Some more complaints about the Bat's support. I keep looking for a helpful, normal forum to figure shit out about the Bat, but there is nothing like that. here's what I've found:
The actual Ritlabs forum:
This is the one on their website. According to the rules, you can only say "positive" things about the Bat there. Nothing else. no bug reports, no support questions, nothing about beta. Only "positive" remarks. It's basically a forum to only give good testimontials for the program. So the official forum is basically useless. i doubt anyone goes there for anything...ever. That's why it's not used.
The stupid mailing list (also accessed through usenet, if you prefer):
This is by far the most active place to discuss all things related to the Bat. The only problem is that it's, well, really really antiquated. We're talking early 90's technology here. Either you use a listserv mailing list, which basically means people communicate through emails. You subscribe and get tons of emails, or one large weekly mail. Or if you don't like that, you can read/post through the newsgroups which mirrors the activity in the mailing list. This is very insane. Good luck searching for answers, or navigating through all the information. Forums are really the way to go for stuff like this, if only the Bat would get with the times. it would be great if they just allowed the Ritlabs forum to be used as a regular forum, open to everything so people can actually figure things out about the Bat. Or give us a manual! Something! Good grief...
Now, I found this forum, called The Unofficial Bat Support Forums:
http://the-bat-forums.orgThe problem with this forum is that nobody uses it. It's great if people used it, but they don't. It's a normal, modern forum, with all the features you would expect. But because everyone that matters uses the mailing lists, nobody uses this. So it's basically useless.
I have such a love/hate relationship with this program. There are like 5 things that they never fix, and if they did, it would be awesome. I can even show them exactly how to do it, and it wouldn't be that hard from a programmer's standpoint. But as many of you know, the only features they have added in the past 5 years are very minor, and predominantly useless. Why? Because the only feedback they ever get is from the mailing list users. And anyone who regularly participates on a mailing list is not a "normal" person. That's not a criticism, what I mean is that they hardly have any sense about what is "easy" for normal people, and they don't care about buttons/UI as long as their keyboard shortcuts are working. So you can't expect them to care about easy conveniences. A version 5 is coming out, and I can almost assure you that there is going to be nothing noticeably different about the program.
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