rsingel

Hi Skipperdoodle,

I missed this when you first posted this. Since your review (which is fair), we’ve added very different displays that are responsive and very easy to customize.

As for sidebars, we’ve tried to clarify this a bit. What WordPress calls sidebars is different from what we do. The sidebars in Contextly live in the body of individual posts, not in the siderails.

You make these inside an individual post using one of the buttons in the Visual or Text editors.

We’ve made a lot of progress since you last tried us out, and would love to see what you think now.

Hi Manoj,

Sorry for the error. This was a major upgrade for us. We’re working to identify why this is happening for some sites. In the meantime, the best fix is to disable the plugin temporarily.

Again, our apologies for the bug and know that it is our top priority right now.

Sincerely,

RS

Hi,

Unfortunately, right now there’s no way to recreate an auto-sidebar for a story once it’s been deleted and no way to copy and paste sidebars between stories.

We’ll be re-working how some of these work very soon.

BUT, you can hand create a sidebar for that post. So, open the existing post, put the cursor where you’d like the sidebar to go and then hit the Sidebar button on the Visual editor (this is the one on the far right side).

Choose stories, add an optional title/description and then press save.

You may edit any sidebar by highlighting the shortcode and then pressing the sidebar button.

Thanks for using Contextly.

Best –

Ryan

This was fixed in an update.

I haven’t seen this before. Can you post or email me a link to a post that has an autosidebar that isn’t showing up?

[email protected]

That way the tech team can figure out what’s going on.

Thanks!
RS

Hi Andri,

Do you have a link to the page or site that is causing this issue? Links are definitely clickable on an iPhone so this sounds like a problem with just one particular site.

We’d love to get that fixed.

Thanks,

RS
Founder

Li-An,

I think you don’t understand how our service works. We don’t gain anything from sites like yours using our plugin. It costs us money, but we want to help independent publishers so we offer a generous free tier. We make our money charging large publications and businesses.

We don’t sell any site’s data. We don’t sell data about readers. All of the recommendations we make on your site are to your site. This is clearly laid out in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Any company like ours that DOESN’T charge has to make money some other way. That’s either selling the data or inserting ads. We don’t do either.

As I said, before, why don’t you try out the plugin and evaluate it on its merits. I suspect you will quite like it and you fit very comfortably in our free tier.

You’ve used many plugins and we’d love to hear what you think about us AFTER you’ve tried it out.

Sincerely,

RS

Li-An,

Unless you registered with a site other than the one in your profile, I don’t even see how you can judge if the plugin works.

No one is asking you to promote it.

We provide the most powerful and customizable related posts plugin for WordPress. We don’t slow sites down because all the hard work is done on our servers and database. We respect readers’ privacy.

We provide a free tier of service for smaller blogs and charge a reasonable amount for larger sites and businesses.

There are many free related posts plugins that slow down sites because they use the WordPress database, not external servers.

Feel free to rate those highly, but I don’t see how you can even rate our plugin and service without even using it.

Sincerely,

Ryan Singel
Founder

Everything seems to be working well on the site. I’m closing this ticket.

Thanks!

RS

Li Ann,

At 200 to 300 PVs per day, you fit comfortably under 10,000 PVs a month. (That’s 6000 to 9000 PVs.)

The description very clearly says this is a premium plugin. No user is charged without a 3-week free, full featured trial. No credit card is required for the free trial. That includes images being hosted and served from a premium CDN, as well as detailed daily, weekly and monthly statistics.

I think it’s very unfair you are leaving a one-star review for a plugin you have never even installed or used.

Sincerely,

Ryan Singel
Founder
Contextly

Hi,

The images seem to be correct now. Let me know if there’s still a problem with the search.

Best –

RS

You shouldn’t have to do anything to get the images right. It’s clearly something we’re just missing and I’m 99% sure it’s just a bug in the script about the size of the image.

And the dev blog part totally makes sense. Try the search now — I switched your default search to the live blog and I *think* you’ll get much better results. (When you search now, you’ll see two tabs – one live, one dev).

As for pushing it live, let us make sure we don’t have that image bug before you switch over. We should have an answer/fix by EOD Monday.

Let me know if the new search works any better. I’m ryan ataround contextly.com

Ryan

Hi Ben,

I put in a request for this. I suspect what’s happening is that the image parser is incorrectly ignoring your featured images due to their size (150×150). That’s actually a perfectly fine size, but we had some logic before that ignored them if they were below our largest size images (220×125).

We’ll reprocess the images.

As for the search, that’s a known bug for smaller sites. We have a plan to make sure every search works, but we don’t have a date for that just yet.

If you could send me some sample searches that don’t give the results you are looking for, that would be very helpful. You can email those to [email protected]

Best,

RS

Nomago,

Sorry but I didn’t see an email from you. Can you re-send to [my first name] at contextly.com?

Thanks,

RS

HI Nomago –

Could you tell me what your site is so I can look into the photo issue?

Contextly does rely on featured images, but the most important thing we look for is metadata, whether that’s OpenGraph or Schema info. Depending on how long ago you installed the plugin (minutes or hours, some of this may be a caching problem).

Can you email me at [email protected] with some links?

I can also check what’s going on with search.

Thanks,

RS