3.0.x version unusable

Hey lioso,

I honestly don’t understand what’s wrong with our attitude. We’ve had issues both technically and in communication, we’ve tried to fix them, I’ve blogged about all that here.

Would love to know what the bug was that you ran into!

Joost de Valk,

Well the attitude seems quite cavalier to me and many other users I have talked to. You broke peoples sites. Worse than that you broke their clients sites and made them look bad.

I tested on one of my own sites before my clients and abruptly found out that the new code took my site down unless I turned off my CDN (Probably a java issue). I can only image doing this to my larger clients!

Basically you are now like Microsoft drivers, anyone with a brain does not trust MS to update their drivers at will. Now many don’t trust you, I know I don’t.

Using Yoast SEO now for some, not all, will mean set it up, get it working and never update or upgrade it and perhaps look for an alternative product.

Even though you made great products, the perception of rushing to monetize all the features before they are ready does not have good optics. Basically when you shoot yourself in the foot you get another chance, but when you shoot yourself in the head, well its over.

You have opened the door very wide for your competitors, you need to find a way to close it fast.

@joost de Valk

I have great respect for the work that has gone into this plugin, and recognise that premium services are necessary to scale up and compensate you and your team of developers.

The reasons I have left the plugin after 4 years are as follows:

1. Every release over the last 12 months has caused major problems for users here, and while I recognise that you wish/need to develop the plugin, I have started to develop a sense of fatigue and apprehension at each new release: do I update and risk breaking my sites? Or do I break my cardinal rule of having outdated plugins on the system and jeopardise my security?

2. You have recently had 2 support forum staff (AskKim & Niles Flores) working to help users here on the free version with the issues: brilliant step. But then these have vanished since the release of version 3.x.x where users have been in real strife with broken sites & de-ranking issue. I understand that you prioritise premium support, but surely there is some free time for these two to also help out here on the www.remarpro.com forums. Their sudden absence seems a little unfair, and suggests that users of Yoast SEO have to sign up for premium support to safely survive the version releases.

Compare this with how the Wordfence security plugin manage thing. They have a premium plugin version which offers express support, but then they also have 3 x support gurus responding to *every* support request in the www.remarpro.com forums. After their last release where a major bug was included they worked tirelessly to resolve the issue for *all* users through the premium and free support forum, and promised to address their QA to prevent this from happening again. I trust them on this, and believe that their model actually results in more users signing up for the premium version just to say thanks for such a great service.

It’s horses for courses, but for me personally I think that when a plugin grows so large there is the danger of a disconnect from the plugin user base, and this is why I have moved on to a small start-up SEO plugin
which I’ll support with donations to get on its feet.

Sincerely.

@artboyle: did you read that post? We didn’t break people’s sites. We broke their editor, perhaps, but not their sites. If it was someone’s clients sites, doesn’t that someone have a role in testing things first? We’ve done at least 3 different calls for testing in the 4 months before the release and they should’ve tested on a staging environment first.

Also: we haven’t taken out a single feature that we made premium. Not a single one. We’ve taken away some features, simply because they caused more problems than they solved, but we’ve not taken a single feature from free to premium.

We are, in a way, a bit like Microsoft, though not even close to as rich or as widely used. They do too suffer from not controlling the hardware nor the software that runs on and alongside their own software. This makes testing of all combinations in which your software can run literally undoable. We’d love to but we simply cannot test 3.9 *million* different configurations…

@barnez: let me get to your points in order:

1: while we’ve had issues, most certainly, they have not all created problems for all users. We just have an insane amount of people using the plugin so there will, always, be issues. That’s not something we can ever fix.

2: Kim and Nile didn’t vanish, in fact, we added Taco and myself and Michiel into the mix. There were just a lot of things to get too, and we can’t get to everything all at once. I contest the “broken sites” remark: there were broken editors, but so far, we have yet to see 1 fatal error with this version of the plugin that isn’t due to an incomplete download. De-ranking issues are very often not tied to our release at all. I’ve so far seen one, and that was a case where the site url was http where it should have been https. Not our fault, but the result of an unfortunate interaction between pieces of code.

I like the comparison to Wordfence: they were among the first to express their sympathy for what we were going through because they’ve had the same issues with major releases themselves. We’re literally 5-10x bigger than they are in terms of users. We’ve got 8 full time support staff working to help people out, here, in our plugin support queue, on twitter, on Facebook, etc. We want to help but again, we can’t be everywhere.

You’re of course fine to move to a small startup plugin, but you’ll probably never get the amount of development and the quick turnaround on Google changes you get with a more experienced party. There’s a reason that despite all the issues here, you can ask almost any guy on an SEO conference which plugin they use and they’ll all mention us. We know what we’re doing, even more in SEO than in development.

All that being said, I appreciate the candid feedback!

@joost de Valk:
If you read all the posts here and elsewhere you will see that many people are saying their sites were broken by this update.

I know you do a lot of very good work, however, when experiencing this kind of an event, denial is an urge you should steer clear of, just my opinion, I personally really like your products.

Yes I definitely agree, everyone has a responsibility to test plugins before going live, yours recent update is dramatic proof of that wisdom.

Hi @lioso,

Almost a year has passed since your review. Are you still using our plugin? If not, we’ve made a ton of changes to Yoast SEO and would like to invite you to give the plugin a new try.

If you want to learn more about the plugin before installing it, we feel our knowledge base is the best place to start.

Thanks!