I’m so disappointed with the problems the performance upgrade has caused. I have around 10 organisations that each have a flavour of the DB app I’ve developed for them. I’ve wasted so much time having to go around them all trying to think of workarounds to allow them to still keep working despite all the bugs.
Its really eroded trust in the platform for end users. If the slightest thing is out of place now I get service requests as people think it’s broken again.
Sorry to hear that this is the experience you’ve been having with the performance upgrade.
While we’ve seen it improve performance across the board for the vast majority of our users, there were also some new issues that were introduced with the upgrade - and we’re working on resolving those as fast as we can.
If there are any particular issues that you’re coming across, please do submit a ticket at support@knack.com so that we could investigate and get back to you when we have any insights.
The same has happened to me. I have been with knack for over 5 years and went through this twice with the new builder and subsequent upgrades. I have lost customers because of the same issues you are experiencing. Knack have a good product but absolutely no respect for backward compatibility. I have spent 100s of hours re adjusting code and dealing with irate customers. It is obviously easier for the knack experts in our community as they can adjust faster. However, knack sells itself on a code free platform but even when I refrain from using custom code changes break the environment. All I can say is that for me I am giving up on custom code as I cannot trust that it will work in the future.
Peter
I found a serious bug - which to be fair to Knack, they have now acknowledged and escalated.
In summary, however, the issue is that when I run a task that simply updates a field to the same value as it currently has (to force a recalculation of the formulae in the record) the “Comment text” from the builder - or some JSON or other code is being inserted into the field value.
However, fundamental to this platform’s success is forward compatibility, so this is not a good experience.
Knack must support upgrades without any need for users to have to debug apps.
I’ve been a knack dev for over 7 years. Whilst you can and we have built some excellent solutions, often with css and jQuery as well as Zapier api supporting custom functions.
The pain of issues from upgrades I’m feeling now that’s not in my control or of my making is now a deal breaker!
5 days of no support and customers expecting results, using a platform app that’s had no changes for 2 years is now broken! And this is the core platform calculations,noy any JS or Api calls, just a basic sum formula! I might have to resort to JS to fix the issues.
They’ve at least acknowledged the bug and exculated. Try telling that to a customer.
I don’t believe they’ve fulfilled any robust UAT, and that’s not acceptable to me.
I’m glad people are contributing to this thread to show knack the impact this is having. I think they make the assumption everyone using the platform is developing for themselves or their own organisations. As people have said in the thread we are developing for paying customers and large organisational customers who use and need the apps every day for critical business.
When it breaks they blame us.
It impacts our businesses.
It kills our reputation.
It burns our work time.
It’s simply not acceptable for us to turn around to our customers and say knack has broken your application and given us no timeframe for when it will be fixed.
Feeling the pain of everyone and good luck sorting this avoidable mess out.
You are spot on. It frustrates the shit out of me that i have seen customers complaining of bugs back in august and yet they continue with the upgrade and break more peoples apps. Its not acceptable
@Kat Re your statement: " If there are any particular issues that you’re coming across, please do submit a ticket at support@knack.comso that we could investigate and get back to you when we have any insights"
I submitted a ticket two weeks ago and have had nothing back other than an automated acknowledgement. If you are going to depend on support tickets for feedback, you need to ensure you have the capacity to handle them. I note that Knack is recruiting, but as far as I could see not for support staff - maybe something think about?
+1
The value of this community is to tell me that I am NOT ALONE!
In fact this upgrade does not fulfill its mission. In some cases, performance is worse (and not consistent).
The support were helpful after the upgrade but suddenly disappeared for the last 7 days.
I recently submitted a support ticket and it took the Knack support team at least 5 days to act on my response every time I replied to them, let alone solve the problem.
Not only is the performance of the software not improving by the ‘Performance Upgrade’, but the performance of the support is also poor.
Hey there everyone just want to jump back in. We’re aware that performance in the new environment is an issue, and we’re also aware that support ticket times are long. These issues are, as you can imagine, related.
Starting with performance, this is a thing we’ve discussed throughout every layer of the company and with all levels from leadership down. It’s our biggest priority, getting this not just back to what you expect, but better, because that’s what we were aiming for with the upgrade.
With support response times, we’re also aware. We’re working on this in a few different ways. Firstly, from an engineering standpoint getting the performance issues knocked out will reduce inbound ticket volume, which increases our response time. We’re also hiring more in support pretty aggressively (If you have someone you’d like to recommend it to, keep an eye out for our jobs page!) to smooth out bumps like this from a response time angle. We don’t like it taking that long to get back to issues either, and we’re sorry that you’re getting that experience right now.
We experienced 3 different issues with the upgrade that we are aware of. The first issue took over 1 month to resolve, the second issue was intermittent and not officially resolved but went away (how does that happen?) and the third was not resolved but we put our own work around in place to keep operating. To compound this the lack of responsiveness from Knack was almost scary considering we run a chunk of our day to day operations on the platform. My big question is, should we consider another platform? We are a Pro customer, 4+ years in with 50,000 records in the app. I don’t necessarily want to start over but I’d rather do it on my schedule in the event something goes south.
Hi Scott,
I might be biased, but I would prefer you not consider another platform. Like I said above, we’re really aware that our communication was weak throughout this rough period. That was compounded by these issues creating more support volume than was possible for our pool of employees. We’re already working at hiring both people who can manage communication a bit better and more support employees, as well as those of us that are here being more active in more communication channels.
An issue taking over a month to resolve is something that is definitely frustrating, but I’m certain as you know that there were some pretty huge showstoppers that might’ve gotten in the way of the fix, or the fix may have just been difficult. Sometimes software issues can be more difficult to trace or resolve, sometimes they can be “easy fixes” but the ones we think are easiest often aren’t because of back end interdependencies. It doesn’t make it easier for you, which I get and I’m sorry for.
We’ve got lots of plans for the future that also involve even more internal testing for things than we already do, to help ensure that once we’ve got everything performing swimmingly it stays a smooth ride.
So ultimately: It’ll be up to you whether you want to look elsewhere, but we’d love it if you stuck around to see how great it can get.
We get this Bill, and we want you to win. But I have 25 live apps used every day by paying customers with 500k records in use. The idea that the only issues I ever have with the apps are when you guys break the BAU is bizarre. It’s not a beta platform, it’s an enterprise-level product which is business-critical for many of your customers. Of course you want to grow, reduce your tech debt and improve your capability, but you simply cannot be cavalier with day-to-day stability. I and I know many other knack customers think you have been even if this was not your intent or desire. It rocks confidence and I see why Scott is considering walking. I am currently building a POC for a new product and I too am now seriously looking at other platforms.
Hi Kevin,
That’s completely understandable and, for what it’s worth, this feedback doesn’t die here with me. I’ve passed it on up through the company as well.
Today (3) records on our employee table had incorrect values for their vacation records. For some reason they are calculated in the 1000s rather than a couple days. Nothing has changed on our end and for the rest of the employees their records look fine. This is a simple group sum, nothing elaborate going on. I have reported this as a defect and hope to hear something soon. We are slowly losing faith in Knack to manage our data. The other side of this is the responsiveness from Knack. If this is resolved quickly, that would be fine, but so far I’ve submitted 3 defects, one had our texting component of the app down for over a month until it was fixed. The second is still unresolved after over a month and the most recent, well time will tell…
I’m not sure what your reply about grabbing the chat means.
I tried to take a few days off last week during the Thanksgiving holiday. Unfortunately our Knack app had this issue so I dug into things Monday and logged the issue.
I sent a request in earlier today asking for an update on this. We are really struggling with something that had worked for years and now puts us back in paper/pencil mode.
