Unsupported tutorials should be marked, and the threads should be left open

I was going through Getting Started With Widgets and had the app crash the first time I ran it. Went through the steps again, everything seemed right. Let’s check the forum discussion on it. Nothing seems relevant… getting towards the bottom, starting to think of how I’m going to pose my question.

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Seriously? Tutorials are only supported for six months? Obviously you can’t and shouldn’t be expected to provide support indefinitely, but not even a full year?

Okay, well, that’s exceptionally frustrating and disappointing, I would have hoped and expected for RW to stand behind their content and help their users for a bit longer than that, but, fine.

Oh, and the post is locked. Great. So us users who are experiencing issues can’t even try to give support to each other.

If content is going to become unsupported, regardless of the timeframe, there should be a visible representation of that at the start of that content. “Note: RayWenderlich provides support for 6 months after a tutorial is published. This tutorial is no longer supported.”

There is no reason to lock the post and prevent users from discussing the content and/or providing support to other users.

Hi @spconrad , APIs and OSes evolve constantly, which means that something that worked before may no longer after an update (app crash, etc). Maintaining an article is no small effort at that pace and six months has become a sweet spot for an article lifecycle.

The articles are not removed because while the example may no longer work, or the post may not match the API post-updates, the content is still relevant to explain how a problem to a solution may be achieved.

Sometimes, some articles are updated and you will see that noted in the article itself at the top.

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@robertomachorro

It is frustrating to see someone use a disingenuous and fallacious argument about the pace of our industry when I addressed that content can not and should not be expected to be supported indefinitely and was extremely reasonable in my argument.

6 months is an absurd and embarrassingly short period of time for support.

This article in particular was published 4 months before Widgets were officially released, there were 5 additional Xcode 12 betas after this article was published. This article was obsolete before the feature on which it focused was released.

I didn’t say every single possible change to an API should be noted or addressed, I didn’t say any and every breaking change must be addressed within 24 hours, and I didn’t say they should update every article for free for 10 years.

I said it is reasonable to expect that a published article be supported for one year, and that it should be noted in articles that they are no longer supported. I didn’t even say maintained and updated. This is not done because it would look bad and make users less likely to return and start or continue a paid subscription.

I said that forum posts for those articles should not be locked.

My apologies, no harm was intended. I’ll rephrase as follows:

Articles have an auto-assigned topic in Forums that have a 6 month lifespan, after that it closes and so does the author’s obligation to monitor and respond to questions (a free service). However, Forums are open and any given topic (including regarding prior articles) can be created (such as this Off Topic topic) by anyone for questions and discussion.

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