westopher

Yes, well, this solution is way late and the reviews aren’t the place to give solutions. I went back and forth trying to get this sort of help for a long time on a support thread, with no real solution arrived at.

To put the actual solution in a review, instead of the support thread itself when the problem arose looks strongly to be an attempt to look good in reviews, rather than being actual technical help. And seeing the solution here doesn’t reflect what the actual experience of trying to get help for this plugin was like for me.

As far as offering support for other plugins- this is a plugin that takes MailChimp’s technology and works with it. Without MailChimp, this plugin wouldn’t really exist. Helping with a quick fix (I cannot emphasize how quick a fix this was enough on MailChimp’s dashboard) isn’t outside the purview of a plugin that exists because MailChimp exists.

It’s like if you guys were a plugin dealing with YouTube and I had put in the wrong link for my YouTube video to display; you could just say my link was wrong from YouTube, just go to the url again and copy it correctly. That’s basically what happened here.

Lastly, there is a place for the code from MailChimp itself within your plugin. Making sure input that goes INTO YOUR PLUGIN is working properly is totally within reasonable bounds of making your plugin work properly. That isn’t 3rd party support, that’s support with an input that your plugin takes. If an API from somewhere else isn’t working, it’s within the purview of developers offering support to help get that API working. It’s the same here.

I find this answer above a major cop out.

One thing that is positive is that the support thread is responsive. They clearly do make an effort to help people using their plugin, so it isn’t all bad. Some plugins just leave you hanging, but they don’t. Even if I got ineffective help, the help was there. So, it isn’t 100% bad, I just had a bad experience with something they don’t cover that I think they should cover for the reasons described above.

@authentictech – no, the support was not helpful because they did not actually help me with my problem. I ended up solving it on my own after going back and forth with them for a week or so without them providing meaningful help.

To prove this lack of meaningful help I linked to the thread where the support from this plugin did not address my issue, but that link was removed by @jdembowski .

Essentially, I kept asking for help because my form was broken. The solution was a quick fix on the mailchimp dashboard. It took me a while to find that on my own. Instead of helping me find this quick fix, the developers for this plugin kept on trying to get me to use their plugin’s form creator, which would have resulted in a form that looked a lot worse than the one I had previously built and was trying to fix.

Not only that, the form they were trying to get me to create wouldn’t have gotten me all of the information from the original form. So, no @authentictech , this wasn’t “one of the more helpful interactions with support.” This was actually a mess that cost me a lot of time unnecessarily.

Okay, so I got the form to work by doing what you suggested I shouldn’t do, which is I copied the code provided by Mailchimp on the Mailchimp dashboard. I don’t know why you told me not to do that.

Okay, I built the form with your advice. But the birthday field is just text. My old form had all of this other information too:

<!-- Begin Mailchimp Signup Form -->
<link href="//cdn-images.mailchimp.com/embedcode/classic-10_7.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<style type="text/css">
	#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; }
	/* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.
	   We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */
</style>
<div id="mc_embed_signup">

    <div id="mc_embed_signup_scroll">
	<h2>Subscribe To Ego Actus' Newsletter</h2>
<div class="indicates-required"><span class="asterisk">*</span> indicates required</div>
<div class="mc-field-group">
	<label for="mce-EMAIL">Email Address  <span class="asterisk">*</span>
</label>
	<input type="email" value="" name="EMAIL" class="required email" id="mce-EMAIL">
</div>
<div class="mc-field-group">
	<label for="mce-FNAME">First Name </label>
	<input type="text" value="" name="FNAME" class="" id="mce-FNAME">
</div>
<div class="mc-field-group">
	<label for="mce-LNAME">Last Name </label>
	<input type="text" value="" name="LNAME" class="" id="mce-LNAME">
</div>
<div class="mc-field-group size1of2">
	<label for="mce-BIRTHDAY-month">Birthday </label>
	<div class="datefield">
		<span class="subfield monthfield"><input class="birthday " type="text" pattern="[0-9]*" value="" placeholder="MM" size="2" maxlength="2" name="BIRTHDAY[month]" id="mce-BIRTHDAY-month"></span> / 
		<span class="subfield dayfield"><input class="birthday " type="text" pattern="[0-9]*" value="" placeholder="DD" size="2" maxlength="2" name="BIRTHDAY[day]" id="mce-BIRTHDAY-day"></span> 
		<span class="small-meta nowrap">( mm / dd )</span>
	</div>
</div>	<div id="mce-responses" class="clear">
		<div class="response" id="mce-error-response" style="display:none"></div>
		<div class="response" id="mce-success-response" style="display:none"></div>
	</div>    <!-- real people should not fill this in and expect good things - do not remove this or risk form bot signups-->
    <div style="position: absolute; left: -5000px;" aria-hidden="true"><input type="text" name="b_00c66b3cec2a881902ea9c9ea_cea7e7971c" tabindex="-1" value=""></div>
    <div class="clear"><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" name="subscribe" id="mc-embedded-subscribe" class="button"></div>
    </div>

</div>
<script type='text/javascript' src='//s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.mailchimp.com/js/mc-validate.js'></script><script type='text/javascript'>(function($) {window.fnames = new Array(); window.ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';fnames[1]='FNAME';ftypes[1]='text';fnames[2]='LNAME';ftypes[2]='text';fnames[3]='ADDRESS';ftypes[3]='address';fnames[4]='PHONE';ftypes[4]='phone';fnames[5]='BIRTHDAY';ftypes[5]='birthday';}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true);</script>
<!--End mc_embed_signup-->

With this new form that you suggested I’m just getting text back for the birthday section. That’s clearly not as good as what I had before. How do I get that?

I totally agree with you, and I haven’t copy/pasted any code.

I described what I did above, which was, I tried to use this WordPress plugin to integrate my MC with my WordPress via a form. I originally built the form on either this plugin or WordPress, at this point, I don’t remember which one it was. Everything was working until I edited the form to make all the existing fields mandatory and added additional mandatory fields.

The code I’m referring to is displayed in this WordPress plugin and I put a screenshot of the code in the bottom two images of this url: https://egoactus.com/screenshots/

Can you please give me more details on how to do what you’re telling me? I’m happy to use your solution, as it sounds like a great idea- I just want to implement it properly.

I’m importing a form from Mailchimp itself.

How do I do what you’re suggesting? Can you give me some more detail on that process please?

I have more error logs. Should I send them here?

Thank you for having a look! Below I’ve put your recommendations with my follow up questions below.

“Please go to MailChimp for WP > MailChimp and click “renew mailchimp lists” to pull in the latest data.”

^…done.

“Then go to MailChimp for WP > Form > Settings, make sure the correct list is selected. Fields are setup per list/audience in MailChimp.”

^…I’ve only got one list on MC, so I would this this is correct by default, no?

“Finally go to MailChimp for WP > Form > Fields, now you should see the buttons above the editor corresponding to the fields created for that list/audience and required fields should have a red line around them.”

^…Here is where I’ve been seeing a huge disconnect. The form fields are as you say, they do have a red line around them. (The Email address, first name, and last name are buttons with a red star, but they are kind of faded compared to birthday and zip code, which also have a red star, but birthday and zip code have unfaded colors.) Scroll down to the two pictures on the bottom of this link to see what I’m saying via screen shot: https://egoactus.com/screenshots/

So, from what I see the HTML in the form code and the form itself in the form preview are not updating. I’m so confused. Is there something I should be doing on MC itself? I’m still confused as to why this isn’t working, why the preview isn’t updating, and why the form code isn’t updating, and why this isn’t working overall.

I don’t think I can include screenshots here (if I can, please let me know how).

As an alternative, I posted screen shots on a url on my site for you to see:

https://egoactus.com/screenshots/

These errors all started when I tried to edit a form that was already working to 1) make all of the fields mandatory (only the email was mandatory on the previous field), and 2) during the same editing process, I added the field zip code.

Thank you for helping me with this.

Hi there! Thanks for the response and trying to help me with this.

So, there is no MMERGE6 field actually listed. When I click on the list name that you ask me to, I see a table open below called “Merge fields”

Within that table, I’ve got 3 categories, Name, Tag, and Type.

Name: Email address, Birthday, First Name, Last Name, Zip Code
Tag: Email, Birthday, FNAME, LNAME, MMERGE3
Type: email, birthday (MM/DD), text, text, zip

(In the WordPress Dashboard the table itself is vertical, but formatting it like that in this comment is difficult).

Also, I would like to be able to add a theme to my podcast without getting these errors. I have had one for over a year without a problem, and I’m not sure why this problem is occurring now.