Under New Ownership
-
I’m a little concerned about this plugin being taken over by the people behind Monsterinsights. Can the new owners take a few moments to settle my mind.
1) I dislike MonsterIinsights because it tends to slow websites down and the admin side scripts/CSS frequently conflict with non MonsterInsights admin pages.
Can you confirm that GADWP will not be turned into MonsterInsights or merged with MonsterInsights, and that GADWP will retain its separate code base?
2) MonsterInsights comes in both Lite and Non Lite forms.
Will GADWP remain open source and entirely free for end users?
3) MonsterInsights support staff are not too active in the WP support forums. In fact you released a statement to say that WordPress Support forums should not be used.
What is the plan for GADWP support moving forward?
I appreciate support time and dev time are valuable and need to be rewarded. However, it would be a shame if GADWP turned into MonsterInsights 2 because then I would need to change my GA plugin recommendations and begin the process of extracting GADWP from the sites I manage.
I read the release post on your website. It provided no insight into your future plans.
-
Hi Lee,
1)
We run into plugins not following WordPress best practices on loading scripts/styles that cause conflicts with MonsterInsights. The fact of the matter is when you have 2 million active installs roughly, you run across a lot of badly coded plugins and honest mistakes from other developers. Where possible, we work with the plugin and theme authors in question to resolve the issue (I’ve personally extensively worked with the .org repo and Envato to report security bugs we’ve run across and submit patches to theme authors). Unlike other plugin authors, we almost never have to ask people to stop using a conflicting plugin because we issue compatibility fixes inside our plugin.If you ever run into MonsterInsights loading it’s CSS/JS on any non MI page, please feel free to get in touch with us, as we design our plugins to only load on MonsterInsights pages. The same also goes for speed. We extensively test our plugin, more than most, with extensive automated testing for both the frontend and the backend, as we have to be efficient to work for some of paid customers like Yelp and Bloomberg. If you haven’t tried MonsterInsights in a while, we’ve likely made a lot of improvements since the last time you’ve tried it (for example the 7.0 release) and we’ll be continuing to do so.
Long term, we’re not sure about the future of the codebases, we’re going to have to take a look at them both. I know MonsterInsights is slated for several large improvements this year, and GADWP is going to remain a separate codebase for the foreseeable future. Like all of our products, if we ever decide on major changes we always give users a lot of heads up time about those decisions.
2)
Again that’s something we’re going to have to look at which we haven’t made any decisions on. When we acquired MonsterInsights from Yoast, Yoast’s team already had a Pro and a Lite version, so we just kept that model since it was already in place. We do however own products with completely free (WP Mail SMTP for example), completely paid (OptinMonster for example) and fremium (WPForms for example) models.3)
Across the board, not just MonsterInsights, some of our products use and some of them don’t use the WP.org forums. To be clear, we offer free support for all of our free users, MonsterInsights’s just happens to be facilitated through our website.In the case of MonsterInsights, we don’t use them for a couple key reasons:
1. The www.ads-software.com forums are a notoriously bad platform for large plugins to manage support on. The notifications for replies and new tickets often don’t happen, and finding tickets that need responses when you get to the scale of a top 50 plugin becomes extremely difficult. The forums are great when you have a couple thousand or couple tens of thousands of users, but not when you have many many millions. I’ve personally worked on the underlying codebase that www.ads-software.com uses for the support forms and worked on making them better, but it’s not something that’s a quick or easy fix.
2. It’s far easier to manage when all the tickets are in the same place. When we have both lite and paid customers, it’s just easier to our staff to go to one place (in our case HelpScout) and see a single inbox of tickets needing help.
3. Outdated information in WordPress tickets can’t be removed, and that leads to further support. It’s a lot easier for those people who want self-service to use our documentation on our site which we can keep up to date, and then if they have questions ask us directly.
and so forth
It should be noted, we’re very much supporters of www.ads-software.com and the WordPress project. I personally hold the record for most tickets involved in on WordPress Trac through frequent work on the core project’s code (with many hundreds of patches merged), work on the WordPress core security team which issues the security releases, co-organize a WordCamp, co-organize 2 WordPress meetups, and so forth. As a company, we sponsor a lot of other non-company projects here on WP.org so that they can remain free forever without requiring a paid model to sustain themselves.
That being said, I don’t think that having all support being done through our site is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, most people who use us our service seem to strongly prefer it since we switched to that earlier this year. I don’t know many other top 50 plugins with a dedicated support team for lite users, or any other ones that averaged a support ticket turnaround of 49 minutes on non-paying users last month during business hours. It might be a bit unorthodox, a bit unusual, but it clearly works for our users, and as we’re a company that strives for superior customer experience, we’re pretty happy with how it’s working out for MonsterInsights.
But at the end of the day, we just acquired GADWP so we have a lot of decisions to make and those won’t be made for quite some time until after we’ve had time to finish the transfer processes and spend a lot of quality time thinking about things, but I can say the future of GADWP is a lot brighter now that it is going to be actively maintained and supported.
-Chris
Chris, thank you for your reply. I understand your preference to keep requests in one support forum. I am familiar with the lack of forum support request notifications sent to developers. FYI There is a plugin that monitors the forums and displays new support notifications in a WordPress site’s dashboard: WP Dev Dashboard.
I will keep in mind the other items you mention as updates to the plugin arrive.
Looking at MonsterInsights and GADWP it occurs to me that people choose one or the other based on their own feature preferences and brand perceptions/expectations. Similar to WordPress SEO and All in One SEO where both perform the same job with little functional difference between them but each has its own army of fans except in this case MI and GADWP do have some functional differences. Keeping the two analytics plugins separate would appear to be the way to go to prevent upset among either fan base.
Will you be surveying the user base to ask their ideas?
- The topic ‘Under New Ownership’ is closed to new replies.
