We’re back hacking this fortnight, with our delivery teams self organising around some creative ideas, racing to ship something cool.
As usual, there are some projects that aim for behind-the-scenes value, and some experiments that you’ll see LIVE on our sites if you look closely enough!
Between now and Friday the 8th of April, you can keep an eye on this post or forum category, where we’ll update you on things to look for. Changes might be small or large, and may also be limited to a certain percentage of users, as we watch our hacks take life slowly (but surely!)
We hope you like what you find and we hope that our team’s wonderful ideas hit the mark. We’d love to see them all become permanent fixtures, but first we’ll hack to find out!
Don’t forget auto generated preview videos and thumbnails for stock footage and motion graphics items, with the opportunity to override and upload custom ones if needs be. I think the hackathon squadron would get a lot of kudos for that one!
Here’s a hack that would be brilliant: Comment Restrictions.
Case:
In the “support” settings of my account I am required to point out where I will be providing support, no problem, I choose “External URL”. Now, pre-sale questions (non-buyers) come through to my item comments, this is totally fine, but, post-sale questions also come through to my comments, why?
If I’ve specified that I’m supporting via an external URL then customers with a purchase should ONLY be able to use that URL, save the item comments for pre-sale, and my ticket system for post-sale (support).
There are no losers here, want to keep all your support in one place? This helps. Buyers need support and come to comments? Remove the comment form, use a big button saying “click here for support”. Buyer wants to leave feedback? That’s what ratings are for.
There’s no reason I should wake up in a morning and have to cross-reference my item comments against my tickets for duplicates when I’ve already specified in my Envato settings that I use an External URL for support.
Are there any plans on fixing the AudioJungle search engine? We’ve been stuck with a lopsided and unfair system since December. It’s become extraordinarily difficult to sell new items in select categories because the algorithm aggressively promotes top selling tracks and leaves very little opportunity for new tracks to be discovered and sold.
Before the changes, the market was being introduced to fresh new top sellers every month and the list was thriving with great new tracks often selling 50-150 times in the first month.
Now tracks are barely selling 30-40 each month, and many of those that do sell were either featured or came from categories that weren’t modified in the change (‘Happy’, ‘Epic’ etc)
Here’s an example of how crazy the search results are at the moment: - the first page is literally loaded with top selling items with hundreds and thousands of sales… many of which are several years old and aren’t even selling, despite maintaining such a high position and forcing new items down to pages 4+. How is this fair?
Not a new item in sight. It’s incredibly upsetting and frustrating for authors who are devoting time and energy into AudioJungle to see such a devastating change. What started with a clear request to reduce the weighting of titles in the search algorithm resulted in heavy bias towards sales, leaving no room for new and thriving items to be discovered.
A fair balance must be achieved by adding weight to item upload date and restorting equilibrium between proven top sellers, and new, emerging tracks. There should be more variety and diversity in the search results instead of a concrete top-sellers list, which the search results have now become.
Ergo, I beg the staff to take this into consideration for Hack Fort.
Feature for buyers to send sensitive information by marking it as private reply in item comments like login details etc. Very useful for authors who provide support through item comments.
Restricting buyers to rate an item after their support period is over.
Transparent author and buyer dispute system for eg: removing inappropriate ratings when provided sufficient proofs, removal of ratings after refund is been provided.
Encouraging buyers to review products through some more interesting ways.
A Rich Text Editor for editing item descriptions. Current one is so oldschool.
An extra Change log tab where author can write their changelogs besides the various tabs currently present.
Another Hack Fort initiative will be tested out tomorrow! We’re trialling a new way for Envato Market users to engage with us within Envato Market. Between 10am and 4pm (Melbourne, Australia time) tomorrow (Friday), a chat icon will appear for all logged-in users within Envato Market. Clicking this icon will allow users to ask us a question - the product team will be responding to questions and feedback with the assistance of the awesome Envato Market Help team.
We’re testing this for a few hours to get a sense of how we might scale this as a full time feature of the site. We expect to get general questions about the site, licenses, how to use items etc, as well as specific questions about items from potential buyers.
We’ll be disabling the feature at 4pm (or earlier if we get swamped!!) and will publish results as part of the Hack Fort roundup.
Let users rate directly on the item page (…if they bought the item of course).
Just had a user who wrote to me asking why he couldn’t leave the five star rating he was about to give on the item page. I wonder how many users simply never understood the fact that you can rate items on your ‘Downloads’ page.
If we choose to not offer support via comments (no business would - it’s a lousy form of support), there’s no reason why people should be posting comments for support there. It just wastes everyone’s time and makes both the buyer and author experience worse.
It should strictly be limited to pre-sale questions.
so exited
