Unhelpful plugin developers & what to do…

It’s not sugar coating and I’ll just leave it as “I disagree and ask that all people participating here try to limit the venting.”

Back to your original topic for a minute in a positive way by example: When a developer of a plugin isn’t responding or isn’t helpful then there’s a few things the user can try.

1. Outline the specific steps that the user has taken, post what the expected outcome was supposed to be, and post what really happened as a result. Someone may know a work around or identify what the problem was.
   Specific steps can help others understand where your problem is.
2. Help other people having problems with that plugin or theme in the forums too.
   It’s not karma exactly, but by becoming more familiar with other users and their problems can sometimes help you identify and solve your problem.
3. Leave a review for the plugin or theme. When a developer up sells in these forums from the free version here to a commercial product then that experience becomes a valid part of the review. That’s more of a way to share your experience.
   It sometimes gets “He said, she said” and that is ugly but people are often civil.
4. Hire someone.
   Very few like that option but it’s valid. Sometimes what the user wants to accomplish is outside of the developer’s area of responsibility. For example a plugin or theme is supposed to work but customization isn’t something the author will or can support for free.

If a user does not get feedback or support for a free plugin/theme then it may be time to find a replacement. No one has to support anything here and authors are not obligated to even reply to topics.

It’s always cool when they do but that’s 100% voluntary. They don’t need to reply at all.

For commercial products there’s not much that can be done. Generally you can’t get a refund, though many do. You can try the above steps and see how it works out. As long as you set your expectations properly. There have been users who have demanded that their dispute with an author was sufficient to get the author’s plugins removed. That’s not how the plugins work here and unless the plugin author is violating the plugin guidelines, disputes have to stay outside these forums.

Thank you… This response is very helpful. I didn’t identify a particular plugin or author because I don’t want this to be a complaint about them but rather want to identify how wide spread this issue is and open the dialogue with the community. I understand that currently there are no protections in place for users but that shouldn’t negate the importance of questioning if there should be &/or how the users can let WP know that this is a bigger issue.

shouldn’t negate the importance of questioning if there should be &/or how the users can let WP know that this is a bigger issue.

Just going to weigh in on that last bit there.

What plugin/theme developers do with their free plugins/themes hosted here is our concern. We have policies in place to deal with disputes, and we do not hesitate to enforce them.

What plugin/theme developers do with their paid plugins/themes hosted elsewhere is none of our concern. The WordPress foundation will not, and should not, interfere in their business. As it is a business transaction, consider handling it like you would when receiving any defective product you have purchased: Request a refund from the vendor you purchased it from, contact your credit card provider to issue a chargeback if you must, and by all means write a post on your blog or social media outlet detailing your experience.

James, thanks for the clarification. However, WooCommerce shoves us back here, as in, you can’t even post there any longer. The paid plugin authors involving WooCommerce aren’t really all that responsive. The free ones even less so. I mean, it’s ‘free’, so you can’t expect much, right? But where are the standards?! I know ‘ratings’ but I can’t trust those. I mean, do YOU? The plugins you’d think that would just ‘work’, because these aren’t unreasonable business expectations (ex: handling fee be applied to each instance of a product in the cart), simply don’t. Even here, some forums have traction, others do not.

What we’re left to do is to just scream to be heard.

Essentially, the whole open source nature of it all is what’s keeping WP down. If there’s a governing/standards body applicable to instances like this, I’d love to hear from it.

But where are the standards?!

Standards for what? If we know that authors of plugins and themes on www.ads-software.com have no obligation to provide support.

On www.ads-software.com..
If a plugin or theme doesn’t work at all, or doesn’t do what it says it does, then it’s not a big deal. Deactivate it, uninstall it and try another. If you want to vent your frustration with your experience then you can do so on a review of that plugin or theme.

I think we’re slipping off the original topic that was focused on authors for commercial services.

these aren’t unreasonable business expectations

Yes, they actually kind of are.

You’re basically asking why code that could have been developed by, literally anybody in the world, and given away for free, does not meet your exacting business needs.

Do you even realize how insane of an idea that is?

If you have specific needs and the code does not meet your needs, then my advice is simple: don’t use that code. Move on. Find some other system and try that out instead.

Or, alternatively, hire somebody and pay them for custom development work.

Do you have any real idea how much software development costs? To build you a custom, functional e-commerce site for you to sell products is in the 6-figure range, minimum. We’re not talking mere tens of thousands of dollars here. A good software developer is paid around 6 figures per year or higher.

So, when you buy a $400 POS plugin and then it doesn’t work exactly to your needs, then yes, you most certainly have a right to complain to the person you bought it from. But you don’t really have the right to complain about the state of things as a whole without looking at the difference between $400 and $150,000. Because those two things are not going to give you the same results, and you should kind of expect that.

Again, however, everything on www.ads-software.com is FREE. No payments, no strings. Any complaints about paid software should not be made on these forums, or this site, because *we don’t allow paid things here at all*.

WordPress is free.

Well this discussion has kinda veered off in one direction and I appreciate the feedback from all of you, I should mention that my concern with the pugins isn’t just about the paid ones. As a matter of fact I started off with free ones and upgraded to paid in hopes that that would increase assistance & support from the developer (which it hasn’t) and as a matter of fact, the developer has since removed the free version which means I can’t even write a poor review.

You make is sound as easy as removing the plugin, the problem with this idea is that one of the plugins I removed has left crap littered all over my account & THAT stuff is causing problems with other plugins still and I don’t know how to get rid of it.

Accountability whether it’s free or not is important, if I go out & build a code that compromises the security of your site or causes you hours of clean up and fail to assist you I SHOULD be held accountable.

I think what is missed here is that WP if full of noobs such as myself, I’m not “dumb” by any measure (I’m actually a doctor) I’m just new to doing this and I think I’m doing really well for only being 2 months in but what I think some of you are missing is that us noobs don’t know enough to know “how difficult it is” for the developer, or the difference in the quality we should expect based on the cost of the plugin. so please keep that in mind when you’re scolding someone for what they aren’t aware of.

So yes, in the end it does concern me that WP is party to the delivery of a plugin that not only didn’t work but caused problems and it angers me that my efforts to get support by paying for the pro version also failed and there is no accountability to the developer who will continue to prey on others w/o consequences.

Right, so it sounds like your whole complaint here is that one (or possibly more than one) plugin developed on free time and then offered to the community for free is not meeting the code or support standards you expect from someone receiving absolutely no compensation for your use of the plugin.

What should you expect from a plugin offered for free? You should expect code that does what’s described, and it if doesn’t you should find an alternative. You should also expect absolutely 0 support. Most of the time, folks around here offer more, and that’s great, but that’s also in their free time for 0 compensation.

When it’s a plugin you have to purchase, that’s a different matter, but we don’t have those here. You take your complaints to the developer, the vendor you purchased it from, and even your credit card provider if you have to.

As a doctor, I’m sure you can understand the different expectations between care at a professional practice vs. a free clinic, and I’m sure you can also understand difference between how complaints and criticism would be received at each.

The same is true here. If someone offered you something for free, the expectation should be simply that you receive what they offered, and nothing more.

I don’t think that is a good analogy, because during my training, I did work at free/medicaid clinics and we were held to the standards as any other practice, and furthermore if our actions resulted in undue injury to the patient.

So what that looks like in real life is, that if one of our docs caused injury, they were held accountable, not only for the injury caused but also the cost of remedying the issue as well. It didn’t matter if the patient paid for the service in the first place, they placed their trust in us and had a reasonable expectation that we knew what we were doing.

While I’m not suggesting that developers should be responsible for the cost of remedy when their plugin goes rogue and causes problems, I do think they should be a basic expectation that they would support their product to a reasonable level.

And lastly what you keep referring to as a lack of “compensation” is actually not accurate at all, while the developer may not be compensated for their free plugin per se, but the repository serves as a gateway to valuable free advertising for them and drives a ton of traffic to their sites where they peddle their paid wares with the promise of increased support & functionality.

So lets not be naive here and suggest that people are ungrateful for the efforts of selfless developers who do this all out of the “goodness of their hearts” because while that may be true for some, those are not the ones that leave people in a lurch because they actually care about their product.

I don’t think that is a good analogy, because during my training, I did work at free/medicaid clinics and we were held to the standards as any other practice, and furthermore if our actions resulted in undue injury to the patient.

You’re right, there are some strong and amazing morals guiding the medical field, I apologize for that analogy.

A better analogy I suppose would be asking your friend to fix the electrical wiring in your house for free vs. hiring a paid licensed contractor.

And lastly what you keep referring to as a lack of “compensation” is actually not accurate at all, while the developer may not be compensated for their free plugin per se, but the repository serves as a gateway to valuable free advertising for them and drives a ton of traffic to their sites where they peddle their paid wares with the promise of increased support & functionality.

You say like that everyone does it, when in reality less than 5% of the free plugins/theme here are by developers with any sort of paid offering. A bit more run ads on their site, but the revenue from a single visit is somewhere between $0.05 to $0.50.

As for your last paragraph, I find it highly insulting to just about everyone involved in the WordPress community.

EVEN IF I asked my friend to wire my house I would expect my friend to either do it competently, be willing to fix any problems they caused or say they couldn’t do it!

IDK how it goes in the tech world… I won’t pretend I’m that fluent but in the real world, there’s a standard of decency that suggests if one is willing to take on a task (regardless of the reason) and they know others are counting on the outcomes, they have a responsibility to do it in a way that doesn’t cause additional problems for those who trusted you enough to load your plugin. PERIOD.

AGAIN, what this all goes back to is my original belief that I think there should be a separate rating set for noobs (or at least an experience level needed), that way when a half baked plugin is getting good ratings because experienced developers have been able to find workarounds for problems it’s not being misrepresented to noobs who lack those skills and will be up a creek with little support or recourse.

What I think seems to be missed here, is what you may find as a “simple to fix” issue that may result from a bad plugin can be extremely challenging to someone who is new to this, and when said issues impact the security of your site & create a time sensitive problem, you’re forced to pay exorbitant fees for tech help to fix the damage of the “free” plugin.

So, yea, I’m sorry your offended by my last paragraph, it’s reflective of the experience I’ve had here in the last two months.

So, when I got involved in this topic, you made it seem like your complaint was with paid products which do come with reasonable expectations, but are not handled here.

As for free plugins/theme, all I can say is that what you are expecting to be provide as a user of a free plugin/theme is not what most free plugin/theme developers here are expecting to provide, and not what most users of free plugins/themes here are expecting to receive. It’s as simple as that.

We will not be creating a separate experience-based track for reviews. If you feel a free plugin/theme here deserves a review (the free one, not any paid counterpart it may have), leave a review with the rest.

Yes, well, unfortunately the quality of free stuff varies greatly on the internet. A lot of it is very good, best in class. A lot of it is bad, made by amateur developers or those who are just learning how to program. Learning to tell the difference is indeed quite tricky.

In general, simply deactivating and removing the plugin in question won’t cause any ill effects to a site. Plugins don’t usually “leave things behind” because that isn’t how code works. While some plugins don’t clean up after themselves properly, unless the plugin is exceptionally strange, anything it leaves behind is only in the form of extra data, not code. Data that isn’t being used doesn’t have any ill effects to speak of.

That said, this discussion has indeed veered into the realm of general malaise, as opposed to any specific problem to be addressed. With that in mind, I’ll close the thread. The bottom line is that it is well advised to practice good standards for anything. If you have a website, then make a test website somewhere to test things on before putting them on the “live” site. Practice regular backups, so that any “cruft” can be easily dealt with by simply restoring from the backup. General good computing practices of that nature.

And if you find any bad plugins here in the directory, leave a review. If you have any specific issues with plugins doing something untoward or downright malicious, email us at [email protected] about it. We’re happy to take a look at specifics and take action based on what we find. And again, never assume that “pay” code is somehow better, because often quite the opposite is the case.