[Plugin: Gurken Subscribe to Comments] Warnings

Do you really need this? Please don’t visit this forum anymore.

Hi there,

I must say I had tried to contact you in the past in private to join forces on this plugin. I had made several attempts to get in touch with you, but it looks like you prefer to insult people and attach fellow developers instead of working together and delivering a better product to the community.

I won’t bother you anymore, don’t worry.

Thank you, pal.

Camu

Hi,

really? how?

Everything I got was “hey use this plugin” or “don’t use this old one, my plugin has n more features”.

I tell you what, I will install your plugin and compare my changes to the original plugin with your import approach. If it’s working for my blog, it should work for others too. I don’t care that much for this plugin, it can die when your plugin is a working replacement.

Please don’t expect a response in a few days ?? and sorry for my comment in the other thread but from my point of view…

Greetings
Martin

Hi there, I tried to contact you via email last October and November, I think. No answer. Then I thought you had just abandoned your plugin since your most recent replies have been posted months ago. And that is when I started “campaigning” for my version, which you must admit solves most of the issues highlighted by your users. I was just trying to give them a better service. I don’t make any money out of it, actually I spend my spare time… And all I get is this blame? Well, thank you ??

Feel free to test my plugin, I look forward to your feedback

Camu

I tested your plugin. Every function I made to the original plugin seems to be present and working. The import process works, at least with my test blog.

Is it true that you send the confirmation email every n days (n = cleanup days)? I chose a limit of one email per 24 hours:

// check if author has subscribed to a comment in the last 3 months
$sql = “SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM ” . $wpdb->comments . “
WHERE DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 3 MONTH) <= comment_date_gmt
AND LCASE(comment_author_email) = ‘” . $email_sql . “‘
AND comment_subscribe = ‘Y'”;

Your code is A LOT better than mark’s subscribe to comments, but there are a few coding standards violations.

Martin

Martin,

thank you so much for spending some time combing through my code. I really appreciate it. As for your questions:

1) clean-up refers to a cronjob that deletes “pending” subscriptions (the ones not confirmed when double opt-in is enabled) after X days. Right now there’s no way to limit the number of requests per day, but I already have something similar in my todo list: users will be able to choose between a daily digest and instant emails

Sorry,

I submitted an incomplete message by mistake. I forgot to ask you about those code standard violations. Could you please elaborate on that? I’d be more than happy to fix them. Also, contributions to improve the code are more than welcome. I’m currently working on my other plugin (wp slimstat) but I hope to be able to start working on my todo list for StCR soon

Camu

Hello Martin,

we had some issues with your plugin, so we switched to Subscribe to
Comments Reloaded. We are having even more issues with that – the
import of your subscription status from wp_comments table is also
importing subscribed email for spam comments. So then it’s sending out
notification to these spammers. Terrible!

We are willing to fix your plugin and send you the fixes. That will
allow us to go on using your plugin on new sites. Some people
complained about the WP 3.1 compatibility, so we will see if we have
any issues. We noticed some interface problems, so I’m talking mainly
about that.

Let us know if you are willing to review these changes and put them
into plugin and perhaps leave a link of “thank you” somewhere on the
plugin page.

Thanks,
Martin Vicenik

Hi Martin Vicenik,

what my plugin is importing is all the subscriptions recorded by Gurken’s and Mark’s plugins, so if these are spam-related, and it’s sending notifications to them, same thing would have happened with Gurken’s version. Unless I’m totally missing the point of your support request.

Anyway, if there’s anything I can do to improve my “reloaded” version of Mark’s plugin, just let me know.

Camu

Camu,

That’s simply not true.

Mark and Gurken’s version do not send out to spam and trashed addresses. Yours does.

Plus you are creating a completely unnecessary extra table for subscriptions which are better managed together with the comments in the main WordPress comment table (which both Mark’s and Gurken’s versions do).

Your plugin is very dangerous and could easily get a site owner or a server blacklisted as a spammer. We found Subscribe to Comments to include extremely careless programming of critical functionality.

Unfortunately, as you pointed out Martin Gurken is a turtle. We want to pass him important changes to improve functionality of the Gurken Subscribe to Comments and we haven’t heard a word. Not via email not via www.remarpro.com.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Foliovision,

I get a feeling of anger in your words, I don’t see why. We should work all together to improve WordPress and to offer a better service to the community, not try to protect our own backyards and personal interests. Please, allow me to answer to your message one thing at a time:

In my opinion, the table is not unnecessary from a DB design point-of-view. Using wp_comments creates data duplication: multiple comments will hold the information about each single subscription, if I post multiple comments to a given article. The “status” value could be altered for one of those comments but not for the other, thus creating inconsistencies. Scenario: I post a comment to your article and subscribe. A few days later I post another comment. Then, a few days later I decide I want to unsubscribe from that post. In your way of implementing this, you will have to update ALL the entries in wp_comments related to that subscription, in my way there’s only one entry. I just see this a better way to create a model of how things work in reality: one subscription = one entry in the database.

Also, in my opinion it’s never a good idea to modify a “system” table, because WordPress is not aware of the change and that could cause problems. There are other reasons why I decided to use a separate table (query optimization among the others), though.

Having said this, I am starting to think about using wp_commentmeta instead of a separate table, WITHOUT changing its structure, but leveraging it, to carry the extra information that keeps track of the status of a subscription. Avoiding redundancy and data duplication, and achieving optimal performance are my first and most important goals.

Also, my plugin has been voted more than 100 times with almost always 5 stars, and it’s been around only a few months, so I guess that means it’s not such a sh*tty piece of software as you are implying in your message, don’t you think?

My plugin is not ‘very dangerous’ if you know what you are doing: install Akismet or any other spam prevention software, and you will be perfectly fine. It’s like you’re blaming your doctor for giving you a medicine you don’t take. It’s YOUR responsibility, not the plugin’s developer, to use the right tools to avoid potentially “dangerous” situations.

Also, I’d like to ask you to elaborate on your sentence “We found Subscribe to Comments to include extremely careless programming of critical functionality.” That would help me understand what I did wrong.

Love and peace, brother!
Camu

Camu,

We had Akismet installed.

Your software got one of our mail servers banned from several prominent ISP.

Outbound mail is not something to treat as casually as you do.

So yes, I’m not very happy with you and your big empty promises. We were even less happy when we went in and looked at your code and found that you were creating all kinds of unnecessary additional tables.

And even less happy when your “compatibility” with Mark Jacquith’s Subscribe to Comments and Gurken’s Subscribe to Comments turned out to be one way. Getting out of the pickle of installing your buggy Subscribe to Comments Reloaded on several sites was an afternoon of work.

Thanks a lot for misrepresentation, empty promises and a totally casual attitude towards damaging your users sites and reputation.

Your attacks on Gurken are totally unmerited as at least his software doesn’t damage users’ sites and reputation. Gurken didn’t deserve the kicks in the teeth you gave him. Alas, you richly merit yours.

Making the web work for you, Alec Kinnear
Creative Director
https://foliovision.com

Kick in the teeth? Misrepresentation? Stop drinking too much Vodka, Mister “Creative Director” ?? And feel free to use whatever you like, I’m not pointing a gun to your head to force you to use my plugin.

I hope your customers will see how their Creative Director behaves in public forums, and get the right idea about how you conduct your business, man!

Peace and love, brother!
Camu

PS: even InfoGurke said “Your code is A LOT better than mark’s subscribe to comments” here above ?? Just so you know…

Just for the sake of comparison, this is what the other plugins do when they have to decide if it’s time to send the notification:

if ( $comment->comment_approved == '1' && $comment->comment_type == '' )

and this is what my plugin does

if (empty($info) || $info->comment_approved == 'spam') return $_comment_ID;
if (!empty($info) && $info->comment_approved == '1')
...

So how Mark & Gurken’s plugin would be different from mine? Could you please elaborate on that? From what I can see they behave exactly the same way, so if mine sends spam, so do them. Unless you can prove me I’m wrong. With facts and code, not just “nasty words”.

Camu

Hello Martin Vicenik,

your email is marked as unread in my inbox and this thread is
also marked unread in my google reader account. I planned an answer
and a patch for camu this weekend (easter).

You may have noticed the following while reading this thread: I am planning to discontinue my fork. Camu’s plugin makes it much better. And I do like the separate table. If I write a new plugin I will definitely choose an own table. I don’t like the approach that a plugin alters wordpress’s tables.

Subscribe to comments is very old and really ugly but the
functionality is similar to camu’s plugin. Why should your patch not
work for his plugin?

If this is so urgent for you, why didn’t you mail me the patch in the first place?

Greetings
Martin

BTW: Gurken is the german word for cucumber, my “logo” https://www.infogurke.de/.