Does anyone from ETC even read these posts?

Um,  well, oh dear, in my case I admit it has been a while....  All I can say is it is because of a great deal of work being done on the next versions of Smartfade, SmartFade ML and SmartSoft.  I think you will see it has been worth the wait.

 Many of the improvements to be introduced result directly from the comments on these forums.

 I apologise that we have not responded sooner.

 Adam Bennette

I read every post on every forum.

I'm a geek like that.

However, I do not respond to everything.

Did you have a question that has not been answered?

I think the replies you have received from ETC have been more than gracious (and I would expect nothing less).  These forums, to the best of my knowledge, have never been represented as, or suggested to be, an alternative to contacting Technical Services for truly timely support.  ETC's phone support is legendary and you can expect a response within 15 minutes, day or night.  You can reach them at 800-688-4116.  I don't know of any other manufacturer in the industry where you could expect to see responses in a user forum from as many different departments as you can find here.  Everyone from tech services, to product management, to marketing, even the people actually writing the code are frequent responders.  Bashing a company as committed to customer service and satisfaction as ETC, over a somewhat less than timely response to a user forum thread, seems a bit unreasonable in my opinion.

For whatever it may be worth,

John (who is not an ETC employee, just a very satisfied user)

Any opinions expressed are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the kind people who pay me.

I wasn't going to comment further but it seems I need to put the record straight. 

doctrjohn:

I think the replies you have received from ETC have been more than gracious...

I completely agree.

doctrjohn:

... ETC's phone support is legendary and you can expect a response within 15 minutes, day or night. ... Bashing a company as committed to customer service and satisfaction as ETC, over a somewhat less than timely response to a user forum thread, seems a bit unreasonable in my opinion.

I'm sure their phone support is excellent but in this case it wasn't an option. So with no reply to my forum post I emailed them on Wednesday. The address on the website contact page for their UK Customer Services came back straight away with an out of office reply suggesting an alternate address. So I emailed that and am still waiting for a reply from either address. I'm sorry but there does seem to be a blackhole somewhere in ETC's system.

I had a problem, I tracked it down, I spent quite a bit of time making sure I could reproduce it and I then documented it in a manner which should enable the software team to fix it. I didn't expect a ticker tape parade or even a Christmas card. A simple, timely, confirmation along the lines of 'thanks, we've logged it into our fault reporting system' is all I expected.

Brian

who still likes his Smartfade ML. 

Hello Brian,

It seems that Adam Bennette in the UK has confirmed your issue as a bug. Thank you very much for the very detailed description of the problem.

I would like to please ask if you could be as kind as e-mail the address you were given on the ETC website for contacting UK service? And how you navigated to the address? (I know this is asking a lot as you have already invested a good bit of time communicating with us). As far as I know that address is a general e-mail address that is not attached to any single employee so I am concerned that you got some sort of out of office auto reply. (Websites are finicky things and maybe you found a bug in ours…as well as the Smartfade ML).

 Thank you very much for your time

Mike Meskill

European Service Manager, ETC

Hello Brian,

It seems that Adam Bennette in the UK has confirmed your issue as a bug. Thank you very much for the very detailed description of the problem.

I would like to please ask if you could be as kind as e-mail the address you were given on the ETC website for contacting UK service? And how you navigated to the address? (I know this is asking a lot as you have already invested a good bit of time communicating with us). As far as I know that address is a general e-mail address that is not attached to any single employee so I am concerned that you got some sort of out of office auto reply. (Websites are finicky things and maybe you found a bug in ours…as well as the Smartfade ML).

 Thank you very much for your time

Mike Meskill

European Service Manager, ETC

Please feel free to write me directly via PM or post here.

Thank you,

Mike