Serious issues and concerns from community

[Mark Cutting]

Ultimate Member developers.

I’m not sure what origin of this upgrade is, but it’s causing absolute pandemonium with WordPress users who have used your plugin for years and now after upgrading to version 2 are witnessing issues across the board – my latest is that users can no longer register, which is a huge reputation issue I’d rather avoid.

There are some extremely negative reviews piling up here, and whilst I of all people realise that mistakes happen, I don’t expect an official release to break my site. Currently, my site at https://www.phenomlab.com feels like a bit of a “developers playground” which just isn’t on for a live site.

Whatever it is you are doing, hopefully your next release will put this right. I’ve cancelled my subscription based on how poorly degraded what was once one of the best plugins around has become, and I, like others, are becoming extremely frustrated by the lack of support – even for paying customers.

My dev site is currently running alternative code to handle registrations etc, and I’m ready to pull the plug on UM if things don’t improve in my production environment. I’ve spent 3 hours trying to debug an issue with OAUTH that turned out to be caused by the “invisible captcha” extension issue reported here.

Very unimpressed, and to be honest, I feel somewhat cheated that I’ve parted with a sizeable chunk of cash for what has ultimately turned into a pile of sh.. (I think you get the idea)

[Mark Cutting]

I’ve also emailed the same text above to the support address. The community would clearly appreciate some formal response to this debacle.

[Mark Cutting]

Contacted both Callum and the Ultimate Member Twitter handles. Hopefully at least one channel will respond. Let’s see.

[pbarmak]

Hey Mark, another frustrated user here. When you say you are running alternatives for registration, etc, would you mind sharing what alternatives you are using? Any plugin that can do registration with email verification, redirecting to login pages, blocking back-end usage, and has hooks built-in so we can customize certain things? Would love to hear of alternative plugins in case we need to switch over.

The beauty of UM is that it pretty easily handled the email verification (with email templates) and allowed logged-in users to register again in order to change username or register into another role (until 2.0 stopped that, which sucks).

[duccsoup]

I’ve been working with their support off their site and they are just completely incompetent and is unable to provide solutions. The problem is, they’ve opened a can of worms with this latest update. IF IT ISN’T BROKEN, WHY TRY TO ‘FIX’ OR ‘UPGRADE?’ These issues are a result of bad code, plain and simple. These fucking idiots and their goddamn incompetent developers are so irresponsible to roll out such a poorly scripted upgrade. I tried rolling back the plugin to a previous version…nope, just managed to break user profiles. I am very close to pursuing legal action against UM as they’ve single-handedly wrecked months of hard work and strong praises from my client only to get a call that their site is now chock full of issues!! FUCK YOU UM!!!

[Mark Cutting]

@pbarmak have a look at theme my login. This is what’s running on my dev site now. It has all you need and more.

[samuraiprojects]

First thing I saw after the update was my login page now had no permissions, the login widget was missing, leaving the splash page of my site looking.. odd.

Am I ever glad WP Rollback works.

[pbarmak]

@mcutting, nice, thanks so much. I’m sure this will help others as well. I’m definitely going to check it out. Appreciate it.

[evollo]

The days when a company can afford to test their new software for months or years has long gone. No one has the money for that anymore … no one is willing to pay for it. Do you remember the disasters we experienced updating from Windows 7 to Windows 10? Microsoft just about took my business down with that one. There were similar upgrade disasters with Mac OS. These are big companies with lots of resources. I never expected to experience the same with a WP plugin, but I get how it can happen with a small company … especially a small plugin dev that gives much of his software away for FREE!

As I understand it, a new, clean install of UM2.0.x works. And some updates from UM1 to UM2 went smoothly. Unfortunately, many updates failed, as did ours.

We decided to stick with UM. For better or worse, it’s taken me 8 days and untold hours to debug all the issues with the UM1.3.88 to UM2.0.x update. The good news is that we’re up and running again with full functionality and only minor glitches that I will probably figure out in the next day or two.

Hindsight is 20/20. The update could have been much better orchestrated. But the new release was necessary to keep up with WP core function.

I’ve been getting reasonable email support from the devs. Communication can be difficult … English is not their native language … but with patience and civility, and multiple emails, they’ve provided the information and support I needed. They did not give up. Neither did I.

This is cheap software for the level of function it provides. The devs are trying to do the right thing.

[Mark Cutting]

This is cheap software for the level of function it provides. The devs are trying to do the right thing.

@evollo I’m sorry, I really don’t agree with this. Ultimate Member only gives you the basics for free – all other elements that make a site what it is are paid extensions – this is the same model that peepso uses. Having been in the IT industry for 27 years, I’ve certainly seen my fair share of failed upgrades, but you really can’t draw a paradigm between Microsoft and Ultimate Member. You only have to look at the other scathing reviews here to realise that there is significant reputation damage.

You clearly are one of the lucky ones. When I asked about a simple 2FA extension, I was then asked how I think it should work ?? Seriously ?? I’m paying for this ? A developers license in fact as a bundle which wasn’t cheap.

[Mark Cutting]

UPDATED: I’ve since had a discussion with Callum (founder) from UM. I’m hoping that we can work together to get these issues resolved, and I’m willing to put up a replica of my live site (users removed) to ensure that all bugs are worked out.