Not ready for prime time.

I would like to preface my below comments by saying this is an initial review subject to revision (more stars) as the product matures.

I recently trialed both the anti-spam and security plug-ins from CleanTalk. During the trial I was a little hesitant to upgrade, not because of performance or service quality, but because it looks like the website and plugin were written by a 12-year-old. With so many spelling and grammatical errors, it makes one wonder what other mistakes might be lurking under the hood.

The pricing is fair, so I decided to purchase access to the premium services for both plugins. There were a couple of quirks with one site and the anti-spam plugin that I could not resolve; however, a quick uninstall and reinstall resolved whatever was wrong.

So far the plugins seem to be doing what they are designed to do, so I looked at another feature, which is the ability to let another user have access to a special dashboard to see statistics for one or more specific sites. To be fair, CleanTalk does not advertise any white label service, which is great, because they make absolutely zero attempts to hide themselves and their products/services from this restricted user dashboard.

In fact, CleanTalk displays customer reviews, offers products and services for sale, including those you and/or the client have already paid for, and more inappropriate content in the dashboard. Imagine billing a client for anti-spam and security services only to have them go to their dashboard and have it appear as if one or both services are not active and they need to purchase them. Not professional at all.

Most clients, IMHO, would be confused by having anything more than the necessary stats with nothing additional to distract them.

In the interest of full disclosure, I created two separate support tickets to bring both matters to the attention of the CleanTalk staff.

For the spelling/grammar issues I was told that they had a new plugin update coming out shortly, and they would review their site and plugin for mistakes, fix them, and then include the fixes in that update. I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

When the plugin update came, I saw no noticeable changes, so I directed them to an area of the plugin and mentioned a mistake without providing any specific details. I wanted to include a screenshot to prove my point; that is not allowed here. The support person replied that I was, in fact, incorrect in my report and that the wording was correct because “It is our decision how to name the processes. To quarantine a file means that the file will be isolated. Not deleted.”

I then showed the support staff the specific error. Only then did they acknowledge that there was an error in the wording. Specifically, the plugin listed the word “Quarantine” twice. The first usage should have instead used the word “Delete”, which matched the description provided on that line. The correct usage (and description) of the word “Quarantine” appeared a few lines later.

This should be enough to have it changed for the next revision of the plugin (still not holding my breath). There is at least one other error in this area of the plugin. I did not point that out specifically as I want to see if the staff is going to bother reading this section again. If they did not already spot the error, they might review it again after reading this review and fix at least that one additional mistake.

In my second ticket I mentioned the client (restricted) dashboard. I was told they had looked at this and deemed there to not be enough interest to implement any white label or similar functionality for that dashboard, although they would look at it again. I really hope they do, because it is a showstopper for me when working with clients.

Since developing my first software solution over 40 years ago, I can say with complete confidence it is better to spend a little more time getting things right rather than fielding complaints first and still having to fix the issues.