I want to thank everybody who contributed to shaping SkaDate software and helping it become what it is nowadays.

Recently we launched Suggest.SkaDate.com – an online tool for suggesting your ideas in a way that can be appreciated and managed by us. But in fact the most active of our customers contributed long before that starting from 2005 – the year of product launch.

Thus I wanted to spread some clue on how we manage this valuable feedback. First of all, we do not merely implement whatever people ask. Nobody would benefit from this. Suggestions are too many, and everyone’s needs are different that is why we have to keep the product roadmap straight, responding to the market situation and massive demand more than the individual needs of specialized projects (sites). Any site can be ruined by throwing packs of features at users and making their way through the site difficult. Also we have limited development forces of course, and have to choose what’s critical.

• Most-voted ideas
  We give them thorough evaluation but the final decision would depend on whether we think that this suggestion is reasonable for the majority of SkaDate-powered sites. This is hard because people use SkaDate for all kinds of dating/social hybrids. Nonetheless, we’ve been helping online dating businesses since 2002 – far before SkaDate was even launched – and we think that our experience earned us a nose for good ideas for dating and community sites.
• Ideas with more than 10 votes
  We pay attention to them because the more votes we receive the harder it is to bubble up your idea to the top. We do not want that to get in your way of bringing our attention to your suggestion.
• Ideas that are less than 10 votes
  We still keep an eye on them detecting reasonable ideas no matter how many people voted. If you suggest something that we find reasonable we will comment, too, asking others to vote for it. Again, this is not to let good ideas be buried under the so-so ones.

Go to Suggest.SkaDate.com and tell us your vision. We absolutely love great ideas.

Thank you for your contribution.

Emil Sarnogoev
CEO
Skalfa eCommerce

P.S. If your suggestion doesn’t receive recognition from other customers but is absolutely critical for your website you can opt for custom development. For that go to SkaDate Certified Specialists resource (SkaDateCS) or write to our sales team.

As a part of our recent SkaDate customer support optimization and reorganization we are happy to introduce several new things that are now available for you in SkaDate Customer Area. Among those are:

1) Public support forum waiting for you at http://www.skadate.com/ca/forum/. For now we are filling it with How-to’s and FAQs for your convenience. You can also post questions and problems you face when using SkaDate. As the time flows there will be more common solutions discussed with SkaDate support operators. So if you face a a problem there will be a good chance to find a solution instantly. Feel free to ask questions, we are listening!

2) Feature suggestion tool at http://suggest.skadate.com/ is up for your convenience. It’s much more effective than now defunct Skalfa Boards and allows customers and anyone else suggest what they think is right for SkaDate. This is a good way for you to suggest your idea and for us to monitor demand.

3) Online documentation at http://www.skadate.com/ca/docs/ now comes instead of old .CHM manuals. Now all manuals will be in one place and universally accessible. We also introduce linking from SkaDate software admin area to corresponding parts of the online manual. Also it’s a more effective way for us to maintain and update the relevant version of every document for your ease and convenience.

Tell us what we can do to further improve SkaDate support.

We are planning to add 2 kinds of widgets that will greatly help with creating content for your social network on WackWall.

1) RSS widget – allowing you to obtain content from an arbitrary RSS feed of any source, like blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and so on. Not that your site should be stuffed with RSS-taken 3rdparty content only but it will help your network take off with constant and fresh content on the topic. Is there anything users love more?

2) Custom HTML widget – a widget that just lets you put any HTML content within it. It can be used for additional wording, promo, non-standard types of content, and… advertisement. Note that we don’t prohibit putting your own ads on your network even if you don’t plan to purchase ControlPack to eliminate/replace WackWall ad banner – you can run your own unlimited ads as well.

If you think you know what we should be aware of when developing these features, or have an idea of other widgets that help you build content for your network, feel free to let us know! WackWall is a project that is destined to be in heavy development during the whole its lifetime and our goal is to make your social network a really cool place to commuincate.

Long time we didn’t write anything about SkaDate but that doesn’t mean there’s no news in the camp. In fact, A LOT is going on in SkaDate development rooms.

First of all, we are receiving a lot of useful feedback from our customers on the public SkaDate forum. Especially interesting is the feature suggestion section where our customers let us know what they want to see in SkaDate. If you don’t participate yet, there’s a heap of reasons why you should.

This update is going to be all about feature enhancements and we believe it’s going to make life much easier for all our customers and their users.

A list of confirmed changes for the upcoming update is also available. You should hurry to check it out because there’s still some time left to submit what you find necessary.

Our development dept is humming and romping.

SkaDate

It’s that time of the product life-cycle again. We are planning next major upgrade for SkaDate, version 7. We are at the stage of gathering all the feedback and putting on paper what should be implemented.

We target the following 3 objectives with SkaDate 7:

1) Several major new features (groups, classifieds, etc.)
2) A lot of enhancements and optimization of the existing features. This is the neverending mission across the product existence history.
3) Performance optimization. We made some custom performance tuning for several big customers. Some of that can be implemented in the main product.

And of course, SkaDate 7 is not going to be a great thing without your suggestions. We found great value of communicating with customers, so new SkaDate can’t go without your contribution.

chuPPo

chuPPo applications do not have any versioning because of the hosted model and constant incremental development. You do not need to download anything, you just see your chat, IM, and recorder getting better, often on a daily basis.

Currently we are eager to hear from our audience what chuPPo can do for you.

Skalfa Boards

Now, for some action go to the new Skalfa Boards and let us know how we can make running your business easier. From now on this is the right place to give us some insight on improving our products.

One of our customers found a couple bugs recently. I mean a couple real program code bugs, not common misconfigurations or interface shortcomings. A rare thing to catch nowadays since at the solid sixth version (SkaDate Unity) we seem to have figured out most of them, current updates are all about minor interface tweaks, existing features rearrangement for better usability and more powerful administration tools.

The fixes are going to be included in the upcoming December revision, as well as a new portion of micro-enhancements. If you have a useful new feature to add, feel free to suggest it after learning what’s already there and how they work.