latest WooCommerce unknown compatibility – Customize Woocommerce

@mksnmks, Sorry for the confusion. The 72 hour delay queue doesn’t actually take 72 hours for us to respond. It’s usually a couple of hours, but we have to give some buffer for the edge cases.

When your message is in the delay queue, please don’t post it again. The reason why your account was marked under moderator watch was because you were excessively bumping. The moderator watch list isn’t permenant and we temporaily flag people just to keep an eye on them. The reason your posts are still being put into the delay queue is because you’re still bumping the threads.

We don’t want to keep you on the list as much as you don’t want to be on it, but we have to see improvements before unflagging your account.

Hi Andrew Nevins (@anevins),

Thanks for getting back to me.
If I had been told what the reason was, then I would have known and been able to do something about it – as in not do it.

The problem experienced is that when I have added a further comment, the comment gets removed, and there is no method of identifying that any activity of any sort had been done. A few days later, it is hard to remember what was done, and what was yet to do.
It would be really handy to have some note attached, whether a text, or iconic emblem/flag to say that a previous comment was removed (and possibly make the comment viewable to the comment author).

Having looked up what bumping might mean, it seems like there is little possibility of drawing a plugin author’s attention back to a topic, that they they have chosen to overlook.
Nor is there a method (like in email), of alerting them as to the importance of the topic.

You will see, that I have done a series of topics related to plugins for woocommerce, that woocommerce does not detect as being compatible with the latest woocommerce update.
It is likely that many users have elected to update woocommerce, even though the plugins are of unknown compatibility. Though this may work okay, or not cause significant problems, it is an imprudent process and trains the user to accept risks that should not be present.
The plugin authors may well posses the know how to create perfectly compatible code, but they are not displaying close enough adherence to woocommerce practice by omitting simple tags in the headers – something which might be expected of proper coding.

I have communicated and endeavoured to re-initiate communication with the remaining authors, and some have responded but are yet to fix, and others have not even responded.
With my re-initiation attempts evidently being curtailed, there is no way of reminding the authors that this compatibility problem is still outstanding.

I do wish to be fair, and have attempted to assist the quality of their projects which I am interested in trying or using.
Being unable to “tap them on the shoulder” (being much lighter than a bump), the only avenue I can think of is to rate and review the plugin, and I would rather do this after they problems are fixed.

Do you have any advice on how to remind a plugin author of a problem they seem to have forgotten about?

Thank you

We have been bad at letting people know of their mistakes before putting them on moderator watch and you’re right that people won’t necessarily know what they’ve done wrong. This is something we’re improving on and hoping to iron out of old moderating habits.

I’ve seen that you’ve put effort trying to get in touch with the author of plugins by posting in their support forums, and I’ve seen that many of the authors have yet to respond.

The thing is, authors that don’t respond probably won’t respond to your bumps or pings too. They could have made a conscious decision not to respond, don’t have time to respond or maybe they don’t know the answer. That’s fine, they don’t have responsibility to provide support, but they are not ignoring you. If they subscribe to their plugin, which they probably do, they receive an email about every thread that gets opened, every comment posted and any review made to the plugin.
For instance, I have subscribed to the Twenty Seventeen theme and I read everything that gets posted, but I don’t respond to everything because of the above reasons.

The situation that I can understand where you’d bump (though we still discourage it) is when the author has started helping you and then communication had unexpectedly stopped.

Overall I don’t think the problem is that authors have forgotten about their support topics, but are not available or do not have knowledge to answer them.

In the long term the best thing to do is to set your expectations of a reply very low when posting in their support forum ??

Whether a plugin has support is a good criterion to judge whether to use the plugin. You will face issues with plugins and it’s important to know there is someone to help when you do.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Andrew Nevins.

If you’ve used the plugin or want to use the plugin and there are problems with it, or a lack of support, you’re welcome to leave a review of the plugin. It’s always good to let the author know of issues using their support forum, but if you’re at the stage of giving up on some plugins and want to have a way of warning other users then a review is a good way to do that. As long as it’s a factual review.

Hi Andrew Nevins (@anevins),

Thanks for the tip.
I know that is the final recourse, but I’d prefer to not to give an unfavorable review.

The fix for this is provided below, by
kaggdesign (@kaggdesign) author of WOOF by Category,
which had alerted to the same problem,
and they found the fix.
So thanks Kagdesign

Hi,

It is very simple. Open main plugin file /wp-content/plugins/woof-by-category/woof-by-category.php and in the first lines you can see the plugin header

/**
* Plugin Name: WOOF by Category
* Plugin URI: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/woof-by-category/
* Description: WooCommerce Product Filter (WOOF) extension to display set of filters depending on current product category page.
* Author: KAGG Design
* Version: 1.5
* Author URI: https://kagg.eu/en/
* Requires at least: 4.4
* Tested up to: 5.0
* WC requires at least: 3.0
* WC tested up to: 3.3
*
* Text Domain: woof-by-category
* Domain Path: /languages/
*
* @package WOOF by Category
* @author KAGG Design
*/

Lines

* WC requires at least: 3.0
* WC tested up to: 3.3

are responsible to reflect compatibility with WooCommerce.

Hello Andrew Nevins,

Time has gone on with this plugin.
I am not sure if there are ways to draw attention to possibly abandoned plugins, or if so, then how to, so if you have any tips on how to go about that – do you have any tips for that please?

This is not urgent – there is plenty of time.
I don’t know what the criteria are for deciding what is abandoned.

The situation with this plugin that indicates that it is possibly abandoned is;
a) No responses to topics from the author for 2 to 3 years (if ever?)
b) No updates since last 3 major releases of WordPress
c) Not compatible with last 2? versions of WooCommerce (for which it is originally designed to work with)
d) the link to the author wpgel.com goes to an asian website that looks like a shopping site (that may have developed the plugin for their site), but it does not seem to show any connection with the plugin.
e) WordPress has been including the warning of it being possibly unsupported, for some months (at least?) now.
f) It has a low user base, even though it has a few thousand downloads, which suggests that many of the previous installations have uninstalled it (probably due to their updating to later versions of WooCommerce).

This plugin showed promised back in its day, and may not need much done to it to bring it up to modern needs.
So if there is a process for handling abandoned plugins, that can lead to them being updated, then may be this is a candidate for that process.

Please can you let me know if you think I should do something about this, either now or after some set time?

Thank you