Wanderlust 4x5 P&S

[mdarnton]

Personally, I like all the whining. It gives me supplemental data for populating my ignore list. No one likes a whiner, but here one can actually do something about it!

[Ben Syverson]

Not going to happen. Ben controls when pick up happens. He calls the carrier with a request for pickup, the carrier gives him a day (if during the week usually the next day) and approximate time. In 35 years doing shipping and receiving for the same company (including large shipments) I never, not once, had a carrier not show up on the date promised. That included UPS, FedX, CF, at all levels of service.

A good example of KS creator communication is the Intrepid 4x5 project. A little over a month ago the creator promised an update every Friday. For the last month he has held to that promise. Although his project has slipped to 7 months past initial reward estimate you just don't see the backers complaining. When Ben posted that bit of information I did not see one sour remark from anyone, just 'thank you'.

Absolutely right about the carrier pickup. In fact, we can call them same-day if it's urgent.

If Intrepid slips 20 months behind like us, I guarantee backers will complain no matter how often they're posting updates. I think Intrepid is their day job, and they're in full-speed-ahead production mode, so it's easier to do weekly updates. I wish them luck—it looks like a nice little camera!

I know we promised to post once every two weeks, but I no longer make any promises related to time. I really hope we can ship next Thursday, but it's not a promise. Honestly, a small percentage of backers will complain no matter what I do, so complaints don't even register anymore. They have zero impact. But constructive comments and encouragement have made a big difference.

[A_Tabor]

I would encourage backers of any kickstarter to be 'generously forgiving' as much as possible. Staying calm and supportive, and encouraging those behind a project to take their time and make things right tends to go over far better than hounding them and holding people to hard deadlines. As frustrating as it can be, life happens, and any kind of development project can readily snowball into a larger task than expected.

A software development project I've been doing a bit of contract work on the side with has hit several major issues. They started off with a tight and ambitious timeline, and focused on using lots of middleware and off the shelf solutions rather than building their own code to finish their project as fast as possible. The problems started when they had issues getting some of their middleware to work as expected, and ended up several months behind schedule having to rebuild stuff from scratch that they thought was already done. Then they pushed back the release date to deal with a few bugs...

The community effectively exploded in rage when the release date was pushed back again, and several members took it upon themselves to out the developers as fraudsters, and things got to the point that nearly half the team has now simply walked away from the project in an attempt to get away from the harassment. This has delayed the project even further and put more stress on the last programmer who has been spending half his time trying to 'keep the community informed' online, and working insane hours.

The insane hours has now also lead to him being clearly sleep deprived and making more errors than he normally would have. The biggest of which was a mistake in trying to fix an issue with some file handling systems that has possibly lost 3 months worth of progress...


Long story short: Deep breaths, and stay encouraging towards a development team. Anything else might just result in rather the opposite of a desired outcome.

[plywood]

Ben, when you posted about a possibile early ship day, and also why you could not do it sooner I did not see anyone calling you a so-and-so for not getting the shipping out earlier. Each of us who posted simply said 'thank you'. I personally do not care if the 90 arrives in October or November or December. Naturally, when they do ship, I'd like a heads up. Even if only you post in the KS comments section, not an official update, on a regular day of the week, each week, you will go a long way to shutting down all us 'complainers'. I don't know, perhaps you thought that by telling us there would be another 10 day delay that we would all jump down your throat. But that did not happen, as far as I could see. It seems the complainers just shrugged, and said thanks for the information.

[Kuzano]

Particularly in Manufacturing, the delays from "Change Orders" dominate the schedule. Also dominated are price increases.

The Travelwide has been rife with "Change Orders", hence the delay.

We should simply be happy that the price has not increased as well.

Look at the F35, our new all encompassing fighter jet that has been a failure in dog-fight trials and is now up against the 40 year old A10 "Warthog" for best Close Ground Support superiority, where it will also lose the competition.

The TravelWide will not go up in price, and will perform it's intended function.

At the same time, we have all participated in the price increases on the F35..... a tax supported contract.

Did you know that large government contracts, like the F35 have a "bonus" for pulling the plug on the contract early, thereby saving money for the government on the contract?

It's called a "BONUS FOR EARLY WEAPONS CONTRACT CANCELLATION". A standard operating procedure for contract failure, paid to the Manufacturer of the product, or weapons system.

Ben should be so lucky!!

[Ben Syverson]

The F35 suffers from trying to please all the people all the time, and thus pleases no one. I miss the days of the F16 and F14.

[letchhausen]

What's astonishing to me is that the Digital Bolex KS (which was also late like every kickstarter where someone is building something from scratch) had far less whining from people who were in for $4k!

But I think Ben and team have done a great job of creating a product that will allow people to get a 4x5 negative in situations where we couldn't before. Even with the limited focal length (my lens kit is 240/350/450) there's a lot we'll be able to do and it will open me up to new ideas. So I'm thrilled that they're doing it. My feeling is that it will get here when it gets here and I usually pop into this thread hoping for discussion of those possibilities and it's tiring when it's just the same few people doing the "are we there yet?" routine.

[Jim Cole]

I love to read posts by people whining about the whiners.

[Gadfly_1971]

What's astonishing to me is that the Digital Bolex KS (which was also late like every kickstarter where someone is building something from scratch) had far less whining from people who were in for $4k!

I've found that the amount of whining tends to be inversely proportional to the amount of money "invested" in a given crowd funded project. The SnapPower outlet cover is a perfect example; $15 for the basic level and the whining started before the campaign was over. They weren't even very late (maybe a few weeks).

[andrearicci]

Hi everyone
This thread has 251 pages..
Can some summarise what's happening with the travelwide ?
I wrote to Wanderlust few times and got no answer
Is the company going to deliver and is there any realistic alternative to the travelwide?