Thank you for the review; however it is unfair considering it is a free plugin. I prioritize support for my paid customers, especially when I am traveling and on vacation as I am now. I cannot currently address the forums, as is the case with many many 5-star plugins – they are also frequently unmanned. I hope you are happy with your decision and wish you luck.
Cheers!
I’m sorry you feel it’s unfair. You responded to this review 3 hours after it was posted, yet I have been waiting over one month for an answer and would very likely have become a paid member had you spoken to me. That was on my agenda.
I’m on Woocommerce to make money selling digital products which I create and I can’t have issues with watermarking, it’s mission critical. I also can’t have the plugin throwing error messages that unmask the PDFs URL so it can be downloaded free again and again!
As you can probably appreciate, my issue was one that shut down my business. You’re here to make money off your plugin, how would you feel if someone stopped you from releasing an update to your premium members and they all left? Because that’s how I feel having been unable to release new products to my own store for a month and having to take several down as well and it’s unfair that I’ve waited so long and held my business up so long for this to be fixed when you can respond fairly quickly and in depth enough to explain to me what the issue is and why it’s happening and how to solve it.
I should add to this: My rating was based solely on my experience with the plugin, the additional mention on support was there in case it mattered to someone else making a decision on which plugin to go with. The support didn’t factor into my rating.
My further expansion on it is personal to you to explain why I felt upset with the support. I have no issues if you’re on holiday. I have no issues waiting a bit for a response. But when I’ve waited a month for any insight and then there’s a reply within hours of a 2 star rating that really sucks, especially when you KNEW it would end up being a sale since the free version was not working for my PDFs.
I hope you had a good holiday, sorry about the lower rating than you wanted but I feel it’s accurate to my experience with the product. If nothing else it would be nice to have some sort of warning it wouldn’t work on specific products instead of exposing my URLs and letting people take the original without stamping free as much as they like.
I think I understand your issue clearly because you have spelled it out much too clearly. Of course even before you did I felt your pain. I run a business, too, and sometimes things don’t work for me. Life is tough sometimes. So let me over-elaborate it from my end.
WaterWoo is free software provided as a gift to the Communtity and without any guarantees of anything more. People who look the gift horse in the face are generally frowned on in this community. Many people use the plugin just fine so when more people start having the same problem as you I will come off my hard-earned vacation and make a fix. Meanwhile, sometimes things have to wait. Sometimes things get lost in the mix. I might have seen your complaint and meant to address it but got distracted. Who knows? Instead of waiting a month for FREE help and complaining you didn’t get FREE help you could have done what most people seriously running a business do: pay for help. You figured this out on your own, thankfully.
I have alerts set up foe when WaterWoo is discussed in forum; however, I have not had the immediate insight on how to set up similar alerts for the support forums. I think it’s a shame it’s not as easy to set up. Anyway, I have been on vacation since March 25 so I offer no other excuses. When I am not on vacation I answer the FREE plugin troubles immediately, and also I’m not that hard to track down online. Had you emailed me via one of my websites (linked to from the WP WaterWoo page) you would have gotten your immediate reply. Waiting one month for a reply to a forum does not constitute an effort so earnest to reach me in emergency that I deserve a two-star review. Try to appreciate the developers who offer you free software instead of you have if to pay hundreds and thousands of dollars to get it working just like YOU need it. Consider I built WaterWoo for the public and NOT special just for you. So if it doesn’t work for you but it works for most other people, that again isn’t a reason for a two-star review. Keep looking. I’m not alone with this sentiment, most WP plugin authors deal with this frustration constantly. Yet we continue to develop and offer free software.
Good luck in your endeavors
The reason for the two stars was because:
1. The product was hit or miss, even on the PDFs it said it supported in the free version. Sometimes it worked others it didn’t.
2. The product wouldn’t handle its own errors when it didn’t work.
3. The product would expose previously hidden urls allowing people to download the file free as much as they wanted without stamping.
I couldn’t reasonably rate this as higher based on my experience with the product, regardless of the support.
