We've been using Movable Type for about two months. It is an elegant piece of software despite some beta-level bugs that should have long been fixed. It works for us, and that's good. That said, the documentation--manual and online--is a mess and a slap in the face and it makes Microsoft and Adobe look like literary giants, both of which have some of the worst documentation ever created. It is almost impossible in Movable Type's documentation to get a clean simple answer--it is so badly organized and so badly written.
And these forums!! They are woefully underused because so many topics go unanswered. They seem to be unmoderated to the point that even spam looks relevant. Whatever happened to Mena and Ben Trott? Do they know about this, do they care?

If anyone from Six Apart happenes to read this, don't ask me for specifics... I'd have to create a new blog to list them all. Just get someone to fire up her lap and do a job in at least this forum that makes a customer's experience reasonable, time-efficient and productive.

It's all so typical of the irresponsibility and unaccountability of American software publishers. Fah!

So...."If you don't know what you did wrong, I'm not going to tell you," right?

I'll be blunt, because the 6A people who might respond here can't particularly be for PR reasons and such, and frankly, you know you're taking advantage of that. Either spell out what your problem is, or move along. "Beta-level" bugs is quite the accusation to toss out with no examples, and just bizarre immediately after calling MT "elegant."

The documentation has always been a problem, and everybody knows it. I'm not even going to try and defend that one, though you may be surprised to find out that people do actually use the application and quite well, so it can't be quite as horrible as you make it out to be. I and many others would be happy to answer any questions you have, um...if you would bother to ask any(I note this is your first post. Hm.) But oh, yeah. You're not going to give specifics, sorry.

As to the last bit about the forum, you seem to be under the impression that support are expected to spend all their time in here and respond to everything. You are wrong. It's a community forum, and they come in as time allows. If you want support, look at the yellow box top right of your screen.

Thanks for "um's".
Look, we all know that technical support is a profit-center burden on software developers which is why the pay-support system reared its misguided head. Nevertheless, in good situations, companies have assigned tech support people who monitor and moderate their forums to keep them alive, interesting and useful. These forums are loaded with unanswered deadwood. Why should we spend the time clicking through the six apart support process to find answers that should be in the documentation and/or addressed in these forums? We get more and swifter support answers on MT from just pure googling other sources.

One final thing--it might behoove you to brush up on your customer service approach. Technical support is a valuable function of customer service, good PR marketing, and general civil good manners. Your pique and attitude in your response offers additional, supporting perspective to my original post.

Unless I'm mistaken, you are not my customer, nor am I Six Apart support personnel.
On the other hand, I have worked in support positions before, and you know what? They hate getting pique and attitude, too. Funny, that. But if it's unavoidable, they at least like to be told why you're yelling at them. We all await the flood of forum posts detailing all of your complaints.

Contacting support helps you because it kinda lets them know what it is you're not getting from the documentation. But that again goes against your refusal to tell anybody what your problem is, doesn't it? I think you've got yourself a problem there.

For the benefit of the mods and avoiding some pointless flamefest, I'm done here. I'll be on the lookout for your questions elsewhere, though.

Sorry... the way you were waving the banner I thought you were part of the moderator team. My mistake. And no "flamefest" intended--just every so often the "pointless" effort to get improved support gets the better of me. Thanks for your responses. I'm done too.