Does anyone from Patreon even look at this forum?

1

Seems like they created a forum but don’t actually look at it.
It would be nice if they actually supported their platform.

2

Hey @Jaypan, we definitely do look at the forum though we’ve been a bit busier than usual the last few weeks. I’m sorry if one of us may have missed one of your questions or feedback. Are you experiencing an issue or have feedback for us?

3

Sorry I’m a little touchy, but I haven’t been impressed at all:

  1. I started by trying to use the PHP library to integrate with your API. The version that is installed with Composer is significantly behind the master branch in the Git repo, and is buggy. Yet no release has been made for months. The library itself is poorly documented, and poorly written, not following best practices for PHP OOP. in the end, I wrote my own direct integration with your API, as the one from the PHP library only resulted in an error when making API calls. I also noticed that your Github issue queue is mostly left unaddressed as well.

  2. I cannot find any way to retrieve fields for a tier from your API. I’ve worked with a lot of APIs over the years, including JSONAPI, and as far as I can tell, your API does not return fields for tiers in version 2. So I tried emailing your support. No reply. That was two days ago. I emailed again yesterday - still no reply from either of these.

  3. I opened a thread on here asking my question. No reply at all.

  4. I opened this thread only to find an apology asking what my question was. It was the third question on the front page. It’s got my username on it. It would have taken like 10 seconds to figure out which question I had and answer it, yet here I am, still with my question unanswered.

There is my feedback. You’ve got a PHP library with a stale release that doesn’t work, and isn’t maintained. Your support is unresponsive, your Github queue is unaddressed, and the forum here receives no replies. And potentially, your API is not working correctly either (though I’m hoping that’s just a support issue).

– Edit –

I just read in another thread that a developer had to abandon your NodeJS library and write their own integration with the API. If you are going to put out libraries, they should be properly maintained. It is bad business to be recommending buggy unsupported libraries. These should be properly marked as beta versions at the least, or unsupported if you do not intend to work on them anymore. By having them out there as the official libraries, you waste the time of developers who use your libraries assuming that they would work, who then think the bugs that appear are in their own code, and try to fix it. These are supposed to be official libraries.

I really like the idea of Patreon, but it would appear that your internal teams are lacking in leadership when it comes to running and supporting an API for a platform. The pieces are all there, but the cracks need to be filled in.

4

I’ve looked further through the forum. I just provided support to someone whose question left languished for 7 days. Then I found this thread:

Making much the same comments I made in this thread. The library is unsupported, outdated, and missing important documentation.

Please mark these libraries as Beta. You cannot believe how frustrating it is trying to find bugs in your own code when you assume an officially supported library would work.

1 Like
5

Hey @Jaypan,

I’m sorry we haven’t been able to provide the service you were looking for. As a small team we aren’t officially offering support through the Developer Community. It’s primarily intended for devs to communicate together on things. We also don’t have an official SLA for pull requests and issues on our Github repositories.

That being said, we do appreciate your feedback and will take a look at the issues you’ve opened up on Github when we can.

1 Like