No Envato Support & Failed Migration

And ironically you didn’t even ask for support. I haven’t seen a ticket from you.

I really don’t understand the point in leaving bad reviews saying “you need better support” when people don’t even seek for help.

Customer support is more than just a ticket system, it’s a range of customer services from installation, training and troubleshooting, to maintenance, upgrading and creating good channels of communication. In my case the plugin stopped working properly and it just disappeared without trace from Envato with no support link to the new version.

I initially purchased the plugin via Envato Code Canyon in January 2014, but recently my customers started complaining that my support system wasn’t working, so I tried to find an update for the plugin as it was very old. On the Envato plugin page it says… “Item No Longer Available”. The message also says… “The item is no longer being sold. The author may have stopped selling or it was taken down for other reasons. Either way it’s no longer available. This sucks, we know, so below are some similar items which may be a good replacement.”

This is poor customer support. At the very least there should be a support link or a message to say where the plugin has moved to and there is a free update. I was left high and dry. If I hadn’t searched around on the web I wouldn’t have even found the new version of the plugin.

I have wasted a lot of time trying to update the old plugin and get the new plugin to work and the migration also didn’t work properly. I can retrieve my customer details from database backups, but it’s all hassle I can do without.

It’s been a bad experience for me and I can’t afford to spend anymore time trying to get the plugin to work, but you could avoid a similar thing happening to others by trying to inform old customers about the new plugin, and make the migration tool more resilient. In my case after migration the user roles weren’t created properly which mean’t having to install another plugin to manage user roles, and it all seemed a bit of a mess. There was also a plugin config option about multiple products displayed on the Support User WP dashboard which didn’t look too good.

Thanks for getting back to me.

I agree with you. Not being notified that the plugin landed on www.remarpro.com sucks.

We have been looking for solutions, but unfortunately Envato does not give any possibility to communicate such a thing to the buyers, and there is no option for e-mailing the buyers of your own products.

We’ve tried our best to notify our users: posts on our blog, messages on our Facebook page, Tweets on our ThemeAvenue account.

After the migration script was finally ready we decided to send a mass e-mail to all our users who registered on our support site. We were not very happy about it as some of these users are using other plugins than Awesome Support, but we wanted to tell as many AS users as possible.

Apparently you weren’t following our blog, our Facebook page, our Twitter account, and you never registered on our support site. I’m sorry about this communication problem. I hate blaming others but Envato really doesn’t give any option for this kind of situation.

Regarding the migration issue, the user roles issue could have been solved in no time if you got in touch with us through our support site or the WP.org support forum.

It makes me sad to see someone losing faith in our work but I understand your position. If there is anything I can do to change your mind I’ll be more than happy to try.

Hi Julien,

It’s a shame you couldn’t have left a change of address message on the Envato plugin page for your WP Awesome Support plugin, instead of removing the page altogether. This would lead old customers to your new page. I had to do quite a bit of searching online to find your new plugin page. It was as if support for the old plugin had vanished, that’s why I left a comment about lack of support for the plugin.

If the new plugin upgrade had actually worked, there wouldn’t have been a problem. But when the upgrade failed and I lost all of my support tickets as well, it was time to move on. If you’re going to provide an upgrade mechanism, it should at least revert the plugin to it’s previous state if the upgrade fails. Yes I could have tried contacting you for advice on how to fix the problems, but I don’t have time. I just need a plugin that works.

I wish you all the best with your new WordPress customer support plugin and I’ve improved my rating as you’ve been kind enough to respond. I’ve reverted to good old email for now as it’s much more reliable and people are familiar with it. I will probably look for a WP knowledge base plugin next rather than a ticketing system. But I will check out your plugin again should the need arise as I’m sure it will be improve in time. Good luck with your ventures.

Best regards,
Martin

Hey,

Sorry I completely forgot to reply to your last post.

1. Unfortunately, Envato doens’t give the option to display a message saying why/where the plugin was gone
2. I’m sorry that the migration process failed for you, however, your tickets aren’t lost, they are in the database and I can definitely help you retrieve them

If you want my help I invite you to get in touch on our priority support (https://getawesomesupport.com/submit-ticket/) and I’ll help you get all your tickets back. It is definitely not lost.