back to me.

Like Henry said whenever I've emailed them I've included the text the app gives you with version and licensing info and they've emailed back in a day or two. You may also want to check your junk mail folder to make sure the reply didn't go there for some reason.

Yes, add the text with your licence number etc, I believe it is used to keep your email out of their spam folder before actually checking its validity !

Last Wednesday, I pasted the license details as copied by clicking the 'e-mail support' button into a forward of the e-mail chain and sent it off, and still not even a peep from them

I was impressed by the software and the knowledge of the staff which is why I bought the license but their response times are horrendous. I wait 3 days for a reply and if I do not receive one I email them again. My initial impression is starting to wear off and its all because they fail horribly at responding to support queries in a timely manner. Get on the stick BI or you will lose a customer.

I am a realist. I understand that this is a small company, and I make allowances for that. I have always had responses to my support queries in a reasonable time. I wonder if somebody has been ill since Christmas

I think I read somewhere that emailing again pushes you back to the bottom of the queue.

That being said, their response times for paid support clients is slower that I expect.

No one asked for my opinion, and it is exactly that which gives me great pleasure in offering it (/sarcasm)

In my experience, BI support has a passion for customer success. When they established the Blue Iris Support Channel on YouTube, they made mention that the purpose of the videos and subsequent creation of the Self Help Content, was an attempt to decrease the demand on internal support resources. That leads me to conclude that there is a bandwidth issue for customer support.

In addition, the redesign in v5, onslaught of new features and functionality, etc., there was a revamp of the documentation. They aren't a huge company and my guess is that they're about as busy as a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.

That doesn't make the response times and such acceptable, rather, it means in order to get their attention one has to step up their game. I offer the following that has been successful for me in getting the most mileage out of support.

They are maniacal about spam - in my opinion, so much so that they throw the baby out wit the bathwater, and I don't see it changing anytime soon. So that means follow the instructions to avoid having your email sent to the island where all the left socks live.

Good Questions -> Good Answers. Best practices are to formulate the best question possible by putting yourself in the shoes of the reader of the email. They can't see what you're looking at. Countless times, people will ask an ill formed question and toss it over the fence. If technical support has to go back and forth just to understand your question, it's not going to get a lot of priority when they're swamped. I know, I know, you're paying for it - but be Jerry McGuire.

In the self help content, Sam has been posting "good tickets" - my interpretation is that he's trying to give examples of good questions when writing support. My take is that you don't have to write questions like his examples, but being thoughtful in what you ask gets a lot of mileage. The following is an example exchange: From what I've seen, many people ask "How can I make BI do something this way", instead of "This is my problem or goal, how do I make that happen?" I have a problem, and this is how I want to solve it. How can I get BI to do it that way? The assumption is they've noodled out the solution to the problem. Many times that's true, but if the question is focused on asking "what is the solution" rather than asking how to implement their solution they get more productive information.

Look, I'm not defending or criticizing - I'm just offering up information that may be worth considering.