[Richtea78]

Or you could have just left everyone on NPower till you had working systems in place like a responsible company. Instead you’ve basically shown you don’t care about customers

[Strat]

At least they didn't go with the dreaded Khoros forum software.

Well I hope they didn't and custom skinned it.

[theunknowntech]

Originally Posted by Strat

At least they didn't go with the dreaded Khoros forum software.

Well I hope they didn't and custom skinned it.

Took me months to find this comment again, since the forum search seems to be really broken and I had to manually trawl every single thread after I lost sight of it.

It didn't take me that long to figure out that this forum isn't running on Khoros though - about 30 seconds in fact (and yes, that platform is absolutely horrible and I absolutely loathe it)! It's actually running on vBulletin with a custom skin that basically overrides almost everything and doesn't exactly do a great job of it. I'm actually forced to use the mobile version constantly, since at least the mobile view relies less on the hacky overrides and more on the default vBulletin skin. It's the only way I can get this thing to work without breaking every five seconds.

vBulletin isn't actually too bad in general provided you don't mess with it too much. But the problem here is that vBulletin is designed more for social purposes than it is for support purposes. And it breaks very easily if you try to "hack core" so to speak, by doing things in ways that aren't intended... Like completely overriding the skin with something based on Bootstrap when vBulletin isn't actually compatible with Bootstrap - unless you're willing to put loads of effort into developing all sorts of compatibility hacks into the skin as well (which doesn't seem to have been the case here).

If you do it right, then yes you can pull it off - and there are vBulletin mods/extensions out there which can add features which are useful for support communities. But it's not as simple as browsing a catalogue and installing whatever seems to work. You have to do a lot of research and testing to make sure it'll actually work (and also avoid any dodgy stuff).

Still no sign of any apps coming soon though... I wonder what even happened to them?

[Strat]

I'm afraid I have more pressing matters to deal with than wrestling with this company's forum.
It reminds me of one of those mazes like at Hampton Court Palace.

[Richtea78]

Good to see over a year later and still no sign of a working app

meanwhile Octopus is still going great and still cheaper than eon.

[Beki]

There is definitely a working app....I use it myself!
It is available on Apple and Android devices!

[grimsqueaker]

If you infer working to mean it loads and shows your account, then yes.
it has none of the features of the old npower app…. It needs the half hourly usage stats we have turned on so we can track usage effectively…. How difficult can it be to feed data that you already have, into an app that is already reading data from your systems

[Beki]

@grimsqueaker I'll be entirely honest and I don't know how difficult it must be as I have no app building/software developing experience personally. But I can ask the question to the team that do. I have heard that in the future, the plan is to have the app as an IHD - hopefully! But I have no idea when that is...and my crystal ball isn't working atm.

[grimsqueaker]

@Beki_EONNext

The fact that it is taking so long, over a year now, indicates several possibilities.

1. You have no way of accessing the data. Unlikely as how the hell are you billing me.
2. You have no intention of surfacing this data because you don't want to pay for a competent dev team
3. Your dev team has no idea of how to access this data.

All I see is excuse after excuse as to why we no longer have the functionality we had with npower. So effectively we are getting less service for more money.

All I am asking for is a means of analysing my energy usage... I can't even access the half-hourly stats on my account via the web and pull them into my own app for analysis.
And please don't mention the IHD as a way of monitoring usage... I unplugged the damned thing ages ago as it has no purpose other than increasing my energy bill.

Please, if the app is not going to give us this data, find some other way to provide it, be that a json feed or even just a .csv file that we can download and analyse in a spresdsheet.

If I performed in my job as well as your dev team are in theirs, I would be shown the door.

[Beki]

@grimsqueaker I understand your frustrations and wanted to let you know that I had a response from our tech team.

It is scheduled to be worked on however we also have had to develop other things into the app - FiT, Smart PAYG etc have been a focus for the past few months. I will get an update from the tech team when they start working on it. 😊