Works inconsistently and support is not satisfactory.

Hey djezer. Rob from Modern Tribe here; I just saw this review come through and I wanted to reach out – first to thank you for taking the time to write this review, and second to apologize for your poor experience. It’s this type of feedback that helps us grow as a team…even if we’re initially bummed at the prospect of a 1-star rating.

I’ll note right off the bat that you’ve actually written a review for a different plugin here: the PRO plugin and The Events Calendar are two different products. You’re reviewing the former, but suggesting it’s for the latter. Just wanted to set other user expectations here since it’s admittedly sort of misleading – we hope that users will review the product they’re using, not a different version of it.

It’s also worth pointing out that the two things you raised concerns about – the meta walker and the date formatting – are both actively being worked on and are slated to be addressed for our forthcoming release (the meta walker is actually being stripped out entirely). While it’s sort of a bummer to see a negative review about these two features when they’re both going to be non-issues in a matter of weeks, this is totally a failing on our part to properly communicate expectations.

Not sure what you’re getting at regarding “excuses and apologies,” but I’d love to see evidence of this so I can work with the team to improve how we do our jobs. I will say we’ve got a body of 6000+ support threads where the vast majority of users are satisfied and understand the difference between basic user support and customization guidance. Asking users to disable plugins/themes is a pretty standard troubleshooting practice in the WordPress community; I’m surprised you haven’t encountered that in your support exchanges before. It’s the best way to drill down to the source of a problem in as timely a fashion as possible. As for running a test site – this is something I generally expect all developers will do, as it’s a professional approach that protects you from any number of problems. If you’re going to have a production environment, it’s a good development practice to have a staging/test one too. I’ve found that most developers are in agreement on this but perhaps we need to reevaluate what we’re expecting of our users. I thank you for this feedback specifically as it’ll get a conversation going on our team about whether we should provide some middle ground for folks less-versed in these development practices.

It’d have been helpful to hear what the series of disappointments you experienced is, so we could work to improve those for subsequent users – but totally understandable if you’ve since moved on. I wish you the best of luck in finding a calendar solution with a support infrastructure that better meets your needs.

Hey there djezer. Thanks for the reply here, and apologies that it took me a few weeks to see it and get you a follow-up. These are legit and valid points across the board…really appreciate your willingness to come back and give us some feedback on where we went wrong. So often users will write a negative review and then – because they’ve moved on – feel unwilling to provide feedback on what made their experience so poor. It was refreshing to see your last comment here 🙂

Your points about communicating how well (or not) the plugin works on the translation front is hugely valuable – this is something we need to get better at. I’ll work with our translations manager on finding a solution that works for everyone here…thank you for getting the ball rolling on that.

It looks like Casey tried to help out in that linked thread, but I see that we ultimately failed to get you 100% addressed there and that you’ve still got 1-star rating here. I’m going to assume that means you ultimately stand by the original review and have decided to move on…which is a bummer, but is also totally understandable. I hope as we continue to build out and stabilize the plugin, you’ll at some point be willing to give us another shot and hopefully we can earn a higher rating in your eyes.