I have, and it’s time for me to leave when someone starts acting like this.
The optimist in me says that we’ll get it back. In the worst case, the offensive behavior cannot be curtailed and the population will have to rebuild with people who can play nice.
Don’t get me wrong, the criticism can stay. It’s the toxic behavior that has to go. And that’s true for both sides, the fans and the haters.
You have have an idea of why it left and to be honest if the plan is that moderation is the way to get it back, I fear you are sadly mistaken.
So why is there so much umbrage?
It’s obviously multi-factorial but my simple understanding suggests 4 main reasons.
Moderation may work for 1 and 3 but 2 and 4 need addressed also and certainly I would not tighten moderation without at least acknowledging these other issues and outlining proposed solutions.
.sjb
You will see that the uncivil behavior is not limited to support areas.
But even then, none of those four groups should be adding toxicity. We’ve always had complaints, and we’ve always had people complaining about issues. We’ve always had people complaining about sound quality, ethernet cables, and MQA. What we didn’t have were axe grinding, griefing, persistent negativity, and harassment.
If you have too many issues with Roon, you should stop using Roon, but you don’t get the right to create a toxic environment for everyone else.
The really bad behaviors are obviously black vs white, but it’s the more subtle grays that are making this no longer a fun place to have discussion.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “toxic behaviour”. Isn’t it just a case of taking the rough with the smooth (like life!)?
How do you plan to curtail excess negativity? Don’t get me wrong, I’m an extremely moderate poster (I tend to prefer the “what are we listening to” threads). I’m just not sure that you’ve got the definition of toxicity right.
Many of the pubs that I’ve frequented have the resident soap boxer. The funny thing is they tend to be the most hurt and vulnerable souls in the establishment. Striking up conversations with these people, rather than walking out of the place, can be enlightening and beneficial to all parties.
Narrowly defining toxicity so that it removes the capacity for people to express their feelings and thoughts in a genuine way could be counterproductive. I would urge a moderation-light approach. Better to equip people in the art of reasonable discourse than to continually censor minor transgressions.
We have a pretty nice definition of toxicity that I think everyone will be able to agree with. Most people will not think that they themselves are being toxic, but that’s a different story.
Will be posting it shortly
I suppose my point is that Roon have a role to play here and I think you (plural) are missing this - or at least are not articulating it.
For example
If users are experiencing this -slow loading of server side data - (and I am) and there is no (obvious) recognition by Roon that this is even an issue, it’s not totally unreasonable to come to the said conclusion in the absence of any other explanation.
I’m reminded of an Irish politician who lost his seat in parliament and when asked about this gave the usual answer “Well the electorate have spoken” but then added - “the b@stards”.
.sjb
All I can say is that Irish 
and English (UK) 
pubs must be totally different experiences.
(admittedly we both have the “Swindon” ones described above - apologies to Swindon but we have Seanachai in ours, storytellers, none of that soapbox stuff, that’s what taxi drivers are for 
.sjb
By “soap-boxers”, I tend to mean those who are not hesitant to share their opinions. I grew up in Yorkshire and this was considered a virtue! On my only visit to Ireland (1994) I witnessed a good number of people generously sharing their opinions and my time there was enhanced by these conversations.
My point is that we shouldn’t dismiss (or silence - on forums) those who’s methods of interaction do not sit easily with our own, whether they be soap-boxers or story tellers (or p****d off Roon customers!).
Indeed Big Jack fitted in very well in Irish pubs.
I was picturing a a more Southern English “soapboxer”.
Apologies to everyone in Yorkshire (and Swindon!).
.sjb
My feeling is that the pandemic has left us all a bit frayed. I try to give everyone a bit more leeway, because I know many of us are having a hard time. It’s tough enough trying not to make a mistake that might get you killed, all the time, for a year; maybe slips in following the forum rules are not that big a deal.
There are 2 things in this statement I’d like to address. The first is: It does not matter how bad things are, you don’t get to act badly. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Bad circumstances do not justify repeated bad behavior. Everyone can slip up here and there, so a nudge in the right direction using empathy and comforting words is the best response, but if that doesn’t come, the incorrect and unacceptable way to react is by having a public internet forum style tantrum.
Now, to address things like server capacity or load: The reason it goes unacknowledged is because 99% of the time, the problem is not on our end. We happen to know how long each request takes. We see trends in the response times over milliseconds that set off alarms for our devops team. We usually know of these types of problems and resolve them well before you feel them. This is the reality of modern cloud computing. Things to do happen and outages do occur, but they are rare. They are not like Google-rare or Netflix-rare, but they are very uncommon for a company our size.
There is a good way to behave, and a bad way. Recently, you were involved in a toxic altercation. There was a user who exploded with a tantrum about how a 1.8 upgrade destroyed his database and how 1.8 sucked and how terrible this software was and how it should have been QA’d better and its shameful/unacceptable/blablah. Turns out the SSD in his system went bad and because 1.8 triggered a database migration from 1.7 to 1.8, it walked the entire database for the first time in a while, and that caused his system to freak out.
He had a backup, and many people brought up (in a related thread) the fact that database corruption will get backed up and good database backups will be lost if you don’t have much history. This lack of DB check previous to backup got acknowledged as being an issue and we are going to check the DB before backups in a future build. The work is on the short term roadmap. It’ll help catch bad hardware sooner. The user was nudged towards civility and they cooled down quick. They are now replacing that SSD.
Yes, the software and systems could be better, but when it comes to the behavior on the forum, the biggest mistake we’ve made is to allow bad behavior to continue so long. The software has a team to fix it. The forums need some help, which is what we are starting now.
That’s a very nice definition, but I’m referring to someone far less appetizing. Soapboxing on internet forums isn’t about opinions, it’s about the act of lecturing, spouting, and ranting about a particular subject to attempt to make a point or a stand. Think about the posters that must bring up MQA in any context and those who can not help but attack MQA. Even the above post I commented about earlier is a form of soap boxing. He just cant help but continue to preach about his problems and make sweeping generalizations meant to inflame and offend.
You made this comment about “slow server-side” and lack of acknowledgment:
If users are experiencing this -slow loading of server side data - (and I am) and there is no (obvious) recognition by Roon that this is even an issue […]
It was civil and addressable. The next move after my comment in return is for you to provide some debuggable symptoms. Unfortunately, the previous comment said this:
The server side end of the cloud infrastructure can’t cope with what’s going on and the forum server is useless. Add this up with support being mostly absent, left to a few poor souls to try and manage and it all looks a bit suspicious that things are not what they where at Roon towers.
I don’t even know how to respond to this toxicity. If he was in my bar, I’d just walk away.
Once again, it is important to consider that these are support related issues, which are just a minor part of the toxicity. The vast majority of the moderation here is spent in non-support topics. The toxicity has grown and requires addressing.
You’re mixing up different posters here, conflating me with Crystal, but it’s understandable as I quoted his comment.
But it goes towards emphasising my point about Frank Clusky, the Irish politician who blamed the electorate, it’s somehow my fault for not giving you some “debuggable symptoms”. I don’t think I can be accused of shouting my mouth off without giving some examples of these dubuggable issues. This is just one of many screenshots I’ve shared.
But this isn’t about me, I’m a fan, I accept there are limitations and Roon cannot do everything I want it to do, BUT…
Honestly you’re shooting the messenger, you really need to take a few steps back… why do you think I’d be bothered posting all this if I wasn’t intrinsically interested in the success of Roon? I’m not angry, I’m not fuelled, I’m not saying your baby is ugly, I’m not questioning anyone at Roon’s intentions, I’m just saying the emperor may not be fully clothed and it may be best to recognise this.
But maybe we will have to agree to differ on this point.
.sjb
Sorry, my words were confusing. I meant that you two were saying the same thing, but one in a way I can address, the other I can not.
I can’t do anything to solve your issues without more information. Our services are providing you with the discography, so that’s clearly working. We are using a very large and popular CDN for serving up images. It’s very doubtful they are broken, but we can check.
I just loaded up Mary Wells, and I see a lot more data, but it’s because I have tidal and qobuz connected. I see hundreds of albums on that page, all with covers that loaded up almost instantly.
I also checked our servers and they are running speedy and handles hundreds of requests a second. I can confidently say this has nothing to do with our servers.
Next step is for you to file an issue, and either parse the logs from your Roon app yourself to find the issue or wait for someone on our support to do that for you.
My Mary Well’s screenshot is from 25th March, it’s just an example of issues I have had (and reported) - today it’s relatively fine
I’m not overly worried about this it was just an example of an issue I have had.
What I’m saying, and I’ll leave it at this, I think part of the “umbrage” is Roon HQ’s reticence to admit issues.
(this is all meant to be positive input, I wouldn’t revert to 1.7 for love nor money)
.sjb
It’s unfortunate you think that, since I do it daily. We clearly have an issue if you believe that. I’ll talk to the team on how to fix this perception.
Classic. Love it 
Thinking about this a bit more this morning…
As a kid, I was taught, “Don’t discuss politics or religion in public. It’s not polite.” The problem was that people with rigid ideas on either can get very upset when those ideas are questioned or challenged.
And I think that’s the crux of the problem here. The threads about MQA are inherently political (politics: “What should we do?”), while the threads about esoteric equipment are inherently religious (religion: “What should we believe?”).
The trouble is, religion and politics are the only subjects actually worth talking about. Anything else is either purely utilitarian request and response, or just plain fluff.
No, these new “rules” are being put in place so that no one is offended…sounds like Canada.
Im not being toxic I am being honest in how it looks to me a customer, sorry you take it that way but I am far from being toxic in my eyes a littel emotional perhops. I have been happy with Roon for many years, I have recommended your product too many, I am happy to help out many other users in support threads every week.However yes I am right now a little disappointed in your product, it’s been far from a great experience of late surely you must see that?
My comment on support is based on my current experience and from what I am seeing happening
to others. It feels like Roon can’t currently cope with the demand and this is not something new it’s been happening since the tail end of last year with many users from my observations left hanging in support threads. It feels like its been the community filling in the gaps. I am not having a personal
attack on your team they do a great job but it does seem they are vastly under resourced. I am concerned this is having an affect on your product as whole. No customer should have to wait more than 24 hrs for a response but this is happening all the time, sometimes several days or even longer. Surely you cannot be happy with this. Perhaps its time to change the way you manage this side of things?
I love Roon or I thought i did and I would not have invested so much in to my house audio to be reliant on it If i had not believed so. With such an investment its easy to get emotional about it when things dont work as they should or how I see they should… I want Roon to survive and improve, but from my current angle it looks the other way and all this has made me think hard about it… Please work on proving me wrong, calling me out as being toxic is not the right way to acheive this.
Any way I am done, I am going to stick to the music threads and leave the rest alone.
I see that many vocal people on the forums dislike 1.8 and love to rant and grind their axe about it. I see many more who like 1.8.
Every day, we get hundreds of messages:
As a VERY HAPPY lifetime subscriber I heard rumours that there will be a rollback to 1.7 because of an apparently unhappy community!
I just want to assure you that 1.8 version’s features are absolutely amazing and it would be a shame to lose them - as the new UI is stunning - if you want to improve even further, be my guest but PLEASE no rollback after this gorgeous update!
Absolutely love and rave about your product though! One of my best purchases EVER! Thanks for your time.
I used to be a developer, so I know what even the best planned release can be like!
Glad you all got through it, and are coming out the other side.
For what it’s worth I absolutely love the improvements. Solved all my minor frustrations with the GUI in one go.
You’re doing a great job and the dev team really rocked with the 1.8 Update!
Try getting a fast acknowledgment of a problem out of Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc… We are tiny in comparison, but it’s still a quarter-million Rooners and ~40 people on our staff. Things here have gotten better, mostly because they were really bad when we were under 10 people in 2015. They will continue to get better as we continue to staff up.
The complaints you have are valid, and the criticism we are open to. It’s the manner in which it is delivered that leads to a forum that no one wants to participate.
You’ve been here for years, you must have noticed that it’s not as nice here. This is how internet forums turn bad. This is why they have a bad reputation. We were lucky before, now we have to do more than rely on luck.
I’ve been trying many ways to moderate lately, and this thread’s postings are another way to learn about what people are receptive to and what they aren’t receptive to. We’ll get there… we all have too much joy to lose by failing. Especially since we all want the same thing: a civil place to discuss music, audio gear, roon, mqa, and ethernet cables… well maybe not those last 2 topics 
