Okay Plugin, But I Had A Bad Developer Support Interaction

  • It’s a fine plugin, but if you have a problem with it, the support in the comments is really not good.

    I was trying to use a script generated by the MailChimp dashboard on this plugin. A plugin called “MailChimp for WordPress” should be able to handle that kind of script from MailChimp itself, right?

    But a problem arose with this plugin using this script. Instead of trying to fix the script, they told me to delete the whole thing and create the form using their plugin. Except, the way they told me to make the form, their plugin didn’t have the functionality to:

    1) Add an asterisk by the required fields
    2) Take in the birthday field as a birthday (it just took in text).

    I had those functionalities on my original form. And I want/need those functions for my client.

    So, essentially, I got told to replace my script from MailChimp with an inferior form from their plugin. That is bad support and I’m not stoked about that interaction with this plugin’s developer support.

    Overall, the plugin has worked fine other than the bad support and the error handling a script from MailChimp.

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Deleted link to free, volunteer support
Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • That linked thread is one of the more helpful interactions with support I have seen on www.remarpro.com despite what appears to me to be a misunderstanding. I am not sure why that made you dock three stars from your review which seems unfair. It does not seem to be a fair representation of the plugin itself or the support experience. I wish all support on www.remarpro.com would be that helpful/responsive to be honest.

    Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    @westopher Thanks for the review but please keep it to your words here only. No links or links to images. That’s not permitted in reviews and I have removed yours.

    Thread Starter westopher

    (@westopher)

    @authentictech – no, the support was not helpful because they did not actually help me with my problem. I ended up solving it on my own after going back and forth with them for a week or so without them providing meaningful help.

    To prove this lack of meaningful help I linked to the thread where the support from this plugin did not address my issue, but that link was removed by @jdembowski .

    Essentially, I kept asking for help because my form was broken. The solution was a quick fix on the mailchimp dashboard. It took me a while to find that on my own. Instead of helping me find this quick fix, the developers for this plugin kept on trying to get me to use their plugin’s form creator, which would have resulted in a form that looked a lot worse than the one I had previously built and was trying to fix.

    Not only that, the form they were trying to get me to create wouldn’t have gotten me all of the information from the original form. So, no @authentictech , this wasn’t “one of the more helpful interactions with support.” This was actually a mess that cost me a lot of time unnecessarily.

    Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    All reviews here are feedback. You do not have to prove anything to anyone for that feedback.

    Plugin Contributor Lap

    (@lapzor)

    Hi @westophe,

    Sorry to hear you had a bad experience.

    I like to answer some points in your review here:

    1) Add an asterisk by the required fields
    The form builder will allow you to put any HTML code you want. If you want to add a * you just type that right there in the editor where you want it.

    2) Take in the birthday field as a birthday (it just took in text).
    You can change the code from type=”text” to type=”date” if you want to use a HTML5 date field.

    We indeed do not support any 3th party javascripts or embedded Mailchimp forms or any other services or plugins that are not ours. We only provide support on our own plugin. That counts for the free support on our free plugin as well as for our Premium add-on.
    Therefore, when you ask us for help the response will always be how to do something in our plugin.

    I’m glad to hear you got your issue solved anyway, even though it wasn’t trough our plugin or support.

    Kind regards,

    Lap

    Thread Starter westopher

    (@westopher)

    Yes, well, this solution is way late and the reviews aren’t the place to give solutions. I went back and forth trying to get this sort of help for a long time on a support thread, with no real solution arrived at.

    To put the actual solution in a review, instead of the support thread itself when the problem arose looks strongly to be an attempt to look good in reviews, rather than being actual technical help. And seeing the solution here doesn’t reflect what the actual experience of trying to get help for this plugin was like for me.

    As far as offering support for other plugins- this is a plugin that takes MailChimp’s technology and works with it. Without MailChimp, this plugin wouldn’t really exist. Helping with a quick fix (I cannot emphasize how quick a fix this was enough on MailChimp’s dashboard) isn’t outside the purview of a plugin that exists because MailChimp exists.

    It’s like if you guys were a plugin dealing with YouTube and I had put in the wrong link for my YouTube video to display; you could just say my link was wrong from YouTube, just go to the url again and copy it correctly. That’s basically what happened here.

    Lastly, there is a place for the code from MailChimp itself within your plugin. Making sure input that goes INTO YOUR PLUGIN is working properly is totally within reasonable bounds of making your plugin work properly. That isn’t 3rd party support, that’s support with an input that your plugin takes. If an API from somewhere else isn’t working, it’s within the purview of developers offering support to help get that API working. It’s the same here.

    I find this answer above a major cop out.

    One thing that is positive is that the support thread is responsive. They clearly do make an effort to help people using their plugin, so it isn’t all bad. Some plugins just leave you hanging, but they don’t. Even if I got ineffective help, the help was there. So, it isn’t 100% bad, I just had a bad experience with something they don’t cover that I think they should cover for the reasons described above.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • The topic ‘Okay Plugin, But I Had A Bad Developer Support Interaction’ is closed to new replies.