Logic of musescore.org header = ?

• Sep 24, 2020 - 22:28

I don't really get this:

org vs com.png

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org vs com.png 60.55 KB

Comments

• Sep 25, 2020 - 01:31

why do we have any links to a site that refuses customer service to their clients? We get well over ten complaints a month about musescore.com. Then someone has to explain, "blah blah blah." Don't y'all already have enough troubles with me being here?

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• Sep 25, 2020 - 01:40

Not that musescore.com has 5 star support but the vast majority of the complaints about them here should say, "I didn't read why I was giving musescore.com my credit card number and now a wish I hadn't..."

Though this is the free site where you get the free software, it is still owned by the people who own musescore.com and com is short for commerce. They are in the money making business and want people to visit musescore.com and WANT to pay them for their services. One more thing, you do use their login to access this site.

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• Sep 25, 2020 - 15:56

I'm inclined to give the consumers the benefit of the doubt. If musescore.com is offering a "free trial" then they should not be charging anything to a consumer's credit card until after the trial period has expired. Also, the failure to give anything short of a full refund upon demand, during the trial period, means that the trial was not free. it is costing these people money.

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• Sep 27, 2020 - 23:51

I had agreed with you, but reading later info by jeetee I decided that doing so unconditionally was too strong. Hardly the end of the world. Yes, I think the situation with the two sites is confusing, feels like a trick, etc etc, and the historical reasons are not-so-interesting to people who are confused. Is that ok?

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• Sep 27, 2020 - 23:58

I stand by my original assessment:
"I'm inclined to give the consumers the benefit of the doubt. If musescore.com is offering a "free trial" then they should not be charging anything to a consumer's credit card until after the trial period has expired. Also, the failure to give anything short of a full refund upon demand, during the trial period, means that the trial was not free. it is costing these people money."

Unless the complainers inform me differently. Until then I give the consumer the benefit.
Jeetee, how do you know anything about this?

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• Sep 28, 2020 - 07:45

I already responded to your assessment, which is built on top a big if. Namely musescore.com charging people at the start of the free trail.
I'm quite confident in my reply that they don't.

Why?
Because of the dozen people that complain about such a thing publicly on the forums each year, it turned out that none of them actually subscribed to the free trail. But that they during their order process switched their order from "free trail + 1y at full price" to "1y at reduced price" (which is without a free trail).

So far, the initial statement thus empirically has been invalidated.

Could the order process have been more clear for those users? Perhaps.
All I have here again is my own experience when I ordering for the first time. But when I see two choices side by side and their price differs (with one being about half the cost of the other), then yes, I read what the offer is. And it was in normal regular print, not small hidden letters somewhere linked off page.

Is the refund policy (too) strict?
For those that have the free trail? In my opinion, yes.
For those that never ordered the free trail in the first place? I'm less inclined to say yes in that scenario.

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• Sep 28, 2020 - 12:09

For what it's worth, I had to give deployable payment information to a cable content provider yesterday, even though I wanted the month free trial and expect to cancel in that time (I really wanted to see a certain offering), so this is not unheard-of (even though, of course,I didn't like it, but I understand their position).

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• Sep 25, 2020 - 16:31

> "I'm inclined to give the consumers the benefit of the doubt. If musescore.com is offering a "free trial" then they should not be charging anything to a consumer's credit card until after the trial period has expired"

They don't.
However if those consumers during their order process change to the 1-year discount program instead of the 30-day trail and then 1-year at full price; that's pretty much on themselves..

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• Sep 26, 2020 - 02:41

I've checked with my legal team and they have come up with a thing called a "loophole." Loophole 130,000,452 section 2 paragraph b "The customer is always right."

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• Sep 26, 2020 - 03:35

For this discussion to do anything but be annoying you need to move it to https://musescore.com/groups/improving-musescore-com since no one here can do anything about it. See https://musescore.org/en/faq#faq-20657

You are a customer of no one on the forums. I think I've actually seen one employee of MuseScore on the forums in the last 2 or 3 days and he can't do anything more than you about any complaints anyone has about the musescore.com site. Me and everyone else are here in the forums because we want to be and we have no ties to musescore.com.

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• Sep 26, 2020 - 09:29

As the O.P. I agree that this thread is not to discuss musescore.com which should be done on that site, not here.
This thread is because I find inconvenient that the only visible part of the musescore.org header once you have scrolled a bit is "kind of" a musescore.com header.
A single clear link to musescore.com is fine, but for the rest quick access to musescore.org functionalities would make much more sense to me.

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• Sep 28, 2020 - 13:58

I have not assessed any facts but stated a general principle that we can all agree with - IF .com did x, then y should follow +/or z should not follow. I think we can all agree to that principle. So the first principle has yet to be invalidated. What the facts are, I don't know. Those are particulars that must be considered. I still give the consumers the benefit of the doubt. If they are having to come here for customer service, then they are not getting it at .com. If there is an explanation, they should be given it at .com, not here. The main complaint that I have seen repeatedly is that they get no response to their complaints at .com. It's bad business practice. I have been in business and I bent over backwards to be sure that complaints about the business were not circulating. As it is, I will never give a penny to .com. And that is not my fault. They have poor references. If I were running both .com and .org there would be massive changes here. There are ethical questions, both there and here, that have never been properly addressed.

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• Sep 28, 2020 - 14:09

"If they were grinding panda bears to keep the servers running, we'd likely not approve."
You can start discussions about what-ifs, real-ifs and nots; but as long as the subject of them is only .com you might as well be cross-breeding robot-cows with dodo's on a desert cave on Mars. Those discussions, no matter how many valid complaints they address, are simply misplaced here on the .org forums.

Now, to bring this back to the gripe of the OP. Yes the header of .org should differentiate from .com more imho (or rather the other way around). I don't agree that those people using that search field are thrown to .com without warning from the pov that the search area clearly shows you'll be looking for "sheet music".

Do I feel that that search bar should be here on .org? No
A default forum/handbook(/user) search imo would be much more valuable here.

Similarly I don't think the Upload button has a place here.

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• Oct 4, 2020 - 15:07

> I don't agree that those people using that search field are thrown to .com without warning from the pov that > the search area clearly shows you'll be looking for "sheet music".

You are assuming that users understand that Musescore.org doesn't have sheet music and that they will be taken to a different website to perform this search.

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• Oct 4, 2020 - 16:06

And you are assuming that the grey text in the search field is read and evaluated before searching.
No it isn't when that search field is the only visible search field with a spyglass icon in the header.
It is then the legitimate expectation that the search field searches the site where you are.
Again: when that search field is the only visible search field with a spyglass icon in the header

Clearly the header search field needs to be the one currently in the sub-header.
The one of the sub-header searches MuseScore.org
But:
-is only visible when no scroll has occurred yet
-requires an additional click to be used while the other one conveniently allows to immediately type

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• Oct 5, 2020 - 15:50

@reddiesel41264: Any such assumption was irrelevant to my post.

The main topic at hand is that it is confusing to have a prominent search field for a different site in your header; most here (myself included by the way) find it to be not so.
One of the arguments given was that is totally unclear for anyone that using that search field would search for scores. I don't agree with that specific argument. That's all I said in that post, nothing more, nothing less.

But to reply to your post and assumption (just because I happen to have been around for some time): I know that at the start of both sites, there was an opposite stream of users looking for sheet music on "MuseScore" (because both the software and the score share platform share the same name) that ended up on .org and where frustrated that they couldn't find/search for sheet music..

So yes, that search field has been there to purposefully guide people looking for sheet music to the correct site to do so.
1. Is it clear that that is what the search field does?
Imho, yes.
2. Should it be there and eat up the space for a convenient search field which this site also need?
In that same humbleness of my opinion: no.

A possible solution could be to have the search function search this site, but also provide a tab with sheet music results. A bit like how when using internet search the results are often presented as site-links on a first "tab" and an option to click through to "images" instead. With a preview of the first x "images" (scores in our case).

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• Oct 5, 2020 - 16:48

FWIW, to me there is a basic problem - that exists for historical reasons going back ten years or so - with having two sites to begin with. Not that having two sites is a bad idea, but managing how users perceive and understand this is a much more complicated problem than just tweaking a header. To me, discussions about minute details of which button does what on which site seem unimportant to me. Really there should be a wholesale redesign of the whole ecosystem. No idea if this is being considered or planned, but in my opinion it should be discussed at least. But, discussion here is probably pointless, this would be high level strategic discussion deep within the company. I suspect that if they want our thoughts as users, they'll ask.

That said:

Ironically, when musescore.com first became a thing, the search facility on musescore.org made sense because people didn't know& about musescore.com. Providing a way to find scores from right here on msuescore.org made perfect sense. And so did making a single login work across both sites, and a coordinated look to the headers as well. Note that none of this was that way to begin with, but kind of evolved over those first early years of musescore.com.

Now that many more people know about musescore.com than about musescore.org or indeed about the MuseScore notation software itself, the idea of a score search facility on musescore.org seems kind of quaint, but also pretty harmless. I'd be in favor of seeing the musescore.org search made more prominent here, sure, but I'd be much more interested in seeing a wholesale redesign of the entire thing.

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• Oct 5, 2020 - 18:59

There's this:
org.png
with the difference explained in an obscure FAQ:
https://musescore.org/en/faq#faq-20657

and a How to:
https://musescore.org/en/node/277874
to which users posting here are often directed.
.

But, for some, it seems more like this:
.org2_.png
(Especially for those who complain here about dotcom subscriptions and refunds.)

Barring a ground-up disentanglement of the MuseScore duality, I like the idea of making those dotcom links (especially that Search bar) less visually dominant on this site, because it does seem very easy to (accidentally) wind up at dotcom from here. (Perhaps done by design? ;-)

Also...
Check out the reverse - for instance, starting from dotcom, see how facile is it to get to dotorg.
(It reminds me of the entrance to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas - one step on the motorized walkway rides you from the very street sidewalk into the casino, but one must hoof it back upon exiting.)

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