Too Limited to Be Useful–Too Unsupported to Continue

At first this plugin was great. I love the sister plugin, Chamber Dashboard Business Directory, and this feeds (somewhat well) into that.

Then the problems started. You can’t customize the application form AT ALL. And the standard one doesn’t even ask for half the information that’s available to display on the Business Directory side, so if you want to fill all that information out you have to bug your members with ANOTHER email asking them to fill out an entirely separate application and send it back to you.

Next, it kept having weird problems processing payments. I would get a notice from PayPal that a new membership payment had been received, but at the same time I would get inundated with error emails from Chamber Dashboard that there was an error processing the payment, and an email full of incomprehensible broken code. Stated another way, I would receive their payment from PayPal, but Chamber Dashboard would bug out, flood me with error messages, and fail to create a Business Directory listing. Or show an application had been submitted at all.

This only happened every third or fourth application, though, so I thought I’d deal with it, only I was seeing this error, and it was a free plugin after all. I’d give them some slack, especially since I enjoy Business Directory so much.

And then the nail in the coffin: It started showing errors on the customer side, making my website look inefficient. For absolutely no reason, the total due at the end of the application would show double the amount. If anyone braved clicking forward to pay anyways, PayPal had the right amount due, but almost no one did. Applications died on the vine when it showed them owing twice as much as they actually did.

As I mentioned before, this is a free plugin, so naturally you need to make some allowances. They have an option to pay a subscription fee to get support, and I’ve done that on other plugins, mainly when the support included timely responses and customizable options support. However, I believe that even if you’re going to continue to offer a free plugin, you need to make sure the fundamental functions work, or you should just take it down entirely and ONLY offer it as a paid plugin. When there was a fundamental error, such as the two mentioned above, I reached out to them. Both times I got a “we’re aware of this problem, but we can’t help you because you haven’t paid for support.” Basically, we know our plugin is crud, but we’re going to try and extort you for money.

Even if I had paid, there was no foreseeable plan to allow customization of the application, which is the only reason I would have paid.

Oh, and the real kicker? All of these problems happened within three months’ time.