search

GitbookIO / gitbook

The open source frontend for GitBook doc sites
https://www.gitbook.com
GNU General Public License v3.0
26.96k stars 3.85k forks source link

Is GitBook still alive? #1808

Closed drobiazko closed 5 years ago

drobiazko commented 7 years ago

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

Any ideas?

nagim commented 7 years ago

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 commented 7 years ago

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 commented 7 years ago

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

drobiazko commented 7 years ago

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

nagim commented 7 years ago

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

AaronO commented 7 years ago

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 commented 7 years ago

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

melvinchng commented 7 years ago

@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 commented 7 years ago

Anyone find an alternative to gitbook?

pnicoll commented 7 years ago

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

We find this troubling.

AaronO commented 7 years ago

@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:

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 commented 7 years ago

@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 https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook/issues/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 commented 7 years ago

@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:

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 commented 7 years ago

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 commented 7 years ago

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

FibreFoX commented 7 years ago

@AaronO Don't want to be that picky, but how about writing some "CURRENTLY COMPLETE REWORK IN PROGRESS" inside the readme-file? This way you can communicate with non-slack users and github-only visitors.

It get's very annoying to not get response to issues like #1784, which blocks pull-requests for the current version, which makes this project seem to be dead.

kozi commented 7 years ago

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

Can you say what very soon means?

pnicoll commented 7 years ago

It's been 29 days since we've heard from @AaronO, so "very soon" seems to mean nothing.

GitBook is still billing me, however.

AaronO commented 7 years ago

@kozi @pnicoll We'll be releasing a blog post and homepage for the new beta this week, where users will be able to request beta access (we're aiming for Friday but it might come out tomorrow, because we want to give everyone an update and showcase the new improvements and what we've been working on).

We've been working hard on the beta, you can see the release notes for the latest beta releases here: https://betadocs.gitbook.com/changelog

If you anyone has specific questions, or things they would like to see improved in GitBook (and thus tackled by this new release) I would love to jump on a quick call with them

(You can reach me at aaron@gitbook.com)

We've been working on this beta to solve the major key issues we heard from our users, a lot of which were non-trivial, if anyone in this thread has any issues please contact me directly.

I also followed up with Igor (@drobiazko) who originally started this thread, had a call with him regarding their use-case, which admittedly is a bit of an edge-case, so I explained a few approaches that would work. Since it's unlikely that we'll implement 1st-class support for white-labelling a single project into multiple live projects, that share all their content but differ in branding and some URL rewriting. My recommended approach was to write a small proxy service on their end that's aware of all the custom branding they want to do and uses our APIs to pull in the relevant content and rewrite it before rendering to the end-user. Allowing them to have full control over their white-labelling logic and have one simple repo of content to maintain.

pnicoll commented 7 years ago

@AaronO Thanks for the update.

What would be really nice would be the ability to set table column widths. Overriding with HTML (which I have to do in long cells that contain a combination of regular text and bulleted lists, for example) doesn't work, nor does forcing a column width with non-breaking spaces ( ) for different tables that have the same column headers. As a result, I have tables with the same headers but different-sized columns, which makes my documentation look sloppy.

AaronO commented 7 years ago

@pnicoll Writing custom HTML isn't a great solution, because it's fairly technical, fragile and a bad practice. I think what you're hitting here with tables is possibly a markdown limitation.

With this new version we can have smarter editing & rendering logic, to accommodate for those kind of situations.

We haven't yet done much work specifically on tables, because nobody has given us table-specific feedback so far.

I personally avoid putting too much content inside tables, and often opt for titles to group that content together. However, I don't know enough about your use-case to know if that makes sense for you.

Would love to jump on a quick call if you're free tomorrow or Friday to better understand your tables issue and see if we can fix it.

nagim commented 7 years ago

@AaronO I have sent you table-specific feedback/suggestions before, too. If it got lost somehow in the meantime, let me know, I will resend it.

pnicoll commented 7 years ago

@AaronO I understand that markdown tables are limited. If the smarter rendering logic can properly render non-breaking spaces to force column width (e.g. two tables with the same headers, so |Column header 1      |Column header 2| for both) then I'd be happy. Having different column widths for tables with the same headers makes it look like I don't care about formatting, when in fact it's the exact opposite.

Due to some of the content of my tables I often have to use HTML, and in markdown tables, everything in an <ol> or <ul> has to be in one line; there's no way around it, believe me, I've tried. So I end up with rows that look like this:

|Template|Selection of workflow templates to be tested directly, customizable and usable in the "By default" list or in the "library"<p></p><p>Default:</p><ul><li>2 levels approval</li><li>Parallel tasks</li><li>Simple approval</li><li>Simple request</li></ul><p>Library:</p><ul><li>Expense report</li><li>Software helpdesk</li><li>Investment application</li><li>IT Changes</li><li>IT Clearance application</li><li>Leave application</li><li>New Product Creation</li><li>Work Order</li></ul><p>A customized workflow template can be created and deployed on the server with the following folder and file structure:</p><p>\wfgen\App_Data\Templates\Processes\[language]\[folder name]\[process name]v[x].xml</p><p>Example:<p>\wfgen\App_Data\Templates\Processes \En\MyCompany\MY_PROCESSv1.xml</p><p>**Note:** Only processes with forms created with the built-in form designer can be used as workflow templates.|

This is all one row.

AaronO commented 7 years ago

@nagim Nope Imre, I've still got the feedback you sent me regarding table cells and the ability to merge cells.

@pnicoll Do you have a link to share so I can see what it looks like ? Would be great if you had an example of desired output in raw HTML, compared to our current output.

AaronO commented 7 years ago

@nagim @pnicoll Happy to talk more about tables, but we should probably move this conversation to https://github.com/GitbookIO/feedback, to not clutter this already long thread and go off-topic.

Would be great to have that feedback grouped into relevant issues (one on merged table-cells, another on alignment) with "current output/behavior" and "expected output/behavior" for each.

lbeltrame commented 7 years ago

@AaronO Given the beta links, and the fact that even the mentions do not say much about the toolchain, the question is: will the toolchain keep on being open source, or will it be irreversibly tied to gitbook.com? I use the toolchain for convenience, and would never consider it if I can't self host the content painlessly (note: the competition has a similar and equally questionable stance).

AaronO commented 7 years ago

@lbeltrame Sorry for the late reply, I was out of the office for a while following a medical operation.

In short: the toolchain will continue to exist in some form, but it needs to evolve.

Our goal is to enable teams to write great documentation (external API & Product docs, internal / team docs, ...). Everything else is a means to an end.

Samy and I built the first version of GitBook because we believed that documents should be simpler, smarter and richer.

We did not stop at building the toolchain because we knew that by itself it was only a small part of what teams need (editing, hosting, collaboration, ...).

Given that we're a small team with limited resources, we have to chose our battles. I don't think it would help our users or the project to focus on "self-hosting", it would only increase fragmentation and complexity ...

We're committed to building a great product for our users (that's simple, reliable and powerful), we believe in open-source and will continue to contribute (we're not looking to vendor-lock anyone) and have exciting new tech and APIs that are radically better for devs than what we have today (plugins, templating syntax, ...).

If you believe that an open-source project diverges from your goals, you have the freedom to fork it.

lbeltrame commented 7 years ago

Basically, it's not going to be the focus, in some way, but you'll leave the toolchain open for others to improve, should the need arise.

That's fine, and I understand your needs. They simply do not align with mine (I'm using gitbook to write non-technical books, which are self-hosted), so I'll pick another tool (pandoc) with a different scope.

That said, thanks for your work on GitBook because it did help me when I started writing.

kirtan403 commented 7 years ago

@AaronO That's really sad to here that, in some form the open toolchain will stop updating as you are focusing on building a product for consumer. Self hosting is one of the key factor which made gitbook popular, IMHO.

I just hope that toolchain will be in the focus again..

develar commented 7 years ago

Why I still use Gitbook instead of another static site generator — because without extra customisation you get really great documentation site. Just write docs and gitbook build. No need to tweak style, search another better default theme and so on.

The only problem now — anchors navigation doesn't work reliably (a lot of reports about it in this issue tracker). And I see that in the beta version it is fixed.

I totally understand, that my usage is out of your product scope — I edit docs using IDE and publish to Netlify. But as far I see, in any case for gitbook.com some tool should be used to convert md to html. Not clear for me — why beta gitbook theme / new generator is not developed here as beta version/branch. Why users cannot use (and test) beta version of new generator.

Anyway, still hope that in the next several months it will be updated. Thanks for a great product.

MrTrebron commented 6 years ago

For me it is the same as for @melvinchng I wrote emails regarding student discount without any answer.

Why should I recommand GitBook for my company when even a simple question stays unanswered?

io41 commented 6 years ago

The website and product is littered with email addresses for contacting support. Even twitter accounts. And no responses to any. At the very least you should remove all these reference if you're not going to bother replying. It's beyond frustrating working with such untransparent practices. Given the terribly misleading info (support contact, timelines, etc), lack of responses, I see no reason to trust any claims being made anymore. We're taking our business elsewhere.

AaronO commented 6 years ago

@io41 Hi Tim,

Very sorry to hear that. I just went through our tickets and saw that you posted an issue regarding having a separate billing email (e.g: account department).

This period is particularly challenging, because we've been working extremely hard on a new product release (https://beta.gitbook.com), shipping in January. This release solves many of the large outstanding user pain points (product complexity, builds, reliability, etc ...).

The entire team's energy is focused on getting this release out the door, right now we're working on the migration tooling to allow users to self-migrate and prepare for mass migration.

It's frustrating as a founder (and I imagine it's equally frustrating for you) because I know that in the short term this has a negative impact on our users and customers, but we're doing this to improve the product in the long-run for everyone.

I've been stepping back from day-to-day product, now that we're approaching release, to grow the team to improve customer success amongst other things (we started this year with 4 people, we're now 8 and need a least a few more hires to serve our customers well).

Either way, we've failed you and I'm sorry for that.

erlend-sh commented 6 years ago

Is GitBook still open source? If so, where can I track the code for the new beta product?

merces commented 6 years ago

I believe the problem is that GitBook seems to be abandoned due the lack of updates (at least a blogpost to say that the team is working on a new release would make the difference). No company stays an year without giving their customers an update to say they're alive. If you reach the stage where your customers ask here if your product is still alive, then you are doing something wrong.

It's January, 2018 already and we haven't seen any update on GitBook blog about the beta. It's just weird giving the fact you told us the new version would be released this month. Also, there are hundreds of open issues and PR's with no answer. Sorry, you guys have a very nice product but it definitely looks dead to me.

AaronO commented 6 years ago

Hi @merces, we didn't want to communicate without having something customers could actually test and use. We're looking to do a public launch in a few weeks and have already been on-boarding teams with existing orgs on gitbook.com to test and gather feedback (If you have an org on gitbook.com, I'm happy to send you an invite)

You can see the beta's public changelog here: https://betadocs.gitbook.com/changelog

Undistraction commented 6 years ago

@AaronO It's really great to hear Gitbook is still alive. I use it a lot and I'd pretty much given up hope on it ever being updated. In fact I found this issue typing 'gitbook alternative' into Google. Hopefully the new release will address some of the bigger bugs (like the broken back button, tables, etc).

xinity commented 6 years ago

In progress Shipping in the next 1-2 weeks:

Public launch

Yayyyyyy can't wait!

On Thu, Jan 18, 2018, 3:08 PM AaronO notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi @merces https://github.com/merces, we didn't want to communicate without having something customers could actually test and use. We're looking to do a public launch in a few weeks and have already been on-boarding teams with existing orgs on gitbook.com to test and gather feedback (If you have an org on gitbook.com, I'm happy to send you an invite)

You can see the beta's public changelog here: https://betadocs.gitbook.com/changelog

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook/issues/1808#issuecomment-358656522, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABtzYWlItQq4jR7NXGQh8JACr9jGf6TEks5tL1BCgaJpZM4NyTg4 .

agauniyal commented 6 years ago

Its been more than 1-2 weeks 🤔

blling commented 6 years ago

I just wonder if the next version of gitbook is still open source?

huan commented 6 years ago

I'm trying to find a solution to write documents for my project, it seems GitBook is a good candidate because it can host all the markdown files on GitHub with rich publishing plugins.

Looking forward to the public launch of the new version!

ballerfuturistic commented 6 years ago

Is it actually dead? It seems so, to be honest.

No updates, no communication, customers with billing issues being ignored.

What’s up, guys?

Just fully open source the next version if you’re done with it, tbh, and let the community lead the development.

fedorov commented 6 years ago

I agree, I have always had troubles understanding the priorities, customer service approach, and vision of GitBook. It looks like they are always busy with the next great thing, which will once and for all solve all problems, but years go by, and users are missing on the basics. New shiny features come in the next version, but those that used to work in the previous (e.g., GitHub sync) get broken, and betas remain betas for an excruciatingly long time.

AaronO commented 6 years ago

@ballerfuturistic GitBook v2 (which was in private beta) just went live for all of our v1 customers yesterday and will switch from beta.gitbook.com to www.gitbook.com next week.

@fedorov Please reach out to the team / support from the v2's dashboard. They will be able to help you with any setup issues and get it sorted. Beta releases exist precisely to get early feedback from users / customers and to iron out bugs ...

The v2 did take longer than we would have liked to. It was a monumental technical effort to improve some of the product's fundamentals (see what's new in the v2):

Opening issues and complaining is easy, building a product (and a team/business) is hard and takes time ...

I think the community doesn't realize that we're a relatively small team, currently 8 people (actively hiring and growing the team, because it's needed). I'm currently working on hiring a head of customer success (and in fact just put out the job post earlier today).

With 8 people (only 4 last year ...), it's unsustainable / impractical to answer 1000s of questions from free users and build a product/team/business at the same time.

Open Source sustainability

I don't know if either of you have read up on the topic, but it's a huge issue. The open-source ecosystem can be great but also very toxic at times, leading maintainers to burn out ...

Here are a few links if you're curious:

Just fully open source the next version if you’re done with it, tbh, and let the community lead the development.

I don't think this would work as you would expect.

There are very very few large & successful open-source projects that are purely maintained by the community.

In fact most of the popular open-source projects I can think of are mainly maintained by companies:

Building and maintaining large software projects takes a lot of time and energy. I think people underestimate precisely just how much, because they only see their issues (and not those of the hundreds/thousands of people) and have most often never been in the maintainer's shoes.

Constructive feedback and objective criticism are more than welcome. I'm happy to discuss our goals, vision and priorities with whoever is interested. But I fear that this thread is devolving into a chain of unconstructive criticism with no meaningful goal or reason to exist.

fedorov commented 6 years ago

I wanted to follow up on my comment, and just say that although it can be difficult and frustrating at times, once you are able to get direct contact with one of the developers (and huge kudos to @AaronO for helping me on many occasions!) they are really getting on the issue, and are extremely helpful in trying to resolve it.

Over Slack, Aaron also pointed out that on the new GitBook site there is an Intercom chat icon (which is blocked by at least some ad blockers, so make sure you disable yours if you don't see it! I was not aware of its existence until now), and I was encouraged to establish direct contact via that channel. It sounds like account/repo specific issues should be reported there.

image

I completely understand the struggles of the small team, and at times their priorities are not aligned with what I would do or want to see done, but overall I remain hopeful about GitBook and I have not abandoned it for something else. Really look forward to the beta to be fully functional (I have yet to test it fully, now that I discovered the new support channel), and become stable.

erlend-sh commented 6 years ago

There are very very few large & successful open-source projects that are purely maintained by the community.

I wholeheartedly agree with that. For an open source product to compete with commercial offerings it needs to be backed by a company or some other commercial entity.

Meanwhile, it concerns me that we have not received an unambiguous reply regarding whether or not the GitBook core will continue to be open source, as is the case with your stable version. It would be a great shame GitBook went closed source, as it was looking to be the OSS wiki/docs contender that would seriously compete with the proprietary alternatives out there.

With 8 people (only 4 last year ...), it's unsustainable / impractical to answer 1000s of questions from free users and build a product/team/business at the same time.

I'd like to be so bold as to suggest that your big bet on chat-only support was misguided. The Ghost project recently reached that conclusion:

https://twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/980872508395188224

fedorov commented 6 years ago

I'd like to be so bold as to suggest that your big bet on chat-only support was misguided.

I thought I am an outlier struggling with Slack! Thank you for sharing the Ghost reference.

elvisbegovic commented 6 years ago

I agree that opensource with commercial offering need to be backed by company. But ideas/feat. request from users on github should be taken !

The question is: today i don't know how I install and test locally gitbook4, I don't want currently use gitbook.com (will move in next couple of weeks ) I just want test gitbook4 locally. Current editor and current gitbook is a little bit buggy.

all new features @AaronO notices seems wow!

Can't we create beautiful readme / blog post about using gitbook4 locally and dekstop editor ?

Or gitbook4 is not anymore available locally ? Does that mean gitbook4 isn't open source can you please answer to this question? And does dekstop editor will have next release fixing some bugs?

i think you can follow "mongodb SaaS" everything is available but if we want hosting + team acces we must pay gitbook.com

pnicoll commented 6 years ago

I, too, would like to be able to test the new version as well before upgrading my organization. As @istiti said, the now legacy web and desktop editors are buggy and quirky; as such, I don't want to upgrade only to encounter new issues that I have to isolate and fix or work around in a panic while preparing the documentation for our next product release. So is this possible?

elvisbegovic commented 6 years ago

@pnicoll seems the new SaaS gitbook version is web hosted on gitbook.com not cli anymore, this is the big change here afaik. Dommage with cli i put my data on my computer not over web. The awesome would be have cli limited to famous markdown documentations (plugins oriented) and have gitbook commercial with official implementations but don't think we will have this