Nice idea, but buddyboss support not good

I’ve had this plugin for around a year. It works well for the intended purpose of forming a “glue” between Learndash and Buddypress. It does have some limitations:
– It “takes over” any BuddyPress group once you’ve associated it with a Learndash Course, no longer allowing the BP group to be customized (e.g. privacy settings, cover photo, etc)
– It forces you to have one and only one “admin” for the BP Group, which is automatically set to the course instructor. If you try to set permissions for someone else to also have privileges, it just resets them to a standard user. This makes the ability to have multiple people running/moderating a group almost impossible.
– It just isn’t very flexible, as the above examples illustrate.

For those reasons I’d give it 3.5 stars. But the real reason for the two stars is support.

I’ve had many times going round and round with Buddyboss support when things didn’t work right. Last year, there was a period of time where my entire web server would get frozen up by the plugin whenever an administrative change was made to the course/site. It took over 45 days of going back and forth with Buddyboss support to convince them it was a BUG. They finally fixed it, after LOTS of wasted time on my team’s part.

Worse still, I recently purchased another plugin of theirs. It is not working as advertised (it is supposed to send email through Sendgrid, and it won’t even connect). After going back and forth with the support rep, this is the message I got today:

“We are not able to debug without having sendgrid access, it will suggest to check with sendgrid support once.”

This is AFTER I gave them full admin access to my site to figure out what’s going wrong. Now they’re pointing the blame at Sendgrid, and asking me to get Sendgrid to debug their plugin for them. *ironic voice* Sendgrid support will I’m sure be receptive to me asking for support on a plugin they didn’t develop. *ironic voice off*

Maybe they’ll eventually figure out why their plugin isn’t working, or maybe I’ll have to get a refund – but either way, it’s a big waste of time going back and forth with a developer who doesn’t quite have their act together, and wants the customer (and other vendors) to figure out THEIR bugs.

So they’re down to two stars for wasting so much of mine and my team’s time.