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dealer site?


dburton

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This was originally advertised as a site for everyone. It would be a shame to close it off.

What is it that dealers want to discuss behind closed doors? I can understand pricing info, but other than that, any technical info is of interest to all.

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I think there can be a dealer-only section to this forum. It would be easy enough to accomplish. If people voice enough opinion to this. I'm wondering how we'd structure this. All thoughts are welcome. I agree with Max, and I also agree with Eric et al. This is a site dedicated to freely accessible Control4 information, and there has to be some dealer-protection as well.

I guess the bottom-line is - where is the line drawn? Or do we draw a whole other line? Again, all thoughts welcome.

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Here's something I posted on remotecentral.com. It might help shed some light on why this forum was created, and help to avoid some issues that I feel might arise from this thread (not a bad thing at all, btw). I'm still welcoming more thoughts on dealer-only topics.

Original link here: http://www.remotecentral.com/cgi-bin/mboard/rc-custom/thread.cgi?7172,3

First things first, I want to state that I am *new* to this forum (as glaringly obvious by my low-post-count), and if you can put that aside, I would appreciate it. With that said, I would like to throw out a few thoughts & and reasons why I put the "advertisement" on this great resource (remotecentral.com)

-This was by no means an attempt to start a flame-war, only to inform those who would like to discuss progressions of the Control4 industry, as well as discuss and share Control4 information.

-Control4 *is* a new product, and *does* have its share of problems. On the flip side, there are a ton (in our opinion) of reasons why one should try/use the equipment, and discuss how to better it...because it has potential to be great. I am sure that Crestron and AMX had their share of problems when starting out as well. Having a place to discuss problems/solutions makes the product better...faster.

-We created c4forums.com because Control4-related intelligent conversations needed an official place to be discussed and shared. The dealer's forum lacked many features (file sharing, RSS feeds, amongst other desired features) and we wanted to enable these features and listen to the community's needs for others. If you read through some of the threads in "General Discussion", you will see our commitment to improving the community forum. Additionally, alot of Control4 users haven't a dedicated place to go, and this is an attempt to solve that problem.

A place for encouraged Control4 growth is necessary. No technology when initially released is perfect. We encourage those who would like to grow a maturing product into a reliable, valuable, & inexpensive platform to share and discuss.

These are some of the reasons why we created www.c4forums.com.

Thank you for reading.

-aslezak

www.c4forums.com

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Good post. I am not a dealer. I took the classes and I am an installer/technician. I personally don't care if there is a dealer forum or not, as long as the issues we are talking about here are allowed to stay. I think that in the long run it will be more beneficial for dealers to have such a large knowlege base of people willing to help. Again, I can see where a dealer may want to conceal prices, and I have nothing against that. Personally though, I think the main area (the part where everyone talks about C4 and how to fix it/hack it/make it work the best way it can) should be open to ANYONE.

My two cents.

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I agree, Taylor. Dealer issues: prices, inventory, dealer announcements, dealer financing questions, and other dealer-related discussions should have a home. I don't have a problem with logical issues and hardware issues being open to the public, IMHO. Again, the forum will have to decided. A poll will have to be setup.

The problem that still remains (as previously mentioned by Dan) we @ c4forums determine who is a dealer and who is a user......

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I vote close the sight to dealers / installers only except for threads that customers have a legitimate interest in. 1) General - is C4 capable of doing this or that 2) Composer Media Edition 3) How to find a dealer. I also think installers should be sponsored by verified dealers.

I sure didn't invest thousands of $$$ and many many hours of training, studying, and trial and error to give it all away for free to DIY'ers. Opening this forum only encourages dealers to sell equipment to end users out of their area.

I would happily put this web site on our service stickers for end users to come and get fast answers and I would gladly help other end users who come here. The idea that DIY'ers can come help themselves to hours of free labor in drivers, screen shots, and advice is just crazy.

IMHO it would be a mistake for dealers to participate in an open forum. It's bad business and doesn't benefit the dealer one iota. I won't participate in an open forum if a viable alternative presents itself.

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<soapbox on>

You know... someothing that gets me.. Dealers bark about the $5000 buy-in being a huge investment. Seems I spent 2/3's of that with my little purchsae of a MC and 10.5" panel. Don't I have an investment to protect also without the likes of having the opportunity to get a return on my "investment"?

$5000 seems like a pretty low cost of getting in the game. Maybe I have the wrong number but I thought it was pretty close to this.

<soapbox off>

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Like emillika, I'm really close to $5K as well, just for my own setup. I'll be *way* over that as the LCD keypads, t-stat, xm tuner, and outlet dimmers ship.

I didn't attend C4 training, but I learned to set up my system from C4 published manuals, AVS C4 thread, other C4 users, both DIY and professional. I've spend hours and hours digging down info, experimenting, trying out things w/Composer, etc. I've submitted bug reports to C4. Other DIYers have written drivers and submitted them to the community.

I've answered easily as many questions as I've asked. Pointed people to available information, helped with answers to issues I've already run into and solved.

We, advanced DIYers are a great benefit to C4 as well as to dealers. Because we don't worry about P&L or running a business, we may spend more time researching answers, trying stuff out, etc. than others may have bandwidth for.

Your target customers are *not* going to hang out on this site trying to figure out how to tweak a driver to make the DVR send right commands to the cable box. They're hiring *you* to figure it out.

At this point, I and other advanced DIYers are more of an asset to C4 than a liability. Why do you want to dump us?

Regards,

Max

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Max,

I guess my first question to you would be which dealer did you purchase your c4 gear from? Did you know they broke the rule allowing you not only access to composer but giving you an "employee" only user id? Do you really think we are worried about the 5K buy in? Im not I am more concerned about DIYers buying things sideways from Texas programming their own system and leaving the real dealers out in the cold. What should we do with them? Should we jsut call jim gist and tell him to banish us all and let the DIyer have the market?

Dog

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I'm with you all the way "All Wired Up".

No offence to the advanced Dyer's on this forum, but there is a great difference between a hobby and a means to make a living. 5K doesn't come close to what it costs us dealers to start a new line of product like C4. I do not discredit any help you may bring to the community, but certain things, you should figure out on your own without FREE dealer advice and tweaks. That's like cheating the artist out of royalties.

The problems will not come from a few Dyer's, but by having all this info available to a mass of Dyer's.

There will come a day where this stuff will be available to the general public, but give us dealers a chance to get a return for our hard work and investments to bring solid, State of the Art, cutting edge technologies into your neighbourhood homes. The stronger the industry, the faster the cycle will be to deliver new solutions to end users. Let's all make sure this stuff is really stable, tried and trued before making it available to everyone.

Manufacturers need to have a strong dealer base to be successful. We need to sell their products and our services to be successful. Our knowledge of products and experience should not be exposed to non dealers.

Dealers helping themselves out creates a strong industry.

Sharing this forum with everyone will eventually rob our industry of $$.

I agree that C4 should have a limited version of Composer for the end user to play with. As long as a configured system stays a configured system, end users should have full access to programming.

Change the 'systemdesign' tab to 'system control' and take out the 'connections' tab, and there is your End user Composer software. This will insure systems keep working as they should, and give the end users the option to play with their new toy if they want. Then inform the end user, if you break it, it will cost $ to fix it.

Sorry, this is my long 2cents.

Jamman

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Hmm... I was under the belief that this forum was going to be closed (after a month or so) and verified to only C4 DEALERS. There are TWO new public forums now - I don't think we need TWO... Brian's forum (www.forums4control.com) is public and it was his beliefs to keep it public from the very beginning. I visit it and post there quite a bit. But I'd also like to have a forum that is closed to just the dealers where we can bitch / compliment / help one another without the end users seeing.

We dealers are NOT gods and do not know everything, but our customers think we are (or should be) when it comes to setting stuff up for them - so I'd be embarrassed to no end, if my advanced customer logged in here to see that I has having trouble with his install and asking for help (not to mention might have an increasingly difficult time getting paid for that job).

Dealers came to this site as the Control4 forums SUCKED and just won't get better. If this forum is going to stay 100% public, then I'll probably stop visiting it as I don't need to visit TWO public forums basically with the same posts on each. If there wasn't Brian's PUBLIC forums already - I'd say keep this one open - but I'm hoping this one gets closed.

As for investments - yes - 5k isn't alot, but the two trips I've made out to SLC was each another $1000, plus the time and effort we've played with on our demo system and customers systems (hours we can't charge for) amount to about another $7500 (figure about 100 hours at $75 / hour) - so now my initial investment is more like $15,000 - $20,000 range... so yeah - I do feel that's a little bit more and yes, what I'm learning I'll be willing to share - but I still want to talk with other dealers only in a trusted / private environment.

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Hey Everyone,

We have given this alot of though and here is where we are at.

We are going to make a separate section of this site that is accessible by dealers only. We have mapped out a plan for how we will implement it which will hopefully be done in the next couple of days. We understand both sides of the situation and want to try to keep everyone happy. It's kind of a tricky situation because when we originally planned and built this site in September the only way for us to be authorized by C4 was to make it dealers only. This site sat dormant for a while because we were waiting for C4 to sign off on it. Brent circumvented C4 and went out and started the forum (mdaoe) which is why ours went online a few days after. When we realized how much work it was to build the community and do the verification of dealers we bypassed the dealer only section temporarily and opened it to the public.

What came out of it so far has been great. I really think the public opinion makes for a great forum and I'm not sure what will develop in the dealer only section, but on the flip side If I could think of everything it would make this a very boring place. So on that note we will deliver on our original plan and have an additional section for dealers only.

We will have the new section online in the next couple of days and will have the authorization procedure in place as well.

Dan

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I hope that you take my position under consideration and only allow end users access to areas that pertain to them. There is no legitimate reason for them to acquire drivers or see screen shots of configurations or any other info that has to do with the DEALER ONLY version of composer.

While there are some very helpful DIY'ers on here who are contributors, and I certainly don't intend any insult to them, most DIY'ers will just be takers. The fact that we are helping those DIY'ers and renegade dealers circumvent the agreements with C4 should be frowned upon by both dealers and C4! DIY'ers constantly take up my time in phone calls and visits well knowing they have no intention of useing our services. I won't knowingly give away more here.

DIY'ers already have AVSforum and the forum listed in the post above amongst others.

The statement that we have only invested $5,000 tells you everything you need to know. First, our costs shouldn't be discussed publicly and second that number is a small fraction of our investment in this technology.

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Why do you want to dump us?

Regards,

Max

But Max, You would not be "dumped!" Just private section(s) for the dealers to discuss dealer-proprietary sorts of things.

Back when I was one of the Sysops for the CompuServe Consumer Electronics Forums in the good old days (80's and early 90's), we had private sections that were only accessible to certain members.

No problem there.

Eric

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