Hey @juliepayne76,
Thanks for opening another ticket, and putting your thoughts into written form. I have several general notes about this ticket, and I hope you have time to read it all.
First, I want to reiterate that we support the minimum version of PHP required by WordPress core. I am not sure if it can put it another way, but we, like core WordPress, are not retrofitting code to fit an older version than that minimum requirement of 5.2.4 (caveat to this later, in the last couple paragraphs). Running an older version of PHP not only pretty much ensures you will have some features of WordPress not work, but you are also opening yourself up to several previously resolved security problems in core PHP.
Moving on, I want to clear up something that I am noticing is an ongoing trend in your recent posts. You seem to be under the impression that our company is ignoring you, and just want to make a quick buck by selling you a plugin. This is not the case. I am not going to list our all your support requests to the helpdesk email or their resolutions, but I will say that our records show that we were the last responders on all helpdesk emails from you. BTW, we actually have a Helpdesk software, where you can login an create tickets, which have histories and tracking mechanisms, instead of long email thread. If you did not get an invitation to it, let me know, and I will have the team send you another invitation so you can start using that instead of standard email.
Furthermore, reviewing the forums, I can see that you and I have had lengthy conversations, to which none require a response from me except the several you opened in the past few days. I do see that a couple of your many requests have gone several days without response, once even as long as a week, but most of them are addressed well before that threshold.
On the same topic, we as a company are not unreasonable. I had planned on extending your license by 2 or 3 months (since we are just over the 2 month mark right now) once you had confirmed your problems were resolved. It seemed like the right thing to do, especially since we collectively have spent so much time getting you up and running. It just seems pointless to do it multiple times while we continue to get you running. I am sure you can agree that doing it incrementally would make it seem like we are holding your license for ransom rather than making good on some promises.
Also, it is not beyond us to issue a refund if the situation requires it. To this point, our customers have been happy with the software and the service, thus the need to issue one has not arisen. But I have talked to the team, and it is an option when all other options have been exhausted. The last thing we want is someone rolling around who bought one of our plugins, was unable to get it to work, and starts bad mouthing a great piece of software because of their bad experience. We are reasonable.
To the point about ‘admin access’. Admin access is NOT a requirement. It is certainly not why your tickets were closed. Your tickets were closed because the discreet problems you reported were resolved, like the GAMP 5.3 problem… that is resolved, evident by the fact that you get further in the process.
Back to Admin Access: Admin Access is a tool. Your complaints seem to be recently centered around not getting enough help fast enough, as anomalous as that is. Having Admin Access makes the entire ‘help’ process much much faster. Case and point, if you had supplied a temporary admin account the day that you reported the GAMP issue, the day I came out with the patch for the same issue, I would have been able to login to your install, update the plugin, and immediately find out that there is another problem preventing you from completing the installation. At that point, instead of requiring you to make another post in the forums, or send another email, I would have been able to see the problem immediately, and issue another change that solves it, immediately, so long as it was within reason. What has spanned days would have been minutes, literally.
I understand that you have reservations for giving Admin Access, even if temporary, and that is totally understandable, as even with my sites I hold the same stance. That is why it is not a requirement. Almost all of our troubleshooting steps can be achieved with a competent WordPress administrator at the wheel, albeit at a much much slower pace. There is only one step that I would normally perform that could not be done by such an administrator, because it involves code. Obviously something has caused you adopted the idea that we simply cannot help you without admin access. Let me assure you that is definitely not the case. As long as you have someone capable in the admin and who can follow concise direction, most steps can be taken. We could even do a screenshare, so that the person can be walked through the steps; however, such a screenshare would need to be scheduled.
Now for this new problem. You are now experiencing a problem with the keychain plugin. This seems to be another PHP version issue. Almost all of the time, such an issue, as stated earlier, is not going to get a retrofit. In this particular case however, there is a valid alternative syntax for calling the function in question that we can use, that will work with your version of PHP, will work with PHP 5.2.4, and will still work even in the upcoming PHP 7 release. Because of this, I will make a patch for it, TODAY, and get it up on the OpenTickets.com website. After that, you will be able to download the new version and get it installed, so that you can add your license.
In addition, I will keep this ticket open, per your request, even though this specific issue will be resolved, until you give me the go-ahead that your entire problem has been resolved. I don’t want you thinking that I closed this one for some arbitrary reason. Besides, in this case, we can simply keep it open as a makeshift Helpdesk ticket until you guys get an account on our real Helpdesk.
I will ping you when I have an update to the keychain plugin,
Loushou
