Oriole_fan,

I was just reading the transcript of the dev chat from Tuesday, and noticed the following count of dev chats for GD by year:

2005 - 1
2006 - 11
2007 - 2
2008 - 1
2009 - 1
2010 - 2
2011 - 2
2012 - 0
2013 - 1

While I think the numbers speak for themselves, I'll actually state that *more* communication with your community is a *good thing* if what you want is happy customers. I understand that Dev chat is primarily a variation of the forums, however with the GD engine heading into a new release I would think that you would want to have chat sessions -- or some similar mechanism -- on a regular basis.

You've been responsive about these things in the past, and this could be an excellent opportunity to avoid large scale customer discontent as the release date approaches or as problems are found.

I would also suggest that WIS maintain some resource *other* then the forums where your customers will know that their problems are being worked on -- or at least acknowledged. The attempts to maintain a list of "known problems" by the user community is excellent example of a gap in the WIS infrastructure which should be filled *by* WIS.

He mentioned that one would be held in a couple weeks after the engine is more widespread.

I guess the point that I was trying to make was that in 2006 they were almost monthly. In all other years they are more or less non-existent. If there is another in a couple of weeks then nothing for another year, then that's not a great communication mechanism. So, they should either have them more regularly, or they should stop pretending that they matter and try to fill that communication gap with something else.