Support vendors

#1

I hope most of you see me as a supporter for this project. We became a vendor months ago and with the help from the community developed and built certified nodes to serve the non-tech market. Meanwhile i invested a lot of time and money on setting up this business, brought together people to talk to (thanks to @weynandkuijpers) got involved in local society groups to get them to use the new grid and even gave a presentation recently of which I’m planning to do more. All free of charge sofar! While everyone at TF gets paid for their work, some of us put in huge amounts of energy and money just because we believe in this project.

I have asked several questions about the marketplace (for which i believe we quickly need to cancel the Commission structure until more successful!) and providing certified rackservers for instance. No answer for months now. I even visited the Belgian office. (Which by itself was great!)

But slowly I’m starting to feel we’re ‘bleeding’ a bit too hard. Let me speak for myself. Although we receive frequent praises from the TF community, I’m amazed that at this point something basic like creating a farm on the TF connect App doesn’t work anymore. For some time now. And THAT is the ONLY way vendors could even hope to sell their nodes and get some of their investment back. It’s already complicated enough for the masses to download the App, create a wallet (many are still sceptical about crypto’s) write down seed phrases, create connect id and create a farm id, before they can finally order a node. It’s a big hassle. Now, i spent a lot of time explaining people how to do this, and was in the middle of creating a step-by-step tutorial when I found creating a farm isn’t working.

I’m afraid to answer the support questions i get by mail, we look very unprofessional and vendors are loosing business. And remember; it takes a lot of positive comments to gain confidence, it only takes a few negative ones to bring a project down.

Please focus on the basics, make it bullet proof (today!) and cherish the vendors a bit more. Thanks!

3 Likes
#2

I stand with Robert, we are not meeting basic expectations on quality assurance, responding to error reports, investigating error reports, or fixing them. I continue to hold the opinion we need to have basic reliable vps deployment before we continue adding further layers of complication.

3 Likes
#3

Dismayed to hear the app still doesn’t reliably make a farm. That caused me an enormous amount of headache when they were actually selling.

1 Like
#4

Best example on how well maintained the app is the news section, were the latest news is from july :joy:

#5

I couldn’t find any issues that were opened in the past about this not working do you guys have any links to your old issues so I can bring them into the new one I opened?

#6

Hi @RobertL (and all others as I am late in replying). I’ll sit shotgun for this one and be your single point of contact (not a single source of information because w have way smarter and more knowledgable people in the group… Creating farms for commercial node sale is something different the persona DIY, and yes it should be reliable.

I’ll do some research today/tomorrow and come back with some findings and recommendations. While I do that can you think about what type of customers you would like to attract to sell your nodes? I think if you go down the “Farming as a Service” route, you might want to include farm creation. This is how Bettertoken sells their nodes.

#7

Hi Weynand, thank you!

I see Bettertoken is a TF initiaitve as well?.. If so, kinda curious where Tf is going. They want to get rid of things and decentralise them but then still start these initiatives. No problem at all, just wondering.

A similar idea however has been with us as well for some time. (as you mentioned it before) Would love to hear more on how this technically would actually work, who could I contact for that?

#8

Node buyers have to create their own farms in the app. So same process.

#9

Indeed. It wasn’t necessarily intended for commercial nodes, I just made (attempted) a personal new farm on another mobile phone.

#10

Seems might have just been fixed by Lennert among others; waiting for official release.

#11

Can you elaborate on Bettertoken? Are they run by Threefold?

#12

@weynandkuijpers Kind bump

#13

Understood- this is the best and most secure way of doing it. Your private key, your tokens. But there are others ways of doing this. “Farming as a Service” where you as a service provider register the node in a farm as a service. There is no rule that he private key that created the farm is also the private key of the wallet that receives the token reward… I am just saying…

Also, I am not stepping away from the fact that we need to have a stable TF Connect app in which you can create farms. I am just saying that there are other way to create a farm:

  • dashboard
  • tf chain client (simple command line tool)
  • using the libraries / javascript or typescript.

And to also answer @FLnelson question, Bettertoken creates the farms for Titan buyers and configures the farm to incorporate the provided wallet address.

#14

Ok, this will probably have an obvious answer; So, all you need to do is to have your customer setup a wallet and provide the wallet address. Everything else is done by the service provider?

I’m still curious how the pricing structure would work. Customers then pay for instance 9 USD a month for the FaaS to the service provider and any tokens get sent to the customer’s wallet. When they value of the tokens is less than the monthly fee ‘bad luck’. But when it grows, great. That’s the idea?
I assume a customers enters some kind of agreement for an x period of time of monthly fees?