Help is on hand!

*Reads*

He logged into the site and resolved the issue in less than 1 hour.

Ha. @ionuttudose Can you explain this extraordinary repeated violation of the rules here please?

Hi @jdembowski,

I’m Horea Radu, co-founder of Extend Themes.

Just wanted to clarify this as I believe it’s a misunderstanding.

The customer that posted the review was using one of our PRO themes and interacted with us privately, only through our support system, which is completely separated from the WP.org forum.

We did not request any information from the customer using the WP.org forum. Is our private communication with the customer violating the WP.org rules in any way?

Also, Ionut Tudose (@ionuttudose) is one of our support engineers. I see that several of his posts where he was asking users to open a support ticket through our system were removed from the forum.

Is asking users (especially PRO version users) to open a support ticket through our system against the WP.org rules?

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

We did not request any information from the customer using the WP.org forum. Is our private communication with the customer violating the WP.org rules in any way?

Yes, it does. I don’t think anyone at Extend Themes has any ill will or bad intentions but this has to stop.

I’ll try and explain. If you have a customer then cool. That person cannot be supported for anything that they purchased on the WordPress community forums here.

If a user, and not a customer that’s important, seeks support and you direct them to your site for that and in the course of that you log into their site then you’re using your support on your site to bypass a forum rule.

It’s basically the same as “We can’t ask you HERE for that as it is not permitted ever. Can you come to our site, email or chat so we can ignore the rule there? WINK, WINK, NUDGE, NUDGE”

(My example works only if you know something about Monty Python and if you do not then I apologize for using a bad example.)

NOTE: Again, I do not think anyone at Extend Themes has any ill will or bad intentions. Honest. But walking around the prohibition here somewhere else is bad. You do understand that, right?

Your customers cannot be supported here. That is not permitted and what happens with your customers elsewhere is none of my or any moderator’s business. Your customers can leave a review on this site if you upsell here. That review can be positive or negative as long as it is their feedback.

When you log into a user’s installation it is not just them in jeopardy. You logged into that site and may be held responsible for whatever bad happens there. How do you think you can prove it was not your fault?

This is what I reply when a plugin author does that.

I’ve deleted your offer to login to your user’s site. I’m am 100% sure you mean well but please never ask for credentials on these forums.

https://www.ads-software.com/support/guidelines/#the-bad-stuff

Now for the why: The internet is a wonderful place full of very nice people and a few very bad ones. I’m sure everyone here is very nice however, by giving some ones keys to your house you are trusting they wont steal anything. Likewise the person who takes the keys is now responsible for the house FOREVER.

If something was to go wrong, then you the author may well legally become liable for damages, which they would not normally have been as their software is provided without warranty.

Please be aware that repeatedly asking for credentials will result in us asking you to repeatedly stop before escalating up to the plugins team.

Usually followed by this.

There are many ways to get information you need and accessing the user’s site is not one of them. That’s going too far.

• Ask for a link to the https://pastebin.com/ log of the user’s web server error log.
• Ask the user to create and post a link to their phpinfo(); output.
• Ask the user to install the Health Check plugin and get the data that way.
• Walk the user through enabling WP_DEBUG and how to log that output to a file and how to share that file.
• Walk the user through basic troubleshooting steps such and disabling all other plugins, clear their cache and cookies and try again.
• Ask the user for the step-by-step on how they can reproduce the problem.

You get the idea.

Volunteer support is not easy. But these forums need to a safe place for all users, experienced or new. Accessing their system that way is a short cut that will get you into real trouble in these forums.

It’s not safe for users and it’s not safe for you. Please do not repeat, that it is always a bad idea.