Erick Danzer

@mike022: Based on your review, it sounds like this is a conflict with a custom header image slideshow you’ve added within an aristeer-based theme. It seems a bit harsh to give a plugin a 1 star rating based on that. In any case, you are welcome to send details. I check your forum history, but as far as i can tell, you never posted about the issue before.

@demonboy: Thanks for the feedback. We’d actually be interested to hear more on what you consider non-intuitive. I think one of the element that others (and I myself) at one point found non-intuitive is the dual system in which you create and manage galleries separately and then insert them into posts. But if you have details beyond that, we’d definitely be interested.

On the download volume… you’re right that the total volume is, in part, related to the fact that it’s old. But when we took it over from Alex in 2012, it was at 4-4.5 million, and it just crossed 10 million last week. Whether you look at it in terms of active ongoing user base or new adoption, NGG continues to be massively popular.

On your comments about taking over the plugin, riding on Alex’s coat tails, and rebranding… As a sole developer, Alex was overwhelmed at the volume of support and some of the feedback he was getting, which is one reason he wanted to let it go. Even with multiple full time people now, it’s still overwhelming, so I understand that. There was nothing nefarious in the rebranding, just an indication that there was a break in who’s maintaining the plugin, which seems quite reasonable. And yes, we do tout the number of downloads; we have released a pro version; but we’ve also put more active development and support into the free version of NGG than it’s ever received before. We believe in giving back to the WP community, and do so by maintaining once of it’s most popular free plugins. I’m just having a hard time understanding why you’d characterize that as a negative.

Finally, “When I last tried to use it last year it was a complete mess…” Yup, I’m sure that was just after we release the massive overhaul of the plugin in August. And it was a bit of a mess. I apologize for that. But things are obviously different after 8 months / dozens of versions. So, yes, we encourage you to give it another look.

Thanks for your time and feedback. (Erick @ Photocrati)

@mvbaxter: Thanks for the feedback. As usual, I usually try to review a reviewer’s forum threads to understand the origin or poor reviews. I don’t see any forum thread from you, but I did find a Pro email thread that may be yours.

If so, I supposed you have some cause for the negative review, because we didn’t really get back to you with the kind of documentation you were looking for. But I’d also point out that you were trying to integrate NGG into a very custom plugin allowing access from multiple users, etc. We did run this past the developers, but we just don’t have the kind of detailed documentation you were looking for readily available.

On the performance issues, the power and functionality we added in the latest version of NGG does come with some small performance trade-offs. But if there’s anything severe enough going on to require an account to be shut down, there’s obviously something very wrong and far outside the norm. I’m not sure what else to say on that without having more details on the issue.

In any case, it’s clear your experience with NGG wasn’t great, and for that we (and I personally) apologize. We wish you the best of luck.

(Erick @ Photocrati)

Translated comment roughly: “I think it needs a major upgrade. It is already quite old plugin.”

@proteinas: Thanks for the feedback, but NextGEN did get a major overhaul as of August 2013 – about as big an update as you can possibly do for an established plugin. And it’s had dozens of releases since then. Are you thinking of something in particular?

@timehillimages: thanks for the feedback, but can you be more specific about the issues you’re having? You mention disliking your galleries, but we haven’t actually changed any gallery displays. So we’re not sure what that means.

I tried checking your forum history, but I only see two posts, this one and a different negative plugin review from 8 months ago. I’m also not seeing anyone who would match your username in our Pro support.

Any additional input would be appreciated (both for us and others).

Thanks (Erick @ Photocrati)

@exxodos – Thanks for taking time to fill in the details. That really is useful feedback for us. Apologies it took me a couple days to respond.

I wanted to offer a few quick thoughts/replies:

*First, I think the difficulties you had started in August last year with our big update. Just to be clear, that’s not when we took it over. We actually took it over a year and half before than and pushed out quite a few small stabilizing updates to the older, legacy version.

*Second, I really do apologize if you are seeing repeated issues after each update. It sounds to me like some of the “issues” are intentional adjustments on our part, and some are bugs.

*Third, you noted “…that was the way the previous owner did it – I got a problem, I contacted him and he helped me modifying the script..” That, unfortunately, is one of the primary reasons Alex wanted to let go of the plugin. There are hundreds of thousands of users for NextGEN. There’s no way a single person – with a regular full time job, who’s doing this on this side – can reply like that to all the support requests he was getting.

*Fourth, I just wanted to run through your list of issues…
– “Shortening of the titles” – yes, we did change this because, as it was, there were alignment problems affecting a lot of NGG users with different title lengths all wrapping. Sounds like those weren’t affecting you, but this change was a response to user demand and improved things for a lot of people.
– “no real “theme” – I’m not exactly sure what you mean here, but you can still use custom templates to “theme” your gallery displays. But we definitely didn’t take away any theming possibilities compared to NGG legacy.
– “Custom CSS not affecting pro galleries” – Yes, this was a limitation with the pro version, because they are powered by galleria and thus have to live in an iframe. We’ve been steadily improving on this. Much like templates, we are setting up a system to store custom css files separately in the wp-content folder so they don’t get affected by updates. But as it stands, yes, for us and any other plugin, if you stick custom files in the plugin’s folder and then update, they’ll get replaced.
– “Updates may or may not work – got 2 database-messups” – that’s a really big deal, and not something we’ve really heard before. And we usually have 100,000 people update the first week after every release. So something odd is going on there, and we’d love to get additional details or troubleshoot it.
– “Ugly deeplinks in pro … that’s definitely a “removed feature” Are you talking about the Pro Lightbox? You shouldn’t be seeing ?post_type=page&p= in your Pro deep links if so. They should look like this: https://www.nextgen-gallery.com/nextgen-pro/#gallery/nextgen-pro/364/0 Also, if you’re referring to pro, it’s definitely not a “removed feature” since Pro and deeplinking never existed before we released it last year. I’m wondering, though, if I’m misunderstanding what you’re referring to by deeplinks.
– “Meta datas get not imported” – the only issue we had with this was that when people select the “resize images on upload” option, it was stripping meta data, but this issue has been resolved. Other than that, we don’t know of any current cases where users are unable to import meta data. If you are having issues, you should definitely send us details so we can check it.
– “sudden all albums doesn’t work anymore” – again, we don’t know of any user case right now where there’s a general issue with albums not working, so if you are having such an issue, it’s news to us and not something shared by other users. We’d be interested to get the details.

–
To summarize everything above, there are 1-2 issue that are deliberate adjustments by us that it sounds like you don’t like, but which are generally responses to user demand; there are a few genuine issues that as far as we know are resolved; and there are few issues here I don’t think we’ve ever heard before (either from you or any other users). On the issues we’ve never heard of, or the ones which we think are resolved where you may still be seeing issues, you should feel free to give us any details.

To be honest, given the nature and number of issues you’re describing, I suspect we’d find that there something uncommon in your server configuration that just doesn’t agree with specific changes we’ve made.

–
Regardless of anything else I say above, it’s obvious you’ve been dealing with these issue. If so, I apologize, and I can see how it would be tiring. So I do sympathize – I’d be frustrated too.

Thanks again for taking time to share your feedback.

Erick

Hi Exxodus –

Just to see if I could understand more what your review was about, I checked your forum threads and noticed this one from 8 months ago:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/cant-change-default-import-folder?replies=4

Is that what you’re referring to? If so, that’s one of the legacy things that was affected that we did address (see response/solution posted in your thread). However, in order to resolve some compatibility issues, we did change the constant names in a subsequent update. Cais, who handles most of our support in the forums went back through any relevant threads to update them, but may have missed yours.

You can still edit that import folder just fine, but the line you use is now:
define( ‘NGG_IMPORT_ROOT’, dirname( __FILE__ ) . ‘/’ );

–
I don’t see any other forum threads from you except that one, which is resolved. So again I’m wondering if you can please add some additional detail about the issues you raise in your review.

Thanks (Erick @ Photocrati)

@exxodos –

We do normally appreciate all feedback, good or bad. But I’m not sure how to understand what you’re saying here, or how other NGG users should read it. Let me respond to a few things separately:

“until Photocrati took it over” – Photocrati actually took over NextGEN Gallery in early/mid 2012, almost two years ago. Does this review apply to your experience since early/mid 2012?

“Basic functions have been removed” – we *never* remove functionality. Our big update in August 2013 did affect some legacy functionality, but that was all very rapidly addressed. There are only two areas where we were lacking more recently. First, we hadn’t updated our translation support since the major update (finally done in 2.0.63). Second, I think there is one specific (and I’ll say obscure) legacy shortcode (out of dozens) that we don’t support currently.
Can you clarify what specifically you are referring to?

“countless social media buttons” – there are no social media buttons anywhere in NextGEN Gallery. I’m not sure if you’re talking about NextGEN Pro, but even there, they only exist in one lightbox – the Pro Lightbox – and you can easily toggle them off in the Pro Lightbox settings.

“Support is quite useless” – again, I’m not sure what the exact complaint is here, but the rate at which we resolve free support forum threads is higher than most plugins, and for our paid support, we clear our inbox to zero twice a day, which means most people are getting responses within hours at most. It sounds like you are a Pro member, and if that’s the case, I know you’re getting timely responses. So is the concern here that we were just not able to fully resolve your issue?
*You mentioned “At the moment you changed anything…” which makes me wonder if you are wanting support for customizations that you made to our code, in which case, yes, depending on the customization, we probably wouldn’t support it since it’s no longer our code.

–
I’d be genuinely interested in getting more detail on some of these points. Thanks and best.

@1998_cc2 – Just wanted to follow up again.

I just checked your forum threads. Looks like the issues you were having were related to the Other Options page not saving correctly. Looking at your thread here:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/error-403-on-other-options?replies=3

This has generally happened when someone has migrated site domains or otherwise changed lightbox URLs. We’ve introduced a fix in .63 for that situation, so you may want to check this and confirm if it’s fixed.

@djf2: any additional thoughts or details here?

FYI – I did try to check for any recent forum threads from you, but your last NGG related forum threads appear to be from two years ago.

@volmering: just following up. I don’t recall every seeing an email come in from you. Did you get a chance to send one?

@domiji: any additional thoughts or details on this?

Hi @whitsey: Thanks for the feedback. NextGEN is working quite well out of the box for most users, so if it’s not for you, we’re wondering if you have somethings specific going on with your site. And while NextGEN offers a ton of options, you shouldn’t need to configure any of them to get it working out of the box – unless, again, you’ve got an unusual site set up of some kind.

I tried to check for forum posts to see what issue you’re having, but best I can tell, your last forum post related to NextGEN Gallery was 9 month ago.

Can you provide any more detail on what issues you’re having?

Thanks (Erick @ Photocrati)

–

PS and FYI – I did google nextgen gallery not loading. Most of the results there are from 2 or 3 or 5 years ago or something like that, and almost every issue noted there is different. NextGEN has been around a long time, and is active 500,000+ websites. So I’m not sure the search tells us much.

If you’re a regular NGG user, which I assume you are, then you know we had a surge of issues around the initial release of 2.0.0 in August 2013, which had a lot of major changes. I assume your review is influenced by that in some way. But we’re eight months later and on 2.0.63, and the 2.x issues are well ironed out at this point.

Again, I mention all this not to discount your review – your feedback is your feedback – but to point out that there’s really no indication either from your post or from general trends in NGG as to what issues you’re actually having.

So any detail would be appreciated, both by us and by any other NGG users.

Hi @k2fly: thanks for the feedback. But I’m noticing your last/only forum post was two years ago and not related to NextGEN. We’d be happy to help you sort things out, but we’d need to know what issue you’re having first.

NextGEN 2.x is working quite well for most users at this point. Most “bugs” are very specific – related ot unusual hosting configuration, local dev sites, different install/site urls, plugin conflicts, site migrations, or uncommon NGG configurations or customizations.

Can you provide any details on you issue?

Thanks (Erick @ Photocrati)

@anant01: NextGEN is working very well for most users, and issues we’re seeing at this point are generally quite specific, usually related to something unusual in hosting, WordPress, or NextGEN configuration.

Looking at your thread, we suspect something similar. Cais responded to your support forum query here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/nextgen-and-integration-still-buggy?replies=2

As noted, it sounds to us like there’s a conflict of some kind. If you’d like to continue discussing it, please feel free to respond in that thread. Without response or additional details, it would be hard for us to understand what issues you’re having.

Thanks.