Feedback to the Teamspeak Team

General Discussion
1

Jul 10, 2024, 12:10 EDT

Preface – This was originally written as a direct message (email) to TeamSpeak, but I guess it went to the Sales&Support team. The individual who responded to this email directed me to the forums to better reach the team, so here I am.

Hello. I have been using TS for many many years now. After both convincing my primary friend group to make the switch from discord to TS, and self hosting the server from scratch, I have some issues with the platform. This message will serve as a collective reference of the most common gripes every single member in my server, including me, complains about.

The lack of modern communication features is causing my users to get very pissy over time.
I know as a team of developers you all hear countless (and often silly) complaints every single day on the forums. I would imagine that most forum complaints/feature requests don’t sting that bad because they are all from strangers on the internet, but as the sole owner, admin, and operator of my server I must listen to the same handful of complaints every week from the people closest to me – my very own friends.

2023 was supposed to be the year of screen sharing. It’s over halfway through 2024 and there has been nothing but radio silence from TS. This sort of neglect does not foster a strong community or hype users of the platform up for the future.

-Needing to download images manually before viewing is also a strange feature. For hardware limited users, I 100% understand this feature existing, but please add a client option to automatically download images.

-The inability to view, edit, or interact with text chats without first joining a voice chat channel is quite convoluted in action. It doesn’t make sense that a user must first join a voice chat just to send or view a text channel.

-Links from whitelisted domains should embed in text channels.

-File limit restrictions should be easily configurable from the server. I want my users to have the freedom to upload large images, files, etc without compression (or lossless compression). The restrictive limitations put on file sizes causes the users of my server to be less communicative, and the image sharing feature mostly goes unused.

-Bot support. My server users complain about a lack of bot support.

(Random Idea for screen sharing: OBS integration? This would have the advantage of seemingly reducing development time/costs, not forcing hardware limited users to download a feature they might not want, and the advantage of using an industry standard program many people are already familiar with.)

P.S.: Please add donation roles in the forum. I am assuming TS has slow development due to financial constraints. I could be 100% wrong here, but having more money should definitely support development. Money fuels.

If a private donation is possible, please let me know. I will be contacting the regular users of my server tonight and exercise the idea of doing a collective donation from all of us at once.

Other than the reasons listed above I am very happy with TS. I genuinely love the platform but the lack of specific features, or strange implementation thereof, has caused me undue frustration on many nights. TS is a platform I believe in and if there is any way for me to help the team I will.

2 Likes
2

They are working on screen sharing, but there have been some major setbacks, which is the reason for this delay. Now they want to get it right and don’t want to disappoint the users.

There is already an auto-update setting.
Settings → Chats → Options → Automatically download images

Due to the fact that they wanted TS5 to be backwards compatible with TS3, this wouldn’t be possible without a major change that would ruin the chat experience for TS3.
→ This can be seen in a recent example where they implemented the [Matrix] as the chat protocol. This would have provided new features such as the ability to view the chat without being in the channel or the ability to delete or edit messages. This was a feature they were working on (x.com) but is currently probably on ice as they switched back to the TS3 protocol in order to maintain backwards compatibility and because of performance issues.

File restrictions are configurable through the permissions. These apply to the file browser. After uploading you can right click and copy the link to the file for direct download.
Note: Drag and Drop can only handle files up to 5MB due to technical limitations which is caused by the way it is implemented.

What features are missing from your bot?

They tried to partner with a 3rd party to implement screen share but at a certain point it didn’t work anymore.

I know this is not an official response which is unlikely to receive when it is about upcoming features or constructive feedback but I wanted to explain some things. This should not be an excuse for undelivered promises.

8 Likes
3

I can’t say I entirely see the need to ensure backwards compatibility with the TS3 client. I’m sure there will be holdouts who always say the older client was better, but I’d imagine it’d be easier to design a new server and client from the ground up with all of these modern integrations baked in from the start rather than hatchet work to try and get things compatible.

But that’s just my humble opinion.

I think TS has a lot it can improve on in the actual server management realm though. Its so easy to deploy and setup a Discord server, permissions are pretty simple. If TS can find a better way to organize its management tools and expand upon them to make the life of TS Server Admins easier, that’d be awesome. And I don’t think this needs to take the form of dumbing down or limiting the capabilities of the platform, there are just some more intuitive ways to implement a lot of things. You can keep the ability to fine tune servers to your needs while making the management of servers tremendously easier. I have a whole host of ideas which I think the platform could benefit from in this space, some of which I might try and implement on my own, but overall I think it’d be better if they were to exist as a first party solution.

4

100% agree with the poster. The responses from teamspeak are not good enough. Backwards compatibility just needs to sacked off and teamspeak needs to move forwards. I used teamspeak for about 15 years, was an admin and a big host for multiple gaming communities. My heart is with teamspeak, but every friend and community is on discord.

Teamspeak has become the following talking point amongst my friend group “when will they pull their finger out and deliver the discord experience (persistant messaging, screen sharing, full media embeds in messages, friends), it looks like they’ve done nothing for years”.

While I disagree with my friends that nothing is happening at teamspeak, not enough is changing for the end user to make anyone want to come back to teamspeak. Users will just become highly frustrated with the lack of features.

5

I think we deserve honest official answer what’s going on. Mobile apps are not working as they should, experience on Android is terrible, TS5 stopped getting updates, its in beta for more than 3 yrs, UI ie outdated …

Dont want to be pesimistic, but I think there should be some official answer, people who support TS deserve answer.

6

Here is the official Answer:

1 Like
7

Hello,
this is my public message to TeamSpeak staff, I know that there were many question about new features etc. I opened this topic because I want ALL the best for TeamSpeak client and community.

Most of the people who are active on forum is loyal to TeamSpeak services. In the past years there were reported many bugs, issues with mobile apps, issues with TeamSpeak client’s and some thing were simply not fixed. In the past when something were reported, TeamSpeak staff responded and most of the things were fixed, but last few years something is happening in backend, might be lack of developing staff.

@SYOX is the guy who is still keeping TeamSpeak active on Twitter and that people don’t forget this program. But core things are not working as they should, people report issues on forums and staff don’t reply / bugs are not fixed.

I know that you said that you don’t want to give information out, because people were dissappointed because features were not released as expected. I think that’s not the problem, most of adult people understand that if you do your best, we can wait and give you support as we can, if there is silent we don’t know what’s going on and if project is still alive or is everything abandonded. Many people try to convince their friends to stick with TeamSpeak and it’s difficult if you don’t know what’s going on.

@SYOX @Five_Alive I think community would appreciate it, if you would be more transparent with us, what’s going on. As I said normal adult people understand things and I’m sure we would be the way more optimistic about the future.

What’s your opinion about it? And I said before, I will say one more time, I opened this topic because I want TeamSpeak to get back on track and all the best.

4 Likes
8

I’m writing to express my frustration and disappointment with the current state of communication from the TeamSpeak team. It’s incredibly frustrating that despite being loyal users, we’re left in the dark with no meaningful updates on the platform’s development. Features like screenshare are still missing, and there seems to be no urgency to address this.

Instead of providing us with any concrete information or progress, we’re getting a constant stream of light-hearted posts on social media that do nothing to address our concerns. It’s starting to feel like there’s zero effort being made to keep the community informed or engaged in any meaningful way.

Is it too much to ask for some transparency or a roadmap for features that users have been requesting for years? A bit of communication would go a long way in maintaining the trust and loyalty of your user base.

Hoping to see a change in this approach soon.

5 Likes