BUG: Bounce management no long working

Thanks for the heads up. We haven’t had other reports for this (yet) but the interesting thing to mention is that quite many of the issues faced (perhaps not these) are in the lite version only and not our paid version. In fact, by purchasing the paid one, you would have avoided lots of problems in the past. However, these 2 tickets that you opened this weekend might affect both version since 4.9 included lots of coding changes for the queue. We sincerely apologise for this! Our tests were fine before launching but it seems not quite enough. We are, however, aware that the lite version needs some more coding fixes for the queue versus the paid one. That’s all caused by the below.

In 2020, WordPress forced us to make changes to our lite version as they had disabled it from www.ads-software.com – and the changes were unfair but forced upon us or else they would not reinstate our plugin. That caused many problems. We’ve been fixing them ever since, as soon as someone reported them. You see, they don’t always appear for all lite version customers, so while it seems fine in our tests, it might not be for you and others.

Still grateful for your report! We’ll take a look and fix what is needed.

You add bugs to your free version to force users to buy the commercial edition? That’s brilliant! Seriously, you badly hurt your brand by abusing the WordPress community for debugging.

And blaming the WordPress team for your own bugs is the lamest excuse of a plugin developer I have ever heard!

There is only one reason why the Tribulant Newsletters plugin is full of bugs. Your developers simply don’t care. I only report a fraction of the bugs here. Obviously, your developers never looked at the WordPress error log, which is full of Newsletters error messages.

This bug is a good example. Someone made a major change and obviously didn’t test at all whether the corresponding feature still works.

I recommend your management emphasizes the following statement to all Tribulant developers:

PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS 1% CODING AND 99% TESTING.

We never add bugs to our free version. You misread.

We don’t know where the bugs are. If we knew, we would never launch it like that. We’re not that type of people. To clarify, we hate bugs and issues.

We were forced by the staff of www.ads-software.com to do changes that affected our plugin. You’re welcome to submit a plugin and see how it is to deal with them, or you can research and find how many frustrated developers there are that have to deal with them. Our plugin is complex and heavy. It’s not a small plugin. Lots of files to work through.

The bugs did not exist until WordPress forced us to do changes that did not make sense, even to multiple developers that worked on our plugin. I hope that makes sense.

Some companies decide not to have a free version here anymore because of the above.

In our eyes, our plugin is fine since in our tests, it seems to work. If you find issues, you can mention them and we fix them. If you say “you should be releasing them without any bugs”. For sure, we agree, but how? Things look good to us, and we have to launch updates that fix important issues (we can’t wait as it’s important, or else customers may complain that we’re not launching enough updates (has happened too many times)), while we continue working on other issues. Look at WooCommerce’s changelogs, that will show you that no matter how small or big a company is, we all need to keep fixing bugs.

Again, not all errors in error logs are caused by our plugin. Some are unrelated. If you have a file to share with all errors you found, please do so. You may reach us on our support page where you can share that file if unable to here. We do search our own logs, every time we do updates. Not everyone gets the same errors. It depends on your environment.

Based on previous tickets you have with us, you are quick to blame us, even when it’s not our plugin’s fault. If you have any constructive feedback instead of falsely accusing us for something we did not do nor would ever think of, we’ll be here to take note of it.

Here’s a real example. You reported 2 issues. One of them was related to a library update we did. The files were pushed to the paid version and the lite version. However, we don’t know how the following happened and our team is perplexed as well, some files were missing in the lite version from that library. Thus, one of the errors you experienced and a patch was sent today, under 4.9.1. We tried to replicate to see how those files were missing, and we couldn’t replicate. Perhaps an upload error, connection error, etc. Nonetheless, we’ll be definitely verifying these things closer next time, but it’s not a usual situation for files to not be uploaded when it was at the same time.

The problem is that with each update, there is a concern that crucial features may become dysfunctional. This can make maintenance of the plugin quite costly since one must always test it thoroughly on a separate system before deploying it to a production environment. It’s unfortunate because the plugin is actually quite impressive.

It is is really pitty because the plugin itself is great.

I agree with you. It is tested locally in multiple environments (PHP 7.x and PHP 8.x) and then on our online dev site for free plugins and another for the paid plugin. We did test the parts we updated, but it seems we missed testing the whole plugin. We do our best to make it backward compatible and it’s something I always want to see since I want to make sure everyone can use it successfully, same as when I want to use a plugin made by someone else.