Well it seems to me that after the initial docs were put up
5 years ago, not much has happened to help us guys integrate User Manager into our networks.
I see everywhere over the net people desperately needing answers to UM questions, yet not many are full or comprehensive enough to allow us to install and use UM and I now find myself asking specific questions here, simple questions that should have been answered in the documentation.
I have built a network that has a 7 node backhaul infrastructure with 2 internet feeds so far with more to be added later, once I can take some money from it.
I have a total of 10 hotspots running in various places in the network with a potential client base of random tourists and full-time residents, so basically I use a mixture of 2.4 & 5.8Ghz with residents using PPPoE authentication and tourists, or clients close enough from a base station logging in from a hotspot.
The promise of User Manager is to give an automated, highly configurable and intuitive way to authenticate users from a central place (router), allowing them to sign-up and pay for a service that has taken a billion hours to setup anyway and many more 1,000's of Euros than expected.
So please, can someone tell me why the docs you suggest are just plain confusing and incomplete?
I don't profess to know too much about ROS, I have a guy that does that for me, but I do know how to make and erect towers, make some boxes, connect a few cables and routerBoards together, so why is it so hard for anyone to actually come up with some decent manual of installation and use of your software?
Apart from getting my hands dirty, I also code e-commerce software which I sell online, it's not massive, but it fills a gap and I took it over from the original author because he couldn't afford the time it was taking him to support his customers. Basically, the forum was being bombarded daily with different questions which would take all of his time without earning from it.
When I took over this software, the first thing I did was re-write all the documents and gave different working examples, scenarios and suggestions so people could get a grasp of what the software is, how it works and how it can be integrated into a new or existing site.
Within 1 month after taking over that software, forum posts reduced to maybe 2 per week and even then I could simply point them to the correct, accurate and complete answer they were looking for.
This just left me to keep taking the money and concentrate on coding for customers who would pay me for bespoke code, or to create add-ons to further enhance the product.
The biggest part of my software includes the ability to take money, which is the main reason my product exists and I have written some 13 different payment gateway modules that integrate seamlessly into it. A sort of plug and play module approach for each gateway.
User Manager is sort of the same, it should allow the integrator to efficiently setup a way to take money from a service that he has created by buying your product, likewise, RouterOS is like my core e-commerce product, it performs the core functionality to create a working network and so too User Manager is like 1 of my payment gateway scripts that should be easily integrated to allow payment processing.
Frankly your docs suck!!!
I know your RouterOS is complex and massive, but so too is my e-commerce software, yet my forum is quiet these days because my customers have all the answers to most of their questions right there in front of them.
Normis, to date, you have almost 13,000 posts on this forum since 2004, the original author of my software had just over 1,300 in 2 years and I have just 633 in the last 8 years. Your post above directs us to a page that has incomplete information and non-existent pages.
Please, please listen to your customers, give them complete and concise answers, re-write your documentation, if I knew enough about it I would and don't assume everyone knows everything. Treat each answer to a question like you're telling someone who knows nothing about your software or how it works, or how it integrates.
People come to this forum for answers, make them count, otherwise you're wasting your time and ours.
You earn your money by creating a hardware product supported by some awesome software that ticks most boxes for WISPs. Your product is affordable to average people that can see the potential in setting up a network, so why not make it easier? You will sell more products, spend less time answering questions and you may even sleep easier at night, unlike most of us that have invested time and money which is hard to get back because of a lack of documentation.
I am not being argumentative, but I have wasted some 3 weeks, day and night trying to find some simple answers to my simple questions which has caused me to come back to this pathetic excuse of a forum thread entitled
"MikroTik User Manager documentation". Just take a look at the number of views on this thread, the
"User Manager v4.0 test package" thread and your
" User Manager Payment Systems" thread.
Need I say more, I don't think so...
Regards,
Gary
