HI Edward,

We are all working for someone, most of us not for RWS. 
RWS does provide this space and the programming framework and sometimes someone from RWS themselves does respond here. Most of the time it’s us “normal” contributors though.

Usually, only few people respond because the questions asked are very often so specific that it only touches very few people’s needs and expertise.
I have just checked: you seem to be working on a custom TM provider. I get automatic notifications on new posts here so I also get these questions of yours. I didn’t respond as I have encountered quite similar problems but have not yet found a solution either. 

I did not want to spam the thread with “yeah, no clue either”. I do hope for clues that help me too, so I might finally jump in with “hey, now I know: just do this:…”.

Hope this clarifies the yawning emptiness.

Cheers,
Andreas

Thanks Andreas. It's really weird that most of the time, it's only us "normal" contributors respond here. We've sent some tickets for technical questions to RWS but they told us to use this community and they (support) don't answer technical questions about the APIs. I was hoping that because their support referred us here, their developers would be monitoring this and actively answer technical questions. But thanks for your answer, really appreciated.

Edward Carandang Andreas Galambos

It's not true to say that we don't answer any questions in here.  I think it's fair to note that when developing on your own you could be completely ignorant of how to develop properly, creating anything at all, creating poor code, asking for help without providing enough context for a developer to even begin to understand how to help.  You could also be creating great solutions, really complex, integrating with other APIs we know knowing about, applications we know nothing about.  It's not unusual for us to take questions that appear in here and spend weeks trying to help developers solve their problems.  We also don't have to as we do not support any of this.  We make the APIs available, we provide documentation and examples, and we hope in vain that other developers will chip in when they can answer something too.  Considering I personally emailed over two thousand "developers" recently it is remarkably quiet in here indeed.  Probably because people only really come here when they have a question and not to willingly see if they can help out.

I don't blame anyone for this, taking time to answer questions in here often takes quite a bit of time even when we can understand what is required.  So the idea here is that this is a platform for developers to help each other.  We do our bit and we opensource almost everything we do and we try to hep as much as we can.  We know our opensourced code is used a lot... how much input do you think we get from other developers?  I can tell you it's next to nothing!  The reciprocation here is almost laughable.

In the last week we responded to these:

https://community.rws.com/developers-more/developers/language-developers/f/sdk_qa/41707/running-automatic-task-for-custom-batch-task-plugin

https://community.rws.com/developers-more/developers/language-developers/f/sdk_qa/41732/how-to-make-viewpart-under-translatinmemories-view

https://community.rws.com/developers-more/developers/language-developers/f/sdk_qa/41535/filebasedproject-publishing-from-studio-2021-to-groupshare-2017

You posted less than 24-hrs ago and are already complaining you didn't get a response.  It was a bank holiday yesterday in parts of Europe we work from, it's the Queens Jubilee today's and tomorrow in the UK.  We also take a break from time to time.

Next week when we are all back we may find some time to answer your question... probably because the rest of the "community" won't!

Incidentally... we do intend to review how we can support developers better over the next few weeks.  In this the right platform for it, or would it make a difference if we used something like stack exchange for example?  Is the platform irrelevant... is it just that there is no appetite in our rather small linguistic world for developers?  Are your requirements often so niche that you won't share, or are you not really a full-time developer and only code between your day job?

Actually I don't know the answer to these questions and there may not be a good one either.  It took years to make the normal user community something that users will sometimes help with and that is a far larger community than the developer community.

So if you have any ideas here I'm well up for discussion on how we could do it better!

Hi Paul, thanks for your answer. I did not intend to be disrespectful or anything. This is actually my third question in the community, the other 2 questions were posted 22 days ago, which remains unanswered. I made 2 references to the same question that I have, which was made 3 years and 6 years ago, which were also unanswered, thus me mentioning that no one from RWS answering.

I'm actually reviewing some plugins in the repository to maybe help me accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish and plan to post it here once I figure it out.

Again, apologies if I came disrespectful. That is not the intention.

P.S. I was actually waiting for you to answer my questions. My colleagues sing high praises about you when it comes to answering technical questions.

You are right, of course, Paul. It „should“ be more of the community answering in here instead of - mostly - you. Sorry I forgot that you are actually with RWS. 
I see if I can chip off some time to look into TM provider issues a bit more and maybe find something. I‘ll post in the actual question thread though, not here since there is no specific developer issue here.

P.S: Enjoy Jubilee day. I‘ll drink to you and your Queen.  

You are right, of course, Paul. It „should“ be more of the community answering in here instead of - mostly - you. Sorry I forgot that you are actually with RWS. 
I see if I can chip off some time to look into TM provider issues a bit more and maybe find something. I‘ll post in the actual question thread though, not here since there is no specific developer issue here.

P.S: Enjoy Jubilee day. I‘ll drink to you and your Queen.  

Edward Carandang Andreas Galambos

I'm apologising here too... I'm not really annoyed at anyone in particular.  I am frustrated at not being able to make the developer community a place that is more vibrant and more compelling for developers to use.  We are really going to try and address this over the rest of this year, at least by continuing to build on the work we did this year already in finally getting all our resources in one place... sort of: https://developers.rws.com/

We have tried running the occasional event over the last years, and these are also not very well attended.  Those people who attend like it, and we have a really good time discussing things and helping out.  But it's not scalable or anything we can justify repeating.  So I'm really looking for how we can do something sensible to encourage more engagement from our developer community, and also scale our own ability to engage more.  Whilst I did go off on one a bit it is true that we are not anywhere near as responsive in here as we are in the user forums.  There are many reasons for this, but we do need to find a way to improve this.

Adding a couple of interested people to this thread: John B Patrick Andrew Hartnett Emanuel Albu Lydia Simplicio

Thanks Paul! Looking forward to a more collaborative community!