Support Forum

We had FIVE pages of posts about this in June.   

Do you have ANY idea how much MY time that took?

I suppose not.  

I wasn't asking for a modification or anything special I needed to do, I just wanted the theme to work.  After all, I PAID for it.

I VOLUNTEER my time and money for our community,  an extremely rural area with no medical services and a dysfunctional fire district / ambulance service that takes at least an hour to get here on a GOOD day!

I finally get some traction, get sued for harassment, try to get it in the paper ... and the forum doesn't work again!

NOBODY advised me that this will revert when I update!  

It's somewhat shocking to see that I'm the ONLY person using this theme, my readers like it.

So I try to post here and can't, because my membership expired.   The cheapest option is now $45.

Your payment system is set up to default to AUTO RENEWAL and to the MOST EXPENSIVE order option.

Even AFTER I changed it and I got the robot error it defaulted to your preferred options again.  STUBBORN!   

This is the kind of crap I've been fighting my entire life.   I'm one of the little people and I don't need to incur an over limit fee because of an auto renewal, NOR do I need to pay for services I don't need as I already have huge debt.

Why do I have so much debt?

One reason aside from so much volunteer work is that I don't operate like you guys. 

I have NEVER defaulted my payment options to auto renewal or the most expensive order.

I also provide paid support for extremely complex issues and I make mistakes too. 

But unlike you, I would have 

1) fixed this bug for the next update.

2) if I screwed that up, I would have sincerely apologized and IMMEDIATELY offered either the corrected file or to fix it again.

3) not only would I have immediately refunded any money paid, but I would have provided the complementary membership for the trouble.  After all, I strive to excel at my work and when I screw up, I try to pay for my mistakes.

In contrast, not only did you not apologize, you made me PAY to work again and you complained about how little you earn.  I hope you realize that if you HAD fixed this bug you wouldn't be wasting your time on this! 

It's certainly not MY fault that the bug exists!

It makes me wonder what your business model is. 

NOT fix bugs so your customers have to pay for access to the forum again so you can just tell them that they need to fix it again?

I don't mind at all paying for support.  I DO mind having to pay for a product that does NOT work as it should.

You have this expectations that your customers need to be your unpaid product testers and that certainly isn't disclosed on your order page.

If you read the posts in June, you will see that after FIVE (5) pages (not posts) you finally determined that it wasn't MY fault.

I TRIED to add the code, but for unknown reasons the changes weren't made and you finally made them.

I installed the update through WP.  I have NO idea what actually has changed.    If you update a file, I can only assume that there were changes to the code and I could have wasted more hours trying to make those changes from June again with no results.

And you know what, I'll just try that right now.   

And, if I didn't have to PAY to read the posts from June again, I probably would have just tried to fix it myself again without posting at all and not going though this hassle here.

But I didn't write this post to waste your or my time, I need to hear from the new people taking over. 

I'm determined to make a difference for our small community, wasted so much time doing NOTHING because I didn't know whether anyone would take over.

I've admin'd forums since about 1996.  I like SP because of the topic description as I only do resource forums.  I'd LIKE to see it succeed and be a profitable project.

But a business model based on making customers pay for bug fixes, especially REPEATED fixes of the same bug will not work.  Certainly won't work for me.

People joke about anti-virus companies making the viruses so we all have to pay for their software.   At least we don't have to WORK for them and troubleshoot their work.

I'll greatly appreciate the thoughts of the new people on where SP is heading because THIS "support" does not work for me.