SimplePress Suddenly Starts Charging For Support

  • demonboy

    (@demonboy)


    13 years ago

    My wife has just spent the last four months learning WordPress and SimplePress. She doesn’t work and doesn’t earn money but has spent all her time and effort building a community around her new project. This month it was officially launched and has just taken off.

    Meanwhile it seems the people behind SimplePress have suddenly pulled the plug on their support forum. It is no longer possible to post up a question without paying a fee.

    Now this practice is all well and good and I understand why they want to charge for their support. However there are two issues at stake here: they did not forewarn their users and they offer no free alternative.

    Quite frankly the way in which they have sneakily pulled the plug on their support and back-stabbed loyal users like my wife, who is not the most technically literate, is disgusting. Their argument is that they spend much of their time in the support forums answering questions. If they want to charge for this, no problem, but at least provide an alternative forum for free that they don’t monitor.

    It was only recently that we were trying out the different forums and opted for SimplePress over the others. If they had forewarned my wife about this decision she might have taken it into consideration when choosing her WordPress plug-in. What a waste of time, effort and energy.

    Needless to say we will be migrating to an alternative forum ASAP, leaving behind SimplePress with a very bitter taste in our mouths. My wife will now have to go through a similar learning curve, which you or I might find easy but to a non-technical person this is quite distressing. She is really upset.

    SimplePress ought to be ashamed at pulling a stunt like this.

Viewing 4 replies - 31 through 34 (of 34 total)

  • ya same. simplepress broke after their update when it worked fine before i did the update. not paying just to resolve that either. i went back to phpbb too.

    I’m on these forums due to simple press breaking – their unzip software now always reports that the zip file for the automatic upgrade doesn’t have the right header or footer or something.

    We paid previously, but support wasn’t much to speak of, so we let it lapse. I guess if they aren’t interested in hearing about bugs that presumably are happening to all of their users, there isn’t much point in using simple press any more.

    I have three simple press sites – all which broke with simple press’s last upgrade.

    I am running simple-press on three sites without any problems. Am glad to help trouble-shoot. Post questions on my site at https://www.jmdezigns.com/support/simple-press/

    I do not charge but you do need to register a user account for the site.

    After asking the Simple:press developers for a cheaper solution for my blog, and not getting an answer, I have tried Mingle, bbpress and some other forums.
    Now found the best solution for me!
    I use phpBB (free and SUPER forum) installed on the server in a relatively simple way.
    On WP I installed wp-united to link both systems.
    Runs like a train. And user registration is much better too.

    Sorry for the simple:press people, But I’d rather donate 2x 10€ for a good and stable working solution with unrestricted support than 39$ for something worse.

    cheers,
    Val

Viewing 4 replies - 31 through 34 (of 34 total)
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