edanzer
Forum Replies Created
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Hey @rafy777, thanks for your review! Just a few quick thoughts:
First, just to clarify, is your 2-star review due entirely to the fact that we’ve asked users to leave us a positive review? Or is it an overall review of the plugin?
You are super welcome to leave a review at whatever level you feel accurately reflects your experience. But I might ask this: if you are having an otherwise positive experience with the plugin, and your main concern is that we ask for a review, do you really think that warrants 2 stars? If not, could you consider bumping your rating up?
Second, asking people to review a product they’re using is a really common practice in the internet era of online reviews. That’s true for all kinds of products, and its true for lots of WordPress plugins as well.
Third, if users ARE having a bad experience with our plugin and they see our notice, can’t they easily follow the link here and give us a negative review (as you just did)? Nothing forces users to leave a positive review, or to leave a review at all. It’s just a request.
Finally, and perhaps a smaller point to make, we currently build and support a large and complex software product, which we give away for free under an open source license which mean anyone who wants can just copy it. We actively support over 1 million+ users of that software, also for free.
Honestly, if you and others are using free software (often for long periods, and some also using free support) I don’t think it’s too much to ask to consider taking 5 minutes to come and leave a review.
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I have the impression you are genuinely concerned or confused or looking for an explanation. Hopefully my response helps put your mind at ease.Regardless, thanks for using the plugin!
Erick (CEO of Imagely and the fellow who wrote the note you posted above 🙂 )
- This reply was modified 9 years ago by edanzer.
@blitzburgh – just a note to say thanks very much for updating us on that. And, yes, if you do get a chance to update your rating, we’d really appreciate it. Point received on the original issue. Thanks!
@jzankowski – Thanks for the feedback. As Becky mentioned, we’re beta testing an update of NextGEN Gallery that redesigns the backend interface. Since you raised this point, I’ll actually share a couple screenshots with you.
An options page:
https://monosnap.com/file/aNSr8o4nnEbR3mDpp0jMN0H4acMHjWThe new Insert Gallery Window:
https://monosnap.com/file/m3GqnKZabkdYnYcHE8JCHHEtEHj4yIThe new designs are also mobile responsive friendly than our current interface. For the record, this is one of the first times we’ve now shared the new designs. You’re welcome to provide feedback.
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On a separate note, as Becky asked, can you review what css issue you addressed?Thanks.
Erick@lesliebigos – thanks for the feedback. I just want to confirm that we don’t know if any general issues with PHP 5.6 or 5.7.
Indeed, we really want to see more people updated to PHP 5.7 and we already know from extensive testing that NextGEN performs best and fastest with PHP 5.7.
So if you want to run NGG with PHP 5.7, we think that’s great. If you do it an have issues, that will mean there’s something very specific to your environment / site and we can probably help diagnose that.
@davidbega – Thanks for the reply. Hope your new solution works, and I honestly wish you the best. Couple quick notes on your points:
1) I’d agree with you on support. And I’d encourage you to try flipping through the first 5-10 pages of reviews for NGG here. Probably one of the most common points made is that support quality for NGG is great. We place quite a bit of emphasis on it. Obviously, that wasn’t your experience, and that’s something I’ll factor in as a data point.
2) I’d agree with you again. But the whole point I was making was that a) NextGEN images DO get indexed, b) that beyond normal indexing, we’ve had ongoing work with Yoast for integration over multiple releases, c) and that even in your case, I’m quite sure NextGEN did index your own images. At the time I checked that page, that page was still running a NextGEN Gallery. And you switched in the last couple days – even under ideal circumstances, new images via a new gallery wouldn’t have been completely indexed yet.
In any case, obviously there was a break down in expectations and experience for you. And that’s what reviews are for. Thanks for leaving some feedback, and good luck with your galleries!
Erick
Just a quick follow up @davidbega – given the various points above, and the fact that your images are actually indexed, any way I can convince you to bump the rating here a bit? Thanks! (Erick)
Hey David – just another quick follow up… It seems from a quick search that your NextGEN images are indexed?
- This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by edanzer.
Hey David – Thanks for the feedback.
You’ve been using the plugin for like 4 years, have had some other issues resolved by us, and have otherwise suggested that it’s a good plugin.
While I can agree looking at your support thread that we really haven’t solved your image indexing issue, given how long you’ve used the plugin, given it has done many things well for you, and given all the the plugin does in general, do you really think a lack of image indexing for you drops the rating from 5 stars to 1 star? Any chance I can ask you to bump this up a bit inline with your overall experience?
I should add (both for David and others reading this) that NextGEN images can be and are often indexed in search. We’re doing anything to specifically inhibit image indexing.
The one big thing that we know we can do to help with image indexing is integration with SEO plugins to ensure inclusion of NextGEN images on sitemaps. We released a Yoast integration for this a year or two ago. But a change by Yoast last year affected our integration.
Our next release (we’ve been working on it for about a month, and we’re wrapping up a week of testing today) actually resolves the outstanding issues with Yoast and ensures NextGEN images are fully included in Yoast sitemaps.
David, I’m not sure if you use Yoast, but obviously this could help quite a bit with your indexing issue.
To sum up: you’ve had an otherwise good experience; image indexing is just one of 100 factors to consider for rating a gallery plugin; we’re not doing anything bad to limit indexing; and we’ve done work to improve indexing in the past, and in our latest sprint.
I’m hoping that, all together, that’s enough to bump that rating a bit. If you do continue to use NGG, I’d also be interested to know if the improve Yoast integration helps at all.
Thanks.
(Erick – CEO)Thanks @joselazovargas! Much appreciated. Are you offering to do a Spanish Peruvian translation if we need it? If so, yes, I’ll have our team keep your name on file and reach out.
@joselazovargas See Scott’s note for some starting points. That said, I’d agree that we need some much better and much more accessible documentation for customizations and extensions.
Given that your primary concerns is around customizations and add-ons (rather than the plugin as it works out of the box), any chance I could encourage you to bump the review to 4 stars? 2 stars off seems like a lot for the issue, even if valid.
Regardless, thanks for taking the time to leave a review!
(Erick, CEO at Imagely)
Thanks Nancy! 🙂
(Erick)
@actionjackson676 – Just to reinforce my point, I figured I’d go ahead and run the numbers. Here are the stats for the last 100 reviews of NextGEN Gallery:
5 stars: 75
4 stars: 10
3 stars: 4
2 stars: 0
1 star: 11Average rating: 4.38
@actionjackson676 About one third to one half of the one stars come from a 3 month period, August – October 2013. That was the initial release of 2.0, and because of the wide scope of changes it created a lot of issues. The surge in 1 stars at that time was justified, of course. But the causes for that surge were long ago addressed. Although they’re no longer relevant, the continue to distort the overall rating of the plugin.
If you calculate out the last, say 100 reviews or whatever (more than most plugin have in total), you’ll see the rating comes out to about 4 stars.
Just to confirm, yes, this was resolved in 2.1.79.
@darren823 … Two quick points.
1) Obviously, if you’re having a site crash, there’s something unique going on. NextGEN Gallery is active on a million sites. If it crashing all of them, the forums would be exploding. So this is an individual user support issue, not a statement about general plugin performance. You don’t seem to have a a thread on our forums, so I can’t diagnose what your issue might be. As Becky noted, if you could actually provide some info, we may be able to give some indication of the issue.
2) While I usually defer to our users on their reviews, the idea that we don’t respond on forum threads is just plain crazy. We have some of the best free plugin support of any major plugin on the repo. We invest a huge of energy supporting 1 million users for free, so this kind of comment is frustrating. Just go to the support threads page and start paging through the reviews, you’ll see that we respond to all of them.
On top of all that, again, from what I can tell from your profile, you haven’t even posted a question on our forum. So the idea that we don’t respond is untrue in general and seems untrue in your particular case as well. If I/we are missing a thread, please feel free to point it out.