First off, I want to apologize for the issues you’ve been experiencing with LeadIn and say sorry it crashed on you. We’re working hard to improve the code of the plugin as well as our development + testing processes so that the plugin is more stable and works on a broader set of WordPress sites.
I also want to address your comments so that people reading this thread know the context of the review.
For those unaware, the major error was a bug we found in our contact merging scripts which was not working properly and deleting contacts from one of the LeadIn tables. Fortunately the affected table was only used as a cached datastore that speeds up database queries.
We worked round-the-clock to write a script that restored 100% of the contacts without any data loss. The data restore process was seamless and users would have never even known there was a problem unless we told them. We didn’t have to disclose the issue, but since our team believes in transparency, we proactively let our users known about the problem and how to fix it through upgrading the plugin.
As for the plugin being prone to crashing, yes, we’re aware and are taking measures to ensure our development + testing process is more bullet-proof moving forward. We recently downgraded our development environments to versions of PHP that are 7+ years old so we can support non-updated servers running WordPress.
WordPress also doesn’t have a built in process to beta test new plugin versions before pushing an update to the entire user base. We’re planning to supplement this hole in WordPress by modifying our plugin to allow users to opt into a beta + testing program, similar to how the WordPress core developers test new release candidates. The beta period for each new version should sniff out most of the issues caused by legacy versions of MySQL, PHP and WordPress. If the process works well, we may be able to contribute the code back to the WordPress core so developers can build better plugins.
I’m writing out this long explanation so that you know we’re working really hard to make LeadIn the best possible free marketing plugin for WordPress by addressing issues head on. Thanks again for letting us know about the problems. Your feedback helps us continuously improve our plugin.
Cheers!
