I sure hope the Knack programmers are having a nice, relaxing weekend! Because my company’s app has been 100% unusable for 11 days now and there seems to be zero sense of urgency on their part. I’m receiving one useless email per day from the support folks and any attempt of mine to actually talk with the people looking at the code is stonewalled. My company has been completely shut down because of the code issues with Knack and it has been nearly two weeks. It took 8 days for them to migrate the app from the EU servers to the US servers. I received a useless email Friday morning saying the problem has been assigned to someone…then nothing. It’s not Saturday afternoon and our app is still dead with zero communication from Knack about this.
I don’t think you fucking kids understand how serious this problem is and how much you need to light a fire under your ass to get this resolved.
Call or email me and we are going to get the programmers and me on a Zoom call to get this sorted out today!
Hi Matthew! I’m so sorry to hear that you are experiencing this issue. That being said, this kind of language is not welcome in this community, and I respectfully ask that we refrain from it. I completely understand your frustration; it was one reason I took over the ticket and have been working directly with our engineers to resolve this quickly.
When we talked over email yesterday, you stated that the app was running again after it was migrated to the US server. As for the delete issue, I haven’t given you an update since yesterday afternoon because there wasn’t any available.
Our engineers worked on this very late into the evening last night and again this morning, and I did receive an update from them, which I was about to send you over email. But since you messaged here, I’ll go ahead and drop this here instead.
A conditional rule is running with every record on this connection field_219 Carton Billing Period, and we believe this is the conditional rule that is trying to update each and every record after the delete operation, which results in the delete process hanging. After copying the entire app into our test environment and removing this conditional rule, the deletion was processed successfully and quickly.
For privacy and security purposes, I will send you the link to the actual conditional rule in response to the message you sent me at 10:10 PM ET last night. I apologize I haven’t replied to that message. After being online since 5:00 AM yesterday, I was already offline then.
Hi Kat,
Shortly before you sent this email Jonathan Tack and I also discovered the same thorn with the Carton Billing Period field. We successfully deleted it and the fields connected to it and did additional clean up and record updates and thankfully the app is not fully back up, running, and working properly.
Through all of this there seemed to be ultimately three problems that we faced:
1: The app being on the EU servers but updates happening here in the US. Your team narrowed that down and perhaps for users in the future whatever that issue was can be resolved more easily or even avoided.
2: Jonathan and I were both actively working on the builder last week and it locked up/broke the app. At the event in Austin this past Wednesday the topic of having multiple people being able to work on the builder simultaneously came up so I know it’s on the radar for Knack. It’s unfortunate that such a major breakdown can happen if two people are actively working on the app at the same time.
3: Orphaned data fields. This one seemed to be a major part of the problems we faced. If there is a way to not completely knee-cap the app due to orphaned data fields or to have better warning messages on the user side regarding circular logic, orphaned fields, etc that will help people trouble shoot these types of errors.
Regarding my post on the forum. I’ll be honest, unless you’ve started your own company and have multiple people relying on you, customers, etc it’s not wise to tell people that you understand their frustration. It’s belittling and placating. No or little communication in this sort of situation is the worst thing you can do. In this sort of situation when the complete failure of an app has totally shut down a company it’s unacceptable to not hear back on what’s going on, even if the update is “we have looked at XYZ, they don’t seem to be the problem but we are continuing and working until we do know what the issue is.” We’ve been pulling our hair out for 11 days over the app and each day that passed added to our problems. It’s reassuring to know, and I am extremely thankful for the hard work the programmers put into trouble shooting these issues. For other Knack clients it’s good to know and it can be reassuring in these sort of times to let them know that people are working hard on it…and more than one email in the morning.
Hi Matthew! Patronizing you was never my intent, and I apologize if it came out that way. I just wanted to address how we’re taking this matter seriously since you mentioned that.
I am glad to hear your app is working again! I will pass this feedback along to our product and engineering teams, so we can detect these types of issues quicker moving forward. As for the multi-user use case, that is indeed on our radar. We’ll post an update whenever that is ready for production.