New Version Wiped Out Settings

Hey Greg, thanks for reaching out & I’m sorry to hear about your recent issues! I would love to hear more about it, especially since we thoroughly tested this “options update” as well (and are now wondering what we’re missing)!

Have you updated to the latest version (v3.5) from the previous one (v3.4.9) or from some older version? Do you by any chance uninstall our plugin first and then reinstall the latest version or some other, unusual way?

May I kindly ask you what other plugins have you currently got installed (and activated)? Which is the blog in question?

Let us know, since we’re really eager to get this sorted once and for all! Bear in mind that our intentions were nothing but the best, which is why we’re looking forward to any additional feedback we can get!

Take care & have a nice weekend!

Best,
Silvo

Sorry for the delay – I forgot to update my profile with my current email, so the email notification about your reply must have went out into the ether. Anyway…

I always update plugins as soon as the WP dashboard tells me they are available, so it must have been from v3.4.9. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there is an update log for plugins, or how to access it.

The blog in question is on the site https://www.gameindustry.com. I have many plugins active on the site. Here is the current list: Add From Server, AdRotate, Advanced Custom Fields, Amazon Link, Blubrry PowerPress, Category Checklist Tree, Co-Authors Plus, Display Posts Shortcode, Enable Media Replace, Extra User Details, Get Rid of Comment Websites, Jetpack by WordPress.com, Mad Mimi Sign Up Forms, Recent Posts Widget Extended, Related Posts (of course), Simple Taxonomies, Slideshow Gallery, Social Media Feather, Stop Spam Comments, User Photo, WordPress Popular Posts, WordPress SEO, WPFront User Role Editor, WP Super Cache.

I understand that you are definitely trying your best to track this down. I know how frustrating it is when something I am working on is not working the way I intended it to. Fortunately, the plugin works great except for this slight problem.

Hey Greg, sorry for the late, too late reply!

We checked & tested it out thoroughly again, and found a small glitch when transferring the update to one of our servers, which somehow caused this error of loosing all the saved user settings, but only from one version to another. Weird, we know, but totally our fault, for which we sincerely apologize! Next time we’ll do a better job!

Nonetheless, we do encourage you to have a backup of your plugin settings stored somewhere before making any future updates. We will test it inside out and triple check before releasing it, but I guess its better safe than sorry.

Again — sincere apologies from our team & please do not hesitate to get back to us, if you have any more questions or inquiries about whatever! We’ll do our best to help you out! Hope you don’t mind if I check this topic as resolved now, but do let me know if you do.

Take care & have a nice rest of the day!

Best,
Silvo

yes I posted about this problem on another thread. They said they could not replicate it, so we removed this off all our clients’ sites. The problem is this was **not* the first time this plugin had overwritten settings — an earlier version had also done the same thing…

The guy above says ‘Nonetheless, we do encourage you to have a backup of your plugin settings stored somewhere before making any future updates. We will test it inside out and triple check before releasing it, but I guess its better safe than sorry.”

That’s true we always keep multiple [hourly] backups, in fact, of the entire sites. But we manage huge sites and many of them, so we use services like ManageWP to update. Because Related Posts is now owned by a sizeably-invested company named Zemanta, we had whitelisted their plugin erroneously thinking that they would follow best practices and not have this type of problem a SECOND time. Now their plugin is either removed on sites, or blacklisted only manually updated.

Sorry, I know re-reading my post it sounds little harsh — love the plugin and hope to see it better so we can add it on in the future again. But for now our protocol means we remove from most sites until sure the developers have good track record. ??

Hey, thanks for bumping in this topic again and we are truly sorry you are / were also a victim of our errors — we wish things would have played out differently, but I’m afraid we are left with yet another experience from which we will take all the lessons available, so that this won’t happen again in the future.

It’s also worth noting that this error hasn’t always affected all of our users, but only certain types, which we are still investigating. If you remember correctly, we did ask you kindly for some additional information (here & here), which would still help us a lot.

The thing is, we are extensively testing all of our plugins inside out before every release, on various browsers, versions of WP’s dashboards, different themes, custom types, proxies, language settings, etc. — but somehow some bugs still break through in “custom environments”. Which is why we appreciate all the data we can collect.

As mentioned above — we are working as hard as possible to get any clue on why this happened before and how to prevent it in the future, but we would also like to kindly ask our users (at least those who experienced those issues before) to make a backup in order to prevent any unexpected problems in the future.

I can only promise in the name of our team that we will do our best in the future, so that those precautioned steps won’t be necessary in the first place.

Let me know if you have any more questions or remarks regarding our service, since I’ll gladly help / listen you out! The only way to get better is to have an open ear for our trusted users, which is why I’m looking forward to your reply!

Take care & have a nice day!

Best,
Silvo