False advertising, surreptitious installation of other unwanted plugins!

For starters, this plugin tricked me into install by saying it would import Yoast’s settings. I went through the Wizard, imported Yoast’s settings, and then when I was done, they weren’t there.

Then I discovered that, compared to Yoast’s poor implementation of schema, the free version of this doesn’t include any, at least not that I could find. They want you, not to buy the pro plugin, in, but to rent it… they want you to “subscribe” (ie, rent) and keep paying them over and over again for the software you already bought that runs entirely on your own system at no further expense to them.

Then I noticed it plastered a bunch of banners all over my admin pages begging me to connect other services I never heard of and didn’t want.

So, I uninstalled it. No problem. Not every plugin is for everybody.

But then the new extra ads didn’t go away. This, I found to be a problem.

I looked and it had somehow installed and activated 3 or 4 other plugins I knew nothing about, never asked for, and did not want! “Optimonster” stuff, I have no idea, I never asked for it, it just surreptitiously installed it. I know it was them because one of the secretly-installed plugins was from the same “All-in-One” company, and because when I combed through and removed them, the new ad banners went away.

I hope I found all of them. I don’t even know if I did, because I don’t know what it installed on my site, I’m going to have to go look in a backup and see what was there before they did this. 100% inexcusable, unacceptable behavior, and I will never trust even a free plugin from this scurrilous company, or from whoever “optimonster” is, or from anyone else associated with this extremely disturbing incident, ever again.

• This topic was modified 2 months, 1 week ago by synthezoid.