I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this. My frustration with Intuit has reached its tipping point, especially after they acquired a Brazilian financial management software called Zeropaper, which my company heavily relied upon. Intuit then proceeded to discontinue the product and withdraw from the Brazilian market without offering any viable alternatives, leaving us scrambling to migrate promptly. The experience was an eye-opener, teaching me a valuable lesson: regardless of any reassurances given after a product acquisition, it's best to start preparing an exit strategy as soon as possible.
> I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this.
That is interesting to me, because I had the complete opposite take after less than a minute on the website. I actively avoid QuickBooks because I despise Intuit.
But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord.
Competing with QuickBooks means competing for business clients, yet I can't imagine a business forgoing real documentation for Discord.
For a FOSS project targeting people who are comfortable using FOSS this seems entirely fine...desirable even. "We don't have money for phone staff who would put you on hold and only be reading off scripted responses anyway, but you can come chat directly with the leaders and maintainers of the software by chat".
Discord (and other non-indexable chats like Slack) is where conversations go to die and be hidden forever. FOSS and other "open" projects should be using something like Zulip, or even anything else, that can actually be indexed by Google and other search engines.
I'm a part of a few Discords, and questions are repeated over and over again, forever. People who answer the questions, get tired of answering the same thing and eventually stops helping people. In contrast, using Stack Overflow or anything else, people can search Google for answers and actually find it.
~~~Well, besides the whole thing about my previous comment that everything you write in Discord stays in Discord and is basically not findable unless you're already a part of the Discord. While phpbb (or any public forum really) is by default readable by anyone, so searching for questions let you find answers without having to sign in and join the forum.~~~
(not arguing that discord should be used for these kinds of projects, just an aside)
to my knowledge, this is is only an optional moderation feature on some servers, not a global policy - you can still use discord without an email address if the server rules are loose enough
The last time I looked for quickbooks documentation, I just found some YouTube videos.
Support has been useless too.
As much as I don’t use discord at all, having a 50% chance of getting someone that understands internet banking to help troubleshoot internet banking would be compelling.
Real time chat in general and discord in particular. Discord cannot be self-hosted, so any support message history will be completely reliant on the goodwill of discord. Another problem with using a chat channel for support (slack has the same problem) is searching for things you know are there but are impossible to find again.
And an ISP to host it on. As we know, if you don't self-host your ISP then you're beholden to the goodwill of a large corporation who could shut you down at any time.
I see these as complimentary, knowledge base for search and self support. Email for well documented transactions or low priority questions. Slack/Discord to avoid making phone calls when looking for real people responses quickly. Phone for emergencies.
Seems like a brilliant way to choose your customers, actually. A great way to avoid Pareto rule type problems that suck away too much time. I could easily imagine that e.g. 200 "smart customers who need very little help" could be more profitable than 1000 who do, after a time v. money calculation.
Presumably this would follow the pattern other big open source projects take, where other companies (who are experts on the software) host and/or support the software for a cost.
This is like 90% of Enterprise IT work. Install some box, follow their directions, make sure the port is open on your firewall... call the vendor when it breaks. IT is so often just being the middle man.
Yet this is the middle man that brings in the business aspects, the context etc. Installing a product in a bank and at a soft ware vendor's can be dramatically different.
I think just having someone who acts as a gatherer of info, so Intuit aren't being sent junk tickets, means service is resumed much quicker. And that's worth paying for.
It can be a decent side business for an IT support contractor. Quickly you learn the biggest issues, and only really need to spend time on special scenarios.
Having interacted with Stripe's chat and email support, I have a similar feeling - their goal is to get me to go away instead of actually helping with my problem.
My first and only choice is their discord support, when that doesnt help I rather work around the problem than get stuck in their email limbo.
It's an open source project - their customers are going to be small businesses with small teams of technical people to maintain it. I don't think they're competing with QuickBooks at all. Why is Discord not a viable method of communication for these users?
I'm sure there's some subreddit or something where people appreciate knee-jerk defensive reactions to the entire idea of free/libre/open anything. There are people out there who actually hate public libraries…
Supposedly HN is for reasonable discussions of things.
Maybe people don't because getting involved means dealing with a bunch of thin-skinned people who can't take a legit criticism, like "accounting software can't have support on Discord."
For better or worse OSS communities organize on Discord now, having an active server where the core contributors participate is the sign of a healthy project. Honestly looks better than a public Slack imho and it's where they'll get the most engagement from devs.
Discord is a serious thing now, I've seen enterprise products add support for Discord before Slack.
Gonna have to disagree with you. Most projects I interact act with are either on IRC or Matrix, or solely communicate through some type of git web instance.
Discord is actively hostile to users by randomly banning and/or phone-walling users, especially any browser or connection that cannot be fingerprinted well enough, and giving them no recourse at all, just saying "yep our automated system is working, bye". There's so many more awful things they do, just search this site to find lots more.
Hostile to users as you're describing it is just "dealing with spam at scale." I find it hard to fault a service for doing sucky things that every other large service eventually succumbs to out of necessity. I can't be on some high horse and demand this company somehow magically solve problems no one else has.
Anyone who figures out how to have pseudoanonymous identities that can't be endlessly minted to evade bans that doesn't involve aggressive fingerprinting will be the internet's favorite child overnight.
> For better or worse OSS communities organize on Discord now
OSS communities, yes. More and more FOSS communities are on Matrix, either using matrix.org or connecting their own instance to the network. FOSS projects using FOSS tools, and decentralized for that matter too.
Even this is no longer true - current free tier of Slack (as of a couple of months ago IIRC) is 90 days of retention, which for low-volume groups of users is even worse.
I did some integration work with QuickBooks online, and oh the horror! Simple things like reconciling transactions against a bank account couldn't be done via the supported API. There was basically no way to automate clicking on every single customer payment aside from scraping the website.
Bonus: the website screws up when you have thousands of transactions that need to be reconciled. I couldn't come up with a good test case as it seems to be some weird internal race condition.
In other words: I wholeheartedly welcome an open source project my business can build on.
And if you want to preach the virtues of FOSS of your product, you’d offer FOSS real-time communications as at least an option. Slap in IRC, an XMPP MUC, Matrix Space. You could bridge to (not from) Discord as a second-class option if it was deemed valuable, but shouldn’t be the primary host.
Wow, there's so much hate toward Intuit here. Makes me glad I stopped upgrading at QB2010.
Still using it regularly. No subscriptions, no cloud, no nasty surprises to contend with. I have custom code that automatically pulls exchange rates from public sources and injects into the appropriate UI fields. My accountant's still able to ingest the file for year-end. Will probably be on it for another decade.
This is the issue with subscriptions that could be regular old software: When the other side of the equation changes you can be in deep troubles. With regular old software you are in control when to make updates, how to vet them and how to move on when no updates are coming.
Ah...but things like payroll/tax integrations usually require periodic changes, so folks get stuck on the upgrade treadmill even if they're happy. I somehow ended up supporting half the quickbooks users in my town and I can assure folks that most of the quickbook hate out there has been earned. :/
This project looks interesting, especially as a non-cloud offering. As for support...well that's certainly something folks can provide if there's a need.
