[STICKY] How I use these forums. Please read.

  • Plugin Author Jason Coleman

    (@strangerstudios)


    10 years, 1 month ago

    Hi, I’m Jason Coleman, the lead developer of Paid Memberships Pro. More and more people are getting involved in the development of PMPro, but at this time 98% of the development and support of PMPro is either done by me personally or by someone I am paying.

    I spend most of my working life maintaining PMPro, supporting our paying members, and consulting with others using PMPro to build membership sites. I spend less and less time answering questions in the www.remarpro.com forum, and I wanted to post this so people looking for help here can understand how I use the forums here and how they can get the best help.

    The truth is that I don’t have the time to answer every support request posted to the www.remarpro.com forums here. I have to prioritize supporting our paying members, and so the fastest way to get support is to post to our paid member forums here: https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/forums/forum/members-forum/

    I do still monitor the www.remarpro.com forums here in a few ways:

    1. I will browse through the forums, especially after a new release goes out, looking for “show stopper” bugs that are affecting a large number of PMPro users. If I see something like this, I’ll follow up with those posting about the bug to figure it out and get it fixed for everyone.

    2. I will occasionally (maybe once a month or so) spend an hour or two or five going through all of the posts and replying. This is a large investment of time, but it’s worth it for me to get a feel for how people are using PMPro and what kinds of issues they are running into.

    3. Some of the developers I pay to help me with support on our paid member forums will have free time and will answer questions here. They will usually have the “plugin author” tag on their posts.

    4. There are a few PMPro users on the forums who are not directly associated with me, but have been using PMPro for a while, and some of them respond to questions posted here. Thanks!

    When I or someone else trying to help replies to your thread, keep the following in mind:

    1. I will prioritize working on issues that are affecting more people. Issues affecting 100% of PMPro users will get fixed. Issues produced by conflicts with specific plugins or themes will be less likely to get fixed.

    2. Many things that I won’t spend time to fix in the www.remarpro.com forums, I will spend time to fix when posted to our paid support forums. If a fix is more specific to your setup or will require me to get access information to test on your site directly, I’d like to have you as a paying member so I can take better care of you and use your membership fee to justify the time I’m going to spend.

    3. You can increase your odds of getting help by providing as much information about your issue as possible. The more information I have about the error (turn on WP_DEBUG to get it and paste it in the post) how your site is setup, what plugins you are using, and how your levels are set up, etc, the faster I will be able to try to reproduce the bug to fix it. I’m often not able to follow up on a reply until one or a few days later, so provide as much information in each reply as you can.

    4. You can increase your odds of getting help by being as nice as possible.

    5. Many of the answers I give will be of the form “add this code to a custom plugin” or “you’ll have to write some code to ____”. I’ve built PMPro as a membership platform and lean toward having it customizable through programming vs lots of settings tabs and options. While this means that sometimes non-developers may have to hire a developer to help them, it’s also why PMPro can be used for so many different kinds of membership sites.

    6. I do appreciate having bugs brought to my attention no matter how small and do appreciate the ideas that the community posts about how to improve PMPro. This post here isn’t meant to discourage people from posting here, but rather to help you understand what to expect from me when you do. When in doubt, post it here.

    Thanks!

    Jason Coleman
    CEO, Stranger Studios
    Lead Developer, Paid Memberships Pro

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Hi Jason

    I have respect and understand what you are saying.

    What is important is that 40,000+ installations are using this plugin – mostly for free. That is where your future income lays.

    Most of these businesses, including me, are using this plugin on commercial sites which means our bread and butter. Most of them, again including me, need to make sure that we have the support when something goes wrong. For us this can be the difference in being very successful or loosing clients.

    All successful plugins, like yours, must look after their “free” subscribers as these are your future income .

    I do not mind to page through forums to look for a possible solution for a problem. The challenge is that I cannot access your paid forums and the sad thing is that I will possibly find the answers in those forums. Instead I have to wait for you to look at this forum in a months’ time and hope I’m one of the lucky ones who will get an answer. My clients do not understand this and it is very frustrating…

    Do I feel comfortable with the support? No and that will make think twice before I pay for the service.

    PS: Don’t take me wrong – I really try to be ‘nice’

    @hercul56 I followed you until I got here:

    My clients do not understand this and it is very frustrating

    No offence, but I think your clients, who are paying you, have every right to not understand why someone they’re paying is waiting on someone else for free support for a free tool.

    It’s losing clients, not loosing clients.

    This is paid support for a free plugin. The bad deal is without paying it there is no support. And you cannot see the level paid support gives you, been through this with another plugin, membership they changed the free version, which broke the installation, they won’t revert to figure out why it is not working and blame it on a theme conflict.

    @obertscloud, the plugin author deserves to get compensated for his work somehow, doesn’t he? He’s offering the plugin totally for free – and this plugin gives you a revenue stream for your website. Pretty darned good deal if you ask me. He also has a money back guarantee on the paid support. There’s really no risk. Paid support for a free plugin is a VERY common model that many well established contributors to the WP ecosystem use. Not sure what the complaints are all about.

    Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    What is important is that 40,000+ installations are using this plugin – mostly for free. That is where your future income lays.

    That would infer that you’re a customer because you’re a user? That isn’t the case. You are a user until you are a customer.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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