Broke 4.3 Password Retrieval Functionality

I wouldn’t. Even if the plugin did have a million downloads, the author still wouldn’t have responsibility to the community to provide support. Open source projects work the other way around.

Sure, open source projects are driven by the community. People who use the software should really be the ones supporting and maintaining it. Just like the WordPress software.

Dear bluedotproductions…

Even if I may sound harsh at first, my end goal here is to improve thing for everyone (you, me, plugin authors and users, etc.). Anyway, on your side, it is not like you cared to be harsh or not. Sounded a bit me, myself and I… and you talk about community? LOL. What help did you offered? Why did not you fix and submitted a patch/solution to the author if it was that urgent? AFAIK, this plugin is free and seem to be popular. I am testing it right now, but I wanted to chime-in as your comments kind-of pissed me off! 😉 From what you say, you are probably capable of “coding” and you are used to work with Open Source since 3-gazillions years.

It might be a lack of wisdom on your part or you just talked too fast out of frustration, but that kind of attitude is the one I don’t want/like to deal with whether I am responsible or not. I intentionally lowered my tolerance/patience for that kind of behavior (I am not the kind to get mad “naturally”, I try to be more positive even when there is issues, even thought I usually aim and reach A+ in what I do, that does not give me credit so I can be an ass). Paid or not. Etc. I qualify this way to act as “polluting other people’s life”.

I don’t know the context, but I guess the author, Jeff, took the time to answer you when you asked him. Chance are you complained and he just explained that he was busy and that he cannot fix his plugin as fast as _YOU_ would like. Nowhere has he said he won’t fix his plugin here and I highly doubt from what I see of him so far that he answered that he won’t fix it. When you are responsible for a lot of things, busy, or you take care of something “important”, you also develop some wisdom, and can you also learn to not work in reactive-mode with everything. That does not mean you are not taking any responsibilities or not contributing (even though nobody here is forced to do anything, he could drop his plugin tomorrow if he wanted, that would be sad for the users, but since it is open source, etc. chance are someone else is just gonna take it over if it worth it).

Hope that you can reconsider your way to do business/interact, no matter if money is involved or not. At first glance, it looks like you are gonna flip if the “support” for the other plugins you “paid for” are not reacting as fast as you would like. Put yourself in the shoes of others instead of complaining like people own you anything, including the one you pay. Because even with paid plugin or someone you had good experience in the past, you are gonna sooner or later be deceived by your expectations, especially if you expect things to only go smoothly and everyone responding to your little needs.

That does not mean to not critic. Critic and discussion is healthy. However, acting like the other is at fault when _YOU_ are deceived, is going above the line that is yours.

No offense, but I hope you can reconsider that way to react and improve that part on your side. I think the author and other people who read your negative intervention would merit some apologies! 😉

Now to answer to what you said directly:

“So its ok to not update your plugin that people are relying on?”

Yes, it is OK. He can does what he wants with it. Especially when dealing with an user/client that try to bully him! Do you think you deserve to have that service? Anytime you want? (no matter if it is free or not, popular or not, etc.)

Has he said that he won’t fix it? Has he said he will fix anything in top-priority? Or he just meant that he won’t do it “right away” as you wished?

“I would say as a plugin developer one has a serious responsibility for being present with WP updates.”

That is your personal opinion or rather expectation. It is not truth or the only acceptable behavior, far from it. Ideally someone would support what he does (especially paid author who sell this as part of their service, but paid or not, if they don’t promise anything time-wise for compatibility with other components they depend on, be it WordPress or PHP, they might have a different way to manage time than you, and some might be more successful overall even if you think in short term, everyone need to react bing bang!)

Not reacting “right away” or “fast”, does not mean you are not responsible. Maybe for you it is that, but I can’t easily agree with this. It is not like you were forced to upgrade everything fast on your side. Maybe you “wanted”…

“1,000,000 downloads? I would say that’s a pretty serious responsibility to the WP community.”

I would like you to see you handle users like you who complaint with a full belly. Maybe you do, and maybe you expect others to deliver what you try to do on your side. It does not mean everyone expect this. What successful project(s) do/did you take care of out of curiosity?

Personally, 1 million downloads, I would say that this is serious success! Now for responsibility, seriously, define for us the problem and what you expected? If it is only a matter of not updating as fast as you would like, that might just be a different way to manage it. As far as I see now, he has updated his plugins.

There are no fixed rules (open source, closed source, paid or not). Unless you commit to (and sometime it is almost dumb to commit to some of those as it will lead to conflict sooner or later). Some people claim that they will give support within X hours period for some services. That is nice in an ideal world. Of course, if you have a web server and your site go down because of it, then that is more time-sensitive / urgent (but that even happened to a giant like Amazon for an extended period of time in some of their data center in recent years).

However, if you build a website, with dependencies and expect everything to work smoothly together and be in sync 100% of the time, then you live in a dream world. There is advantage to reuse what other people have created, and there is also disadvantages. One of it is that this increase the amount of potential problems as it is not the same author. Another is you do not control everything (but if Open Source, you can at least fix it on your side for your own need until the author apply a “clean fix”).

Glad you found some alternative that please you, but I repeat that I hope you can reconsider your way to interact, it is not healthy for anyone, including you.

Now, if I may give you some advices (and you may already know this and if so, I would shake my head!):

– When having multiple dependencies, manage them wisely.

– If you upgrade something, especially the core, like WordPress here, you test it aside before doing it to your production installation. That or have a fallback strategy in case things go wrong like you claimed. If you don’t do this and then complain that not everything work as you expect, you have no one else to blame but YOU. You decided to take a high risk approach with how you manage it, and that risk eventually translated to a problem on your side. Then you probably blamed others for it as that is more easy than wonder if part of the issue might also lay on your side.

There are reasons some Linux distro does not always have the latest version of everything. Of course, they lose a lot of potential users that way, but they guarantee more stability. If you want to run bleeding edge, just expect some issues along the road.

I repeat that you work with dependencies there, so you can’t expect realistically that everyone/everything will be in sync at the same time. WordPress does not create a release each hours, and unless they have a very predictable development cycle, chance are plugin authors does not know what to expect exactly for release. And even if there is stable, edge, etc. Not everyone have the time to maintain their free and open source project like it was their main activity.

On my side, I will try later to bring some constructive feedback to the author if I end up using it in productions for some projects. I can say that without documentation, some part were not obvious as to what they were doing only from the interface (talking of some modules), and ideally, as an end-user, the interface should give me all the information I need (without over-polluting with info of course). That part can be improved. However once I found the documentation that gave the one liner explaining what each module was doing, then it was easy to understand what each of these options were doing. Maybe only including those explanation at the right place would do the job and they will be documented at the right place. As a developer, the documentation (at least the one I found) seemed a little bit outdated (like some filters mentioned in documentation did not seem to be in the code anymore, etc.). Of course, documentation is an extra overhead to maintain, so after we have to find a way to lower the maintenance. Still, so far it looks good. Now let’s see how easy it is to customize everything to our needs. 😉