Problem with consistency?

Hi Ankur,

Thanks for the review — while I’m certainly bummed to see a 2-star review–especially after trying so hard to support you in these forums–I appreciate your feedback and it means a lot to our team.

One reason I wanted to follow-up directly with you is because of what you had mentioned here:

but look at the massive support threads open…

I’m super sorry if it wasn’t made clear to you when you first opened your support thread, but this support forum is moderated once a week. We’ve tried to communicate that on the main plugin page as well as our forum guidelines but I know those can be easy to miss.

That said, the support we offer here is free of charge to go alongside the plugin, which itself is completely free of charge. In other words, we give the plugin away freely to folks in the community like yourself and offer to check in once a week to help troubleshoot issues that are reported in the forums. For example you had reported an issue with language translation files and we responded one week later with a hotfix to the plugin (version 4.2.1.1) to help address that issue.

I hope you understand that we are constantly working on The Events Calendar to make it as awesome and stable as we possibly can. In fact, we typically release updates to the plugin every other week specifically to address reported issues, which you can follow along with on our release schedule:

https://theeventscalendar.com/release-schedule/

The other part of this is being able to provide support for a free plugin. We offer the free support here on www.remarpro.com, but offer a premium level of support service on our website for those who purchase a product license:

https://theeventscalendar.com/support-forums/

The price of the licenses is what keeps us able to release updates, new features, and jump in here on www.remarpro.com every week to support the community.

… most of them unresolved.

Not every thread is marked as resolved. In fact, many the the support threads we reply to receive no follow-up from there, even if we supply a reply and and answer to the thread. In other words, that number is misleading and equally dependent on those seeking support as it is to us providing support.

I know we still have our ongoing thread open in the forums and we’re happy to continue troubleshooting the issue with you over there. I certainly hope we are able to resolve it with you, and hopefully earn more stars in the process.

Sincerely,
Geoff

Hello Geoff,

Maybe you interpreted my review personally, where I was not personal at all.

Look: I said the plugin is interesting, but with a massive number (indeed) of open, unresolved threads, seems that the plugin is giving many people some kind of trouble, here and then – as I suggested, maybe a consistency issue.

About the “once in a week” moderation, it was clear to me since the beginning, no trouble to find that information, and not also questioned here.

About the plugin being free, I appreciate your hard work and good-will – really. Note that I never demanded anything, and when I asked for help in the support forum, I was never impolite or hasty. Though I’ve opened the thread for more than a month back, your answers was somewhat sparse, not concluding and sometimes even absent. Not until today, after posting this review, I got a response from you which really helped me to find the problem (maybe if I had received this advice earlier, I could have solved this -simple- issue before, not only after more than a month waiting).

But, lets not move away from the review content, the subject that matters in this section.

See, people that looks for a plugin or anything like that, are interested to know the experience of its current users. Lets be honest: if the plugin is free, it still have a purpose – and people will certainly want to know if this purpose is being achieved. Again, even being free, if the plugin gives them headaches, they will leave frustrated. I think this is the main goal of these reviews. I gave here my utmost conclusion about the plugin – interesting, but probably with consistency issues. If this is not what you wanted to read, maybe you could look inwards (‘team’ related) and see what you could do there… not outwards, looking to question the criticism that was made.

Someday I was at a restaurant, where I tasted some not so tasty food. After I payed my bill, when I was leaving the place, the owner asked if it was everything alright. Well, I said it wasn’t actually, some of the food was tasting bad and it was not a good experience. Then he said he would call the cheff to hear me. Well, it didn’t actually happened. Quickly, after listening to my few first words, he started to talk endlessly about how he was thorough with the selection and preparation of the food, etc, etc. He didn’t accepted at all that I said the food wasn’t pleasing. Well, everything he said absolutely didn’t changed not even a little the really bad tasty of the food, and then I left frustrated two times more. :-\

After that day, with my clients, I never listened to their criticism anymore trying to find explanations for them… I just ask sincerely for forgiveness, see if I can find some way to minimize their discomfort, and then looks inwards (‘team’ related) to find a way out so it can never happens anymore.

Hey Ankur,

Thanks a ton for the follow-up! I’m so stoked you took the time to share it because it means a lot.

I can assure you that no hard feelings were taken from your initial review — I was hoping to help add context for what you mentioned could be indications of inconsistent programming and how the number of support threads is certainly not a solid way to draw that sort of conclusion.

Regardless, though, the point of a review is hopefully learn something from it that we can take and use to make things better. If your experience was a poor one, then I would really like to know where it was poor so that we can check it out and learn from it. I have read your first reply and that does not provide nearly the clarity of your experience that the second reply did — which is why I really appreciate you following up here.

I just ask sincerely for forgiveness, see if I can find some way to minimize their discomfort, and then looks inwards (‘team’ related) to find a way out so it can never happens anymore.

Exactly. That’s what we’re all aiming for here. ??

Geoff

@ankur Prem Did you at least installed the plugin. Actually did you ever tried it out?

Perhaps you did it. Because leaving a rate without even tried it out looks unfair

Sure I did, Alicia. Don’t know why you thought otherwise, or even why you posted this questioning.

I am just asking because the subject of the rating looks like a question and the content of your review it looks like it’s based on what you have seen on the forums rather than the plugin itself.

I don’t wish to spam this review, I was just letting you know my point of view.

Cheers

Hey folks,

Just wanted to chime in here to thank both of you for your feedback. It’s especially cool to see you pop in here to share your thoughts, @aliciamoris.

I do know from working directly with Ankur that he has not only used the plugin, but spent a good chunk of time and effort working with our support team to figure out an issue regarding translations. In the end, Ankur was able to pinpoint the issue to a conflict with his theme and was kind enough to share his results with us. Thanks for that, Ankur!

@aliciamoris, I love that your experience with The Events Calendar was great enough for you to respond directly to this review. In fact, if you haven’t left a review of your own (I couldn’t find one immediately), then I’d love to get your full thoughts in there — we really do try to learn from low-rated threads as much as we do high-rated ones, so any feedback you would be awesome and surely be received by us here at Modern Tribe.

Cheers to you both and thanks for using The Events Calendar! It’s this sort of dialogue and feedback that make us love working in the WordPress community. ??

Geoff

Ankur it was not my intention to sound rude. I apologize if that was the case.

I will leave a review for sure.

Cheers