Not Very Good

Hi @ed-g,

Very sad to read this review, especially because:

1. You never asked for help with the things that you believe are bugs
2. Most of what you say is not true

Now, let me review this point by point.

• The plugin uses custom roles for a very specific reason: we don’t want support agents / users to access things in your WordPress site that they shouldn’t. The reason is security and that’s also one thing that makes our plugin secure. We are far from being the only plugin doing this kind of thing and this comment just shows you’re not very familiar with development and best practices
• The capability create_ticket is given to admins and all support agents / supervisors. I don’t know why you’re saying it is not created. Moreover, a capability is not created, it is given to a user among all the other capabilities this user has
• There are caching mechanisms at different levels indeed, and the data being saved upon ticket creation is a method used to improve user experience. Let’s imagine s user submits a ticket and writes a long description, however something goes wrong during the submission (one field missing for instance). Do you really want that your users has to re-type everything? I don’t think so. Also, these data are removed right after successful ticket submission, so it is completely wrong to say that you need to “flush the browser”
• The textarea problem you describe is most likely a bug, because there is no reason you’d need to disable it to use the plugin. It is most likely that you’re having a jQuery issue on the page, and it is also very likely that it is not caused by Awesome Support
• Regarding IE 11 compatibility, I’d like to hear more about what your problem is. However, this should have been discussed in a ticket and not in a plugin review

In the end, we are, again, in a classic case of user not even bothering asking for help or trying to understand how things work and preferred leaving a bad review instead. Too bad, it could have been all very easy to solve.

As a closing note, I encourage you to read the following articles:

• There’s a wrong way to give plugin feedback on www.remarpro.com
• How to Leave a Good Bad Review

When a plugin fails basic steps like 1) installation and 2) operation, it attracts bad reviews. You plugin never did work. I kept getting “capacities” errors when trying to submit a ticket even after fussing with it for quite some time, installing a user role editor, and verifying that all of 5 the needed capabilities were set for the Support User role.

As for your odd choice of user roles and “security”, yours is the only plugin of several dozen I have used that has this “feature”. I do not understand why you choose to upend the WordPress role system and create your own roles. That is problematical.

The caching was a huge problem because I never could get a ticket submitted. You claim the cache is cleared at that point; I never reached that point, so cannot vouch for it.

The problem in IE11 is that the hint in the description field does not clear when the field is focused. It must be manually erased.

As far as asking for help, it is not up to the plugin user to determine what the problem is, and with many plugin authors demanding payment for support, it is not even always possible.

As for trying to understand how things work, I reviewed the documentation, I created an Awesome Support directory in my theme to support customization, I reviewed portions of the code, and I debugged the textarea problem and found a workaround. I’d say that’s above and beyond what should be expected of users.

In addition, I uninstalled your plugin after making the Advanced setting to delete all data and it STILL left garbage to clean up. I had to manually delete all of the Support roles.

I ended up installing WP Support Plus. It worked right out of the box and I was able to install it and create my first ticket in just a few seconds.

I stand by my review of your plugin.

2000+ active installs, only one user complaining about those things…

Regarding the user role thing, I stand by my comment that you apparently don’t fully comprehend the system. Custom user roles is a built-in WordPress feature. There is a reason for that.

Finally, regarding the support, I completely agree with you that it’s not the user’s job to determine what the problem is. Posting a support request is not about you figuring out what the problem is, it’s about you telling the author there is a problem somewhere, and the author helping you fix the problem. That’s what support is, and it’s free.

I still think you should read the articles linked above.