Extremely poor support

This appears to be mostly related your use of the Pods Beaver Builder Themer Add-on built by one of our community members and partially supported by us officially to a limited extent.

I’ve looked over the history of your public chats with two community volunteers and our support lead. It seems that multiple suggestions were made for you to explore and attempts were made at helping understand your initial problem in our free live chat on Slack across three days. Some of it ended up being related to issues surrounding Beaver Themer/Builder not allowing you to get field connectors working because you weren’t previewing the correct post / post type. We sent an article / tutorial link to help assist you in an alternative since you were trying to add something to the front page itself.

During the second session, you asked what seemed like a separate question and then provided a login link to your test site for us to figure out how to build a feature on your site using Pods + Beaver Builder. We tried to explain that our support is not able to always log into sites and build things out for our users. Historically I myself have done this type of thing only for a very few exceptional cases, but it is not something we can have our support / volunteers be able to do while they maintain their other responsibilities (Jim: supporting other users on Slack, Forums, GitHub, and writing docs; Volunteers: their normal day jobs).

The final session was unfortunately not productive or support-related, I don’t need to comment on it or quote your messages here, but I can just say that it was not necessary.

Building a site takes time, some times you have to tinker around and figure out how to make multiple plugins work towards your benefit when trying to do something that may not be documented or supported through already built integration. We provided you with ideas and suggestions on how to accomplish your custom functionality. But it appeared that you were expecting something we were unable to provide, even though our support spent hours trying to look into your questions and provide you with solutions and our volunteers were just trying to help you out of the goodness of their heart.

Back to the review itself:

• The learning curve of Pods varies from person to person. For instance, it can be used by people who do not know how to code but it’s advanced features or certain requirements of sites may necessitate some knowledge of PHP or our custom templating / magic tags (documented on our docs site). The biggest problem facing most people who start to use Pods is understanding where Pods ends and WordPress begins. Establishing that line can be difficult since Pods integrates so tightly with WordPress.
• Our support lead Jim is one of the most sympathetic people I know, but he also has a duty to ensure that our limited resources (free plugin, surviving on donations) are spread out enough to allow time with as many of our users as possible during support hours. He was right to say that “We can’t help everyone, though we try,” because some times people ask for us to build custom solutions for them. We sent you multiple suggested solutions, but we were unable to commit to spending extensive time on logging into your site and configuring it all for you.
• We could not find any forum posts or GitHub bug reports of any issues/bugs you’ve had with Pods or the Pods Beaver Builder / Themer add-on itself. I looked over the Slack chat history and it didn’t describe any issues there either. It seems that most of the problems you described in Slack chat were use-case specific and not problems with our plugins themselves. You gave the plugin itself 2 stars in your review but did not reach out to explain what we could improve in the plugin, perhaps you can provide this in the future?

Overall, we are glad that you were able to find a solution that worked for you. We really do just want the best for you, we aren’t trying to disrespect you by not building your site, it’s just that we don’t have the luxury of resources like you’ve described ACF as having. If they were able to figure it out, that’s great.

On a personal note, I just want to please ask that you give the ACF support team the respect and patience they deserve when they are dealing with any future issues you bring to them.

Scott, if you’re going to the effort of writing a War and Peace (Novel) you ought to spend as much, or if not more time getting facts straight. I wrote my review to state that support sucks because in my experience it did. I’m not interested in your BS attempt to make things sound a little better, because if you really cared about the service as much as you suggest, you would take a little bit of negative feedback on the chin and learn from it..

The facts are your agent couldn’t be bothered to initially spend any time understanding the problem. If he did, he would not have incorrectly assumed we wanted the work done for us. We built a whole demo site for the purpose of demonstrating our issue so that support could guide us (Quote – teach a man how to fish) visually, given the complexity of the problem..
I have a log of the complete conversation which I will very happily post in another message if you insist, which also praises the Beaver Themer agent for their efforts to help us out.

In response to your personal note, I generally give respect and show patience to most people in life (as I did with the Beaver Themer agent and even yourself) Retrospectively, I reserve the right to speak out when dealing with ineptitude, complacency arrogance or a piss poor attitude – I don’t even apologise for it.
To reiterate, the PODS product is clunky, support sucks and in our experience, a solution was found with the ACF staff, whom were easy to engage, eager to help, understanding and patient.

As far as I am concerned, the experience of a direct comparison qualifies my opinion, although I don’t rule out I was unlucky to have dealt with a bum agent. Nonetheless, your company would be far better served to use this negative response (and any others) as a means to learn from and improve for the future

Good day

I wish I could write a novel, that would be pretty cool.

For facts, I went through the logs that we had and I posted a general list of what happened so we could be on the same page. If you have differing logs, please feel free to share them with me at scott (at) pods.io. I don’t believe this should be one-sided, so I want to ensure your side is represented here. Part of that is me acknowledging any miscommunication or misunderstandings from our side, but once I see your logs I can re-evaluate.

A few other questions from your reply:

• You stated the product is clunky in your review and now in your reply, can you elaborate? Is this a personal preference or is there something concrete here we can improve?
• You mentioned the ACF staff members were easy to engage and eager to help, I’m very interested in seeing that message thread if you care to share. To take your comments about ‘negative feedback’ and ‘learn from and improve for the future’ to heart, perhaps you should share it so it can be used to improve our support process on future questions you think you were misunderstood on?
• I still don’t understand why your review and reply has been so hostile, is there something going on personally/professionally for you? Is it just a high stress project you’re working on? I hope it gets better, I wouldn’t wish anyone to have or maintain that level of stress.

Folks, the purpose of a review is to state one’s experience with a plugin/theme, not to debate attitudes or to make ad hominem comments about each other.. I suggest that you take this up as a new support topic to see if you can resolve the support issues and that you both walk away from this review for a while.

*Removes modlock, modlook tags*