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I'm just trying to get a feel from the community on whether or not I should be posting questions about J Cal Pro on Joomla SE?

1) The questions are 100% specific to the 3rd party extension.

2) There is no forum on the developer's web site to ask these questions.

3) The answers are not found in their documentation.

4) Support is available.

While I'm a huge proponent of 3rd party extension developers having top-notch documentation and their own dedicated forums, I also am a realist.

1) Support costs and takes time and energy from the developer. If we can utilize SE to 'unburden' the 3rd party developers a little bit, why not?

2) Sometimes you just get better answers from a wider community.

Anyways, I'm just curious about people's thoughts on this.

I've been sending quite a few support requests, and the response has been fast and good quality answers - but I still feel as if I am burdening them too much.

Thanks,

N

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As a developer of extensions myself, I have absolutely no problem giving support, for both free and pro extensions. Primarily because I like to ensure all customers are happy, but it also a good way of figuring out what improvements can be made.

I like to think that other developers take the same approach.

If a developer releases an extension, especially a commercial one, then they need to be expected to support it.

Also bare in mind that the support ticket submitted may actually be a bug in the extension as opposed to "not knowing how to do something".

The primary problem with asking for support for a commercial extension, is that it's commercial. Other developers can't exactly download and test without purchasing it.

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  • Because I've referenced J Cal Pro, I just want to say that support requests have been lightning fast. Yes. I understand your position. In an ideal world, extension developers have a forum, great documentation, tutorials, etc. and great support. StackExchange has the best question/answer format I've seen, and some commercial extensions are widely used. I think the SE community can also figure out what might be bugs - we're good troubleshooters if nothing else. What would the harm be?
    – NivF007
    Commented Jan 24, 2018 at 16:45
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    I've never been a fan of these sorts of questions because people normally say "I'm using X extension and X isn't working...help me". Worst one were with VirtueMart to be honest. By all means, feel free to post an extension related question, but ensure you've asked support first and ensure it's as detailed as possible.
    – Lodder Mod
    Commented Jan 24, 2018 at 17:13
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    Yup. I agree with all these points. My experience with support in general (and I'm always talking about paid extensions in this context) is, issue arises, project halted while waiting for response (sometimes days), issue resolved (okay great!), but often, issue not resolved, resubmit support, wait, etc. The cycle is too long. Conversely, let's say you pay $99 for an extension (this is typically an hours pay for an IT professional), how much support should we expect? SE often gets you the answers fast. But of course, I'd doing what you suggest and going through support first.
    – NivF007
    Commented Jan 24, 2018 at 17:50

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