In my experience everything 37signals cranks out is over rated. I’m not sure why they get the positive press, and adoption rate they do.
I’m going to keep a running list of stuff that drives me nuts about it:
- You only received notifications when something is created, if something is edited you have no way of knowing
- To clear up what I am talking about here. I know that you can explicitly include when you edit a message. However, what I would like to see is basecamp remember who was originally notified, and make them the default for notifications for that message.
- Also, what would be nice, is what a message is edited, have it tell you what changed
- You CANNOT reply to notifications. You are forced to click on the link in the message, and wait the average 4 second load time for the page.
- This feature has not been added because a lot of people don’t want it. However, based on my discussions with people both on and offline, a lot of people DO want it. So, why isn’t it a configurable option?
- Notifications don’t tell you what files are attached to a message, just that there might be some random number
- Links in messages become plain text in notifications, so you have no way of knowing that there are even links in the message
- It is SLOW, seriously slow. Practically unusably slow.
- Notifications only have the site name in them, no client or project information so you cannot easily sort through them quickly. You have to click on each message and hunt down contextual information.
- The notification subjects are so abstract that most email clients cannot thread them.
If I have made an error, and you know of a way of correcting any of the above mentioned behavior please let me know!
Your type of issues seem similar to many pieces of software used for development or enterprise systems. Half the programs we use at where I work are just annoyingly crippled, frustrating, and ugly. That is what happens when programs are writen for who buys them not for who uses them. It also shows how easy it is for users to put up with so many frustrations becuase they have to. I should write a similar post about our incident tracking software “Magic”.
You are jja…don’t forget it….
I’m sorry to hear that you’re having trouble with Basecamp. Especially that you’re finding the site to be slow. We work hard to have a fast and response site. It’s incredibly important to the flow.
If you’re interested in helping to clear this up, we’d certainly like to hear from you on support. Perhaps there’s something special to your setup or connection that makes the site seem slow to you.
All the other concerns seem to be about notifications. I’ll take them one at the time.
1) You can choose to send notifications when you’re editing a post. It works the same as if you’re creating a new post. But by default it won’t send a notification on changes as that would include simple things like correcting spelling mistakes. Also, all changes are included in the RSS feed for a project, so you’ll get change notifications there automatically.
2) We currently don’t allow replies to notifications because lots of our users request that we do not. The problem with allowing people to reply to notifications is that they’ll then possibly not get used to Basecamp. So they won’t use it for their own stuff. They’ll just continue to live exclusively in email. That’s not good for team adoption.
3) Our email notifications are currently clear text, so regular HTML links (and other formatting) is not included. But if you subscribe to the RSS feed, you get to see the full HTML messages, so links are included there.
4) The notifications include the client and project information in the body text. There is simply too much information to include it in the subject. You could have a subject like “[37signals Extranet] [Protector & Gamble] [Marketing Improvements] My subject”. Most people’s email clients would truncate the message well in advance, leaving every notification to have a subject of “[37signals Extranet] [Protector & Gam…”. That probably wouldn’t be too helpful.
5) Including the name of the attachment in the email reply is a good idea. We should do that. Thanks for the suggestion!
David, thanks for the response.
1) I’ll take a look at the RSS feeds.
2) If a lot of people want it, and a lot of people don’t why don’t you make it a setting? I think one of the biggest obstacles facing basecamp is that it is so light on configuration. It forces people into a one size fits all scenario.
3) I don’t think it is necessary to have full links in plain text. However it would be nice if there was some kind of indicator that something was a link, even if it were just an asterisk after the word.
4) I believe this is another great area for empowering users. Why not allow users to specify what they want in the subject?
5) It would be nice.
I totally agree. I decided to try Wrike as one of my friends said it was cool. But it turned out that the tool doesn’t even have Gantt charts. And they still call themselves a project management app, right? I’ve read this article at PCworld.com http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134816-c,webservices/article.html and switched over to Wrike http://www.wrike.com.
I just thought to write you a quick note that you don’t actually have to use BaseCamp if it is driving you nuts. You know, there is always that option. But seing DHH responding to your query with such detail, I am almost sorry that I don’t have problems with it. It is really impressive to have this kind of dedication to software, specially when someone is having a problem with it.
Thing is, I really tried to use it, my clients simply ignore it, so I got the message quickly and moved on.
Hey, I have some issues with DarkRoom which I really like, how do I go about it?
Zeljko, unfortunately my client uses BaseCamp so I can’t avoid it, otherwise I would.
For Dark Room, please go do the latest dark room post, and write the request as a comment there. Soon I will be setting up a more formal project for it, and will be releasing the code on a limited license. So, hopefully that will speed up development.
For writeboards, there’s no notification when they’re created and therefore none when changes are made — a double whammy.
One more thing. Why can’t our Basecamp site use domain mapping so that if I’m at someone else’s computer I can actually remember the URL — like basecamp.yourdomain.com
Basecamp support sucks! My basecamp goes down and I need it for my dev team to finish my project and its goes down? I go to the support area and 1. no phone support 2. only email support which isn’t 24 hours???? If I’m working with a team globally not every has the same hours! Get 24hr email support or lose more customers!
It is slow and it lacks features, yet some how this sells.?
I am forced to use it at my work for the last three years. Why my boss is in love with their software is beyond me, OH WAIT he doesn’t use it…
Try Cohuman.com. If you have any problems with it email me (ben@cohuman.com). We will customer support the **** out of you
Thanks for the tip. We’ve been using Basecamp for sometime and it’s been one of those “necessary evils”. Been checking out our options. I also found http://rule.fm and it looks pretty sweet for total online business management. Have to sign up for pre-registration since it’s counting down till launch in less than a month.