Note that if this is implemented, it should be a toggle feature; those of us doing adult content have to private everything we post practically per payment processor rules, and so if this were a hard rule implemented, it would look like (to the public) that we had basically sat on Patreon, were getting thousands of dollars a month, and had never posted a single time on our activity feed, ever.
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- Post formatting. I would like the Preformatted Text option like you see here in this text box in which I am writing this reply.
Context: I teach programming and when I add code to my posts it does not look good so instead I have to take screenshots of code and upload the image. But then readers can’t copy that code.
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Benefits based on LIFETIME SUPPORT.
So, i want some one time gifts to give, and lifetime support could be a very nice tool, if Benefits could track it down and notify me if someone reached the “gift limit”. Also, lifetime support doesn’t start from 0 if someone delete his pledge, and later comes back. I think, more opportunity is still in benefits. -
MESSAGES
As someone already replied, i wanted to answer a certain member, and it went out for the group. It was very personal, what i wrote to him, now i just simply not brave enough to answer anyone. Not good, not clean. -
DELETED PATRONS
No email notifications, no exit survays with names… Just becouse the system doesnt notify me, i won’t be happier, becouse i will see it anyway later on.
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Thanks @tal. As you can see by the link I provided, we’ve been told this feature is in the works since 2017.
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Honestly, for me Patreon is working fine, it is nice and clear and has all I need. I know this is not the post for this, but I would like to say thank you and congrats to all the team! 
I don’t really have any pain point (apart from the pain of last month payments and patrons gone!), but I will make two little suggestions:
I agree with emily, patrons may need easier support for any issue.
Also, I don’t know how -maybe you were trying things, I don’t know, but I never found it again- I once saw my posts sorted in little squares like a kind of Instagram. It was much easier to find a post that way! Is that an option I can’t find anymore? I would like an option to choose how to view posts, Instagram style.
Thank you!
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Ah, yes, I forgot!!!
When you write “Pau” in Patreon’s searching engine, it would never find me! It hurts me so!!! 
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I like locked posts, but I understand why some people wouldn’t — maybe giving us the option to display or not display locked posts would solve the problem? Maybe a site-wide setting each creator can choose.
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Oh my god, that first one would be so good. I have a few “redeemable after 6 months” rewards and it’s nigh impossible to keep easy track of when those rewards are met without just manually sorting your Patron CSV every month and then comparing it to a list of which users have already redeemed their reward.
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Exactly. When Patreon added benefits, i actually THOUGHT it would be it, i was a little disappointed. But i hope, they will add this feature soon.
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Thank you so much for making this post, Mindy. Patreon has literally changed my life and I am so grateful, but it remains incredibly clunky to use (for both creators and patrons). Here are some things I’d love to see corrected:
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Overall site organization/navigation — Here’s a good thread that sums up my feelings on this pretty well. At this point, Patreon is only truly convenient to use if you a) pledge to someone based on existing knowledge of their work and/or their video/page description, and b) don’t want to look at any past content. The combination of pagination and featured tags makes viewing past content so difficult that I hesitate to use “access to full Patron-only post library” as a selling point for new Patrons because of it. I’d suggest looking at blogging platforms for cues on how to manage this better: Some sort of easy summary view of past posts and giving us SIGNIFICANTLY more control over the tagging system would be a great start. I’d literally (not literally) kill a man for a highly customizable home page with drag n’ drop modules that would allow me to showcase albums of images, categories of posts, featured posts, videos, etc.
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Patron Manager/Relationship Manager — Both features are clunky to navigate. I don’t see why the Patron Manager & Relationship Manager couldn’t be combined into a more functional tool that serves both purposes. Afaik, the main difference between the two is that the Relationship Manager includes past Patrons, right? Also, it’s irritating that the “Additional details” private notes don’t show up in the Patron Manager, and aren’t searchable. In order to get anything useful out of this section, I basically need to download the Patron Manager CSV and completely reformat it. OH, and… this is a tiny thing, but can you please put the total number of Patrons in each tier at the top of each tier section in the Patron Manager? It’s so stupid that I have to either navigate to my home page, download the CSV and highlight the cells, or manually count how many Patrons I need to send rewards to in each tier.
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Refunds — This has only been a problem for me once, but it was a BIG problem, and I’m terrified it will happen again: I have my Patreon set up to auto-withdraw my payments to my Paypal each month, so generally there is little to no money sitting on Patreon. When I recently needed to refund two months of $50 pledges, I found that I couldn’t choose to pull that refund money from another payment source (like my Paypal, or even a bank account), but instead had to wait until the next month’s payments went through in order to refund my Patron. When I brought this up with support in hopes that I was missing something obvious, I was told that my best alternative was to privately refund my Patron through a third party payment source, which seems like a recipe for disaster, particularly if you’re processing a refund because of bad blood. I see absolutely no reason why a refund couldn’t be processed using the same payment method as my pledges to other creators if I don’t have enough money on my Patreon account for the expense.
I also want to vehemently second the complaints about the notifications system and the messages system, which are all but useless.
Thank you for asking, and listening, and hopefully for fixing!
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thank you all! this forum thread is providing so much insight and the more detail you can give about what exactly you find to be bad/broken/needs improving, the better we can help!
I’d love to hear any specifics about these two, please!
Since notifications aren’t chronological and it isn’t clear which ones are new and which ones are old, I find them next to useless other than in regards to comments. I would prefer if new notifications were highlighted, or old notifications were greyed out or something. Often my little notifications bubble will say 8 or 10, but I’ll click through and only see 2 or 3 things that seem like actual notifications, which leaves me feeling like I missed something.
As for the messages system, I would love for it to just function more like an email inbox. Searchability would be huge, particularly when it comes to searching for previous message chains with specific Patrons. It would be great if messages with a single Patron could be automatically threaded with previous messages, imo — like a Facebook private message is, where even if you bring up a new window, it appends it onto the existing chat. I don’t use group messages much so I can’t really weigh in on that.
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I think my problem with notifications is that they’re so completely random, and ordered in no particularly helpful way. On virtually every other site I use, notifications are chronological, with the newest notification on top. Patreon notifications have no real order to them. New and departing patron information is always on top, even if I only have one change, that happens on the first of the month. Comments usually come next, but not all comments: I can’t see comments from non-patrons, or comments made on comments. Likes come next, but there’s no information about who liked a post, unless I click through to it. Why not just give us what/who/when, as it happens, rather than clumping the information together, and making us guess?
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I just have one. The address listing have abbreviations for the countries instead of the country name, it gets confusing when state names are also abbreviated and there are some cross over on the abbreviations.
It would be really nice if countries were listed as the full name instead, so it is easily clear it’s a country and not a state.
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I agree with what several here have already said.
- Notifications are annoying and unreliable. I’ll see that I have a notification, click on it and realize it’s something I’ve already looked at._ Grrrrr… it feels like a waste of my time to keep looking at things over and over.
Also, I want to get notifications when a patrons leaves. It would be nice if I could get a better idea of WHY, so perhaps more meaningful choices. Did I do or not do something? Or was it just life, finances, etc.?
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I really, really would like to be able to preview a post without having to publish it! I’m a serial proofreader and it’s very frustrating not to be able to view it as it will look when published. It’s much easier to catch any errors that way.
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The message box size is super irritating. I’ve taken to composing messages elsewhere, then pasting them into the box.
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Don’t like the yucky looking featured tags. I’ve been told it’s supposed to be a background of my latest post in that category, but it’s always just kind of brown looking.
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More flexibility in sorting my patron list. I’d like to be able to do it like a spreadsheet can be sorted by any column. I’d also like to be able to search my patron list.
You asked for gripes, you got 'em!
All that being said, I’m very thankful for the Patreon platform and how hard you all work. 
12 Likes
A new pain: Having Schedule a post and Save as Draft as a pulldown menu next to publish a post means it is VERY EASY to misclick and accidentally publish something you did not mean to publish. Which I just did and even though I deleted it in seconds, I assume the emails went out and now I fucked up the timing of my special offer marketing plan.
I would also like a 5 minute grace period between publishing a post and having Patreon send out posts to backers and followers so I can delete posts quickly that I accidentally published.
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I agree with all of these!
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I’d like an easier way to go back and edit my posts instead of having to scroll endlessly through the chronology. There were a bunch of posts I made years ago that I would like to go back and tag properly.
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It’s easy to miss but there is a filter to show posts by year or month on the /posts page
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Mine are minor compared to others, but here they are:
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I would love to see “Save as Draft” and “Schedule” get their own buttons next to “Publish Now” instead of being hidden in a pull down. I know you probably don’t want to make the screen too busy, but I think this could be really helpful for us compulsive savers AND prevent accidental publishing of posts! Suggestion: Give "Save as Draft" and "Schedule" their own top level buttons
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I would love to be able to “copy” or “clone” a previous post as the “template” for a new post! For example, if I have a weekly update post where the title, image, and tags are always the same, as well as some language in the post, it would be great to have a button next to the previous week’s post that said “copy/clone to new draft.” Click that and the old post is copied into a new draft, and then I just change whatever needs changed and write the new update for the new week. Saves A TON of time. (WordPress has this feature for blogging and I LOVE it!) “Clone” or “Copy” a previous post?
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The ability to easily reward backers for staying at a tier for an extended period of time. Please see these threads where the idea came up: A request for three tier functionality improvements and BENEFITS based on Lifetime Support
By the way, THANK YOU for asking! I’m loving everything about my Patreon experience to date, so I don’t want to sound whiny or ungrateful for the platform and the hard work that goes into making it work!
17 Likes