I'm really curious how the support forums play into this. I keep seeing Woo being patted on the back for their transparency, but something just doesn't add up. They ditched the forums with no warning (or little warning, I don't really remember) and went to an all ticket system, which users hated, so then they moved to a hybrid ticket/forum system. And now they claim support costs are too high. It seems like those two things might be related to me (and to many of you, obviously); where's the transparency to that relationship? Where's the Big Picture transparency?

I've entered support tickets. Personally, I hate it. I would rather search the kb and forums. Honestly, some of the tickets have probably said "I know I've seen how to do this but now I can't find it." Some of my sites are behind a firewall, in which case they just say "sorry, nothing I can do". Troubleshooting based on what a user describes is out of scope, if they can't get credentials and log in, they don't want to bother. And granted, that level of support is probably too expensive for them. I would be willing to pay a support fee for assistance in cases where "Ninja" and I are doing some serious back and forth, figuring out a problem. Blanket raising of prices to cover support costs when most tickets are probably just links to documentation that no one can locate anymore? Ugh.

No doubt their business model wasn't sustainable long term, but their harping on SUPPORT! COSTS!! being the issue, combined with their shady handling of the change, just isn't looking good. (And Adii's answers in the comments of those posts certainly weren't doing much to make them look better.)