Too much advertising in the Admin

Hey gecko_guy, I understand your frustration and believe me when I say all were removable from v1.

The sidebars can be hidden using the top right corner where it says Screen Options and unchecking support & share.

The banner is a one time Dismissal and it stores a note in your user profile preventing it from showing again.. EVER.

We follow all guidelines per WP Plugin Guidelines, so these things were built in to adhere to that.

After further testing on a new install, I did find a bug that I will patch immediately with the share metabox not staying hidden. That is not by intention and most effeminately a bug, likely due to it not using the typical metabox container i guess.

But as to the non dismiss-able banner. It shows up only until you click DISMISS. Once you click that as I just tested, it does immediately disappear and doesn’t appear on any further page views. If this is not what you are experiencing then please report it as a bug. In fact if it doesn’t dismiss properly it likely means that another plugin is causing a JS error in the admin which would prevent the dismiss AJAX call from firing giving a problem like you describe. Even so that wouldn’t be an issue with the banner but with another plugin.

As I said we do not try to be obnoxious, and in fact tried to make our stuff as out of the way as possible, with the exception of the banner. I will take your feedback into consideration and would love to have you back.

@gecko_guy – I would like to ask you to check out the latest version and reconsider your review. I did find and fix several bugs related to the banner ad being shown repeatedly, despite dismissal. This in fact was simply due to the meta check before showing having the wrong key, off by 1 character and has been resolved. If you had previously dismissed it, it should now be gone without another dismissal unless you run user meta cleanups.

Also after further testing I have determined that the share bar has to be redone entirely to be hideable as the rest are. I was not aware it didn’t stay hidden until you brought it to my attention and it too will get resolved in the next update.

@danieliser, great to hear you are working on making the plugin better.

I will certainly test and reconsider my initial response. Please be a little bit patient until I get a chance to do so due to other commitments, but I will reply properly once done.

So a quick note to anyone else who happens to read my initial response,

Please don’t take it as a reason to not try this plugin.

It’s highly unusual (in my experience) for the dev of a free plugin version to respond so personally to an older review, and I think this is an indication they are listening to the feedback and working hard on making their product better.

Thanks for the follow up, will update again after revisiting.

@gecko_guy – Well said, and thank you for your considerations. We are in no rush for your re review but would like to recover that star of course to maintain the 5 star average we feel this plugin deserves. With years of effort as well as keeping up responsive free & paid support, we have built a great utility tool that is both easy to use/learn and extremely extendable & customizable.

That said, bugs happen and we HATE bugs, We also LOVE feature & improvement requests. The end goal is to be the best in class plugin on the market.

@gecko_guy – Just a quick follow up to see if you have been able to recheck things. Would like to at least confirm the issues were resolved. Hope all is well. Thanks.

Hi there,

Installed latest version to a sandbox. It is looking quite a bit cleaner I must say, well done.

However, the screen options settings are still not “sticking” properly.

Actually, only one option is not sticking, and that is the “share” option.

Also, the Howdy! Please message can’t be dismissed. Not sure what that even actually means? Howdy!! ??

I have no problem with developers wanting to encourage adopters of their plugin to share it, and maybe this is a bit of a personal bugbear, but I actually can’t stand pushy social share messages in my admin area.

If you intend to keep that sidebar there for marketing purposes without the ability to turn it off, then perhaps you should remove the screen option to disable it (since it doesn’t work).

I often just remove intrusive plugin sidebars with a bit of admin side code so that it doesn’t bug me, and doesn’t affect the upgrade process. (bugbear, see ??

Other than that, looks more refined, but have not had a chance to test the actual functionality properly yet.

Will get there eventually, and I promise to offer a more insightful review when I do. Before I leave another review though (or update this one), I will also open support tickets to resolve any actual “problems” if necessary.

Anyway, waffling aside, well done, looking much better from a UX perspective. Functionality is obviously the key, but design is equally important to make people Love It!

@gecko_guy – The share box not disappearing is actually a bug I have reported with wp core. I do intend on it being fixed, but the only way to fix it currently and I’m guessing it would just be best to do it now would be to convert it to the boxed looking meta panel, you know the one with the collapsible heading bar with arrow. Apparently there is a bug where non collapsible meta panels don’t stay hidden even though you disable them.

Will push that in the next update as a temporary fix until WP core is updated.

As for the only other issue you mentioned, “Howdy” text, you had me questioning that myself. I just did a full search of the plugins code and even all of our extensions. The word howdy or Howdy is not used anywhere in our plugin at all.

That said WP defaults on the admin bar to saying Howdy, Daniel Iser in the top right corner. Where are you seeing that at? Either way I’m certain it is not code coming from our plugin, but until I know where you are seeing it I can’t say for sure its not a bug of some type.

You can verify this yourself using the following search url on our open source github repo for the plugin https://github.com/PopupMaker/Popup-Maker/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Howdy.

Either way I will get the share box addressed in the next update so when you do get around to testing fully it will disappear as expected.

Thanks for your follow up comment and time.

How odd.

Here is a screenshot (note that the image will self destruct in 7 days, for anyone who stumbles on the thread)

https://uploadpie.com/kpfay

It appears on every one of the plugin config pages, but not on any other admin pages. It can’t be dismissed permanently, and there is no sign of it once your plugin is disabled.

Wow, ok. First I have seen it. Can you try commenting out line 201 in the main plugin file popup-maker.php

Looks like this

require_once POPMAKE_DIR . 'includes/admin/admin-notices.php';

I am removing that file in the near future anyways as it is no longer necessary except in one place where I can do without it.

That is the only file that can possibly be the cause and generate admin notices like that. How a notice is getting generated is beside me.

My guess is that since your install is not a new one, that another plugin is somehow generating a notice and our script is causing it to show.

Just did some google searching and can’t find that exact string anywhere coupled with the word WordPress. Didn’t find any matches.