I wanted to like it. But has bugs & poor customer support even at paid pro level

I really wanted to like Shield. It has many great features and a very low price. But, it is not ready for prime time. And based on my short use of it, I’m not entirely confident that it ever will be. One Dollar Plugins has failed on several fronts.

The first problem is that changes to Hack Guard settings do not get saved, they reset to the default options every time I tried it. I’m sure some people haven’t noticed this and so Shield is not doing what they want it to do and what they think it is doing. This bug hasn’t been fixed for at least ten weeks – I see that it was reported on their WordPress plugin page back then and then reported again a week ago by that same user.

The bigger problem is that there is a bug that sometimes caused me to be identified as a security risk when I logged in, even though my user name and password were correct and I was on my own computer. When trying logging in I was sometimes unable to do so (checking the logs, I know it is because “the GASP checkbox was not present”) and then the screen would refresh and an I’m-a-human checkbox was visible for me to check. Clicking this allowed me to login as normal, but earned me a mark. So, a user is required to check a box to log in, but there is no box.

Eventually I got black listed and locked out of my site. Someone answered my e-mail and told me how to override the lockout and that I needed to go remove my name from the black list. After this, even though I sent six more e-mails over six days (including one with my logs so they could try to identify the issue) I never heard from them again. So if I wanted to continue using Shield (I don’t) I would have to go into settings and remove my IP address from the blacklist every few days and be stuck with some default settings.

Based on these two plugin problems and their poor customer service I probably would have given it three stars, but I knock it down to two (and probably should give it only one) because three of the e-mails they have ignored have been requests for a refund. Either the claim on their website that they offer a “100% money back guarantee” is a lie or things are too disorganized in house for them to handle this request. Either way, I have paid for a plug-in that doesn’t work well and I am no longer using.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by Tim.