Is GitBook still alive?

[drobiazko]

Is it worth to consider GitBook? I have my doubts due to:

• it seems like there is nobody reading support emails. Even as a paying customer I'm being ignored.
• last blog post is now 4 months old
• last commit to this repo was done more than 2 moths ago
• last tweets is almost 2 moths old
• many issues are open since months without any comments
• many pull requests are waiting to be merged since months

Any ideas?

[nagim]

Hi,

Yes, it's still alive.
The lack of activity in the GitHub repo only shows that the work is currently being done in other repos that are not public.
The team is in the middle of a complete overhaul of the whole GitBook experience (that's why you didn't notice activity in the repos, as it will be a different approach compared to the existing one), which takes a lot of time and effort now. It is currently in beta testing phase, I believe.

I agree that a lack of response to support emails can be frustrating, I guess with this amount of work for a team of 5 or so people, support emails processing might be very slow.

I'm a paying customer as well and I often write to the Slack channel which often allows for speedier responses.

Cheers,
Imre

[drobiazko]

Thank you for your answer @nagim.

I understand your arguments about the new GitBook experience and the size of the team. However the guys behind GitBook need to learn how to handle customers. The only reason I purchased an organizational plan was Individual support. You can have the best product in the world but if you ignore your customers you will lose all of them. You just must not concentrate on delivering new version of your product without helping your paying customers.

[nagim]

Yes, you're right on this.
Again, try to contact them on Slack via a direct message. That usually works best for me.

[drobiazko]

I asked my questions on Slack as well. Unfortunately it was not answered either.

[nagim]

The one regarding variables? If you come online, I might be able to help.

[AaronO]

Hi @drobiazko,

First and foremost I am sorry if you've experienced delayed replies (could you email me at aaron@gitbook.com with the specific issues you need help with ?), I'm travelling at the moment but will get back to you when in a few hours when I'm back.

Secondly, GitBook is very much alive, we're beta testing a massive product release that solves many of the core product issues we gathered from users (by talking with users and running surveys).

I'm sorry you've encountered issues, email me or ping me on slack so I can help you with your immediate issues.

Kind Regards,
Aaron

[zuker]

Hmm, it's strange to make clients struggle to get paid support...

[melvinchng]

@AaronO I sent you an email regarding student discount. I have been trying to contact the team for more than a month now and I receive zero response.

[reviewher]

Anyone find an alternative to gitbook?

[pnicoll]

The team is in the middle of a complete overhaul of the whole GitBook experience

We find this troubling.

[AaronO]

@pnicoll It's important to highlight that we're doing this as a result of user-feedback:

... product release that solves many of the core product issues we gathered from users (by talking with users and running surveys).

We spent a lot of time talking with our users, to really understand the major pain points. We've been beta-testing the new-release with a few organizations over the past few weeks with solid feedback so far.

As a result here are some of the improvements currently implemented in the new release:

• Unified read & write experience (much much simpler UI/UX)
• Simple and clean company branding out of the box (branding is super-important for public product/API docs)
  • Upload a logo and pick a color (we automatically suggest one from your logo)
  • Set custom links in header
  • Header logo & favicon
  • It takes seconds not hours (no need to write CSS/HTML/JS or plugins ...)
• Editor now natively supports editing rich content (hints, embeds, api methods, ...), no longer requires a templating syntax !
• Most common / popular plugin-powered features are now implemented 1st party (non-exhaustive list):
  • Title anchors
  • Collapsible TOC entries
  • Image captions
  • Hints / Callouts
  • Rich embeds (to embed external content, e.g: YouTube videos)
  • And more ...
• Relevant & fast content-wide search (works on users and comments too !)

Overall things are an order of magnitude simpler, more reliable and less quirky.

@pnicoll I would love to talk one-on-one over Slack or Skype/Hangouts and hear your feedback (and potential concerns).

I've had a call with @drobiazko and am working with them to help streamline their docs (they have some special requirements that no documentation solution will solve out-of-the-box).

[pnicoll]

@AaronO That all sounds great, especially collapsible TOC entries (using a plug-in then clicking on a second-level TOC associated to an anchor link breaks the search entirely, which we told you about in January; see #1670, in particular @nagim 's comment @SamyPesse this issue is quite serious, basically you cannot use search if you have scrolled down in a page, because it crashes instantly). As a result, we can only have level 1 TOC entries, and some of our chapters are massive, so our users have to scroll or search instead of immediately finding what they're looking for in the TOC.

What worries us is what might be broken with this overhaul.

[AaronO]

@pnicoll The error you encountered is precisely a symptom of the underlaying problem that we're fixing (I'm sorry that you encountered it).

Namely that GitBook requires plugins for:

• Branding (a must-have for companies, which today have to painfully write custom HTML/CSS/...)
• Improvements (e.g: title-anchors, better search, etc ...), that should be built-in
• To include rich content (youtube videos, iframes, etc ...)
  However:
• Most plugins are developed by 3rd party devs, not the core gitbook team
• Plugins may conflict with one-another (or builtin plugins, such as the crash you saw)
• They require editing book.json or using a templating syntax (for end-users)
• Which isn't supported by the WYSIWYG editor (it would be impossible for us to provide a tailored editing experience for arbitrary 3rd-party plugins)
• May break your builds (and prevent your content from updating ... I hate that this is even possible ...)

Overall this exposes a lot of unnecessary complexity and technicalities that end-users (you guys) have to worry about, that's frustrating and a subpar UX.

The core focus of this release is building a much simpler (UI & UX) and reliable experience for our users. Everything a team needs to write their documentation should be simple, reliable and "just work"™. No build failures, plugin conflicts, sync errors, ...

I would love to jump on a call, understand your specific use-case & needs, demo you the beta so you can get a better understanding of where we're going (and see for yourself if it truly is simpler/better).

[AaronO]

We will announce the beta (through an official blog post) and have a landing page with more info very soon.

We wanted to have tangible results and feedback (from beta-testers) before announcing it.

[greatdreams]

Is there any latest developing information about gitbook and gitbook editor?