Topic: Tips & Tricks / Basecamp Migration?

We don’t offer anything for that, no. There’s no direct mapping between the two products, so the transition is unlikely to fit well to an automatic process.

Topic: Miscellaneous / Multiuser question

We’ve chosen to focus the new direction of Backpack predominately on multi-user accounts, so the main track of plans go from free to home to basic and so forth.

But we still want everyone who’s been using Backpack with the previous focus to get everything they were at the same price, so we’ve allowed everyone to continue with the same features at the same price as before. Despite the fact that this price is much lower than the other new paying multiuser plans.

The solo plan retains this “exception” idea at a similar price point. Just like we have Highrise Solo, even though Highrise is also now predominately a multi-user product.

If you want to play with Backpack in multi-user form, you’re more than welcome to signup for a free account and try it out. If it’s something you like, the first multi-user plan is the home plan at $12.

Hope that clears it up.

Topic: Backpack Calendar / Shared Calendar Confusion

You get to use the calendar on it’s own and you can share ical feeds from it with others as well as subscribe to their ical feeds. Then, if you upgrade to multiuser Backpack, others can see the events that you create.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Multiuser?

rich: that’s because your SSL setting is now sticky across all account upgrades.

Topic: Miscellaneous / Excluding pages from view for invited users?

Yes, all pages have permission settings when there are multiple users on the account. You can choose to have pages just visible to you or just visible to a few people.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / No invitations sented to users

This has been fixed. Thanks for reporting this and sorry about the trouble!

Topic: System Announcements / Backpack interruption of service

All the 37signals properties were offline for two hours this morning between 10AM and 12PM CST (16:00 to 18:00 GMT) as our load balancer blew out and knocked out the network connection for all our servers. No data was lost and the machines all kept running, but they weren’t accessible from the internet.

We’re very, very sorry for this interruption of service. While we were able to report on the progress of this interruption through our http://status.37signals.com (all the products and 37signals.com pointed to that site during the majority of the outage) that’s a small consolation when you want to access data stored on our services right now. It was just not good enough.

While we don’t have a formal service-level agreement (SLA), we still want to compensate anyone who felt they were negatively affected in their work because of this outage. Please write support@37signals.com and we’ll get that taken care of.

Naturally, we’re going to have a long, serious talk with our service provider (Rackspace). They’re supposed to be the best in the business, but in this instance they failed us, so we in turn failed you. We’ll do everything we can to make sure that something as simple as a load balancer (or firewall or switch or any other network equipment) going bad does not cause two hours of downtime.

Again, we’re truly sorry for this interruption. This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Oops page has an oops in it too.

What’s up with the drama? A much simpler version would have been “Hey guys, the mailto link on your error page is broken. It needs a mailto: in front of the address”.

In any case, it’s fixed now. You can do a victory dance now.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Backpackit Mobile can't work w/ OpenID

Hi guys,

In addition to the “Can’t Login” work-around, you can actually start by logging in on your phone using the direct Backpack URL (don’t append /mob) using OpenID. Then, once logged in, you can access the /mob path and use the regular mobile interface.

We’ll definitely continue to think of ways that we can improve the situation and make it easier for people use both the mobile interface and OpenID.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Open ID hassles

Luther, we’d be happy to help. Could you send a note to support with your URL? I’ll look into it and get it resolved.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Backpackit Mobile can't work w/ OpenID

Hi Stever,

On the regular login screen, there’s a link to “Can’t login?”. If you click that, you’re send a regular username and password that can be used alongside the OpenID login. You can use those to login from your Blackberry.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Broken Link Support

Hi Matt,

I’ve found the problem and fixed the bug. Going through the old data to fix that up too. Thanks for reporting this. Should be all fixed shortly.

Topic: Feature Requests / OpenID/OpenBar

OpenID relies on the fact that you’re picking a trusted provider. Just like you have to trust a web site before entering your credit card details.

Topic: System Announcements / A couple of updates

ep, I’m sorry to hear you find our development process and roll-out “rude”. There’s certainly no intentions to be rude, merely to provide the most value to the most customers as fast as possible.

Hosted services definitely exist in a different environment than desktop software. It means you can get major updates and fixes pushed out fast and to all customers, but it also means that sometimes bugs slip through and have to be fixed in the wild. That’s the trade-off of how hosted software like ours works.

It sounds like that trade-off might be rubbing you the wrong way. That’s completely understable. Hosted software is perhaps not a great fit for everyone. We’ve had a lot of incredibly positive response to this update, though, and we’re working as fast as we can to deal with any issues that have popped up as part of this massive roll-out.

We continue to strive to deliver great software fast and as trouble free as we can. But if the occassional bugs that are bound to creep in during these upgrades are completely unacceptable to you, I’d consider thinking about how perhaps a desktop product where you control the upgrade cycle could work better for you.

Topic: System Announcements / The new Backpack is live!

Erik, got the Writeboard issue fixed now.

Topic: System Announcements / The new Backpack is live!

Erik, we’re looking into the Writeboard issue. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Clearing a new page cleared my Home Page

Hi ep,

Data loss is completely unacceptable. Please write support with your details and we’ll restore whatever you might have lost.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Moving items

A list must have at least 1 item when it’s created or it will be removed again. But existing lists can stick around if they get down to 1 item through, say, deletion.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Link to another page

Hi marlon,

We’ve taken page links out as they were hardly used (less than 1% of all pages used the links feature) and confused people new to the system. Existing links still work, so no data was lost.

You can still link between pages using HTML/Textile in notes or by using tags (the most popular way) to group related pages.