lenwbrown

You are most welcome Ron! I still keep watch and check out your site and help forums regularly. It’s also great to see you back in regular appearance too.

Best Wishes!

– Len

Thanks for your reply!

Ah, time is such an elusive beast! I never can find enough of that either! ??

Free speech works in both directions. I reply to a few (certainly not a “lot” of) 1-star reviews because I feel it is necessary (that free speech thing).

Aside from vocal freedom there’s also the importance in helping others understand the differences when a review is and is not helpful. Not according to me, but according to the mods who often assert similarly, though far shorter than my verbosity.

And I think you forgot alexandrubr, when you eloquently stated “did anybody ask you anything!?” that, once again, free speech, as you happen to interpret it, should provide me the right as it does you.

I’m not putting you down. I don’t know you. I’m just disheartened that all too many people don’t actually “review” plugins but instead complain they didn’t get what they wanted and they didn’t read the information first to save them time.

I’d considered leaving a 1-star review for your WU plugin because it didn’t do what I thought it should. But then I realized that would be childish of me because I didn’t actually read the documentation first. Ok, I’ll hush up now and move on to the next review (or not).

Touché and good day. ??

I understand your frustration, but this plugin states clearly what it does and does not do and you, like everyone else, made a conscious choice to download and install it. And everyone reads what a plugin does and doesn’t do before they decide to download it, right? ??

This plugin does what it states. This plugin gives the option to pay a small amount of money one time to do what it says it will do when that money is paid. But nonetheless, it does what it states. It does exactly what it says it does.

A review given for this plugin, on this site, should be for the thing or things the plugin claims it will do. One should never rate a plugin based on features that are clearly stated as not included in the plugin being rated. That’s like firing someone for not being able to do something that they clearly stated they couldn’t do when they were hired.

There isn’t a single thing wrong with working (very hard) to develop a plugin, offer it for FREE, and kindly ask that the user consider offering a one-time financial payment for additional features a user may like to also have. If that is unacceptable, there are an enormous number of other plugins that do similar things that can be downloaded. But be forewarned: many of them also require you to pay to unlock some of those features too.

Sure, photos are nice, as are other things about FB. But many, MANY people do not use FB just to share media. Many, like me, use it to share thoughts, business updates and general news. That is why hundreds of thousands use this plugin and are perfectly happy with that – including myself.

smashballoon made a hilariously clever point in another one-star review in which he said that it’s like complaining you didn’t get cheese on a sandwich you were given for free.

To elaborate, you got the sandwich. And it satisfied your hunger and therefore fully served its purpose. But if you want cheese, then you gotta pay for it or find someone else who is offering free sandwiches with cheese.

smashballoon, thank you for your plugin.

But alexandrubr was correct, though a bit misguided. Useless is the right word to use.

However, it’s his 1 star rating and his reasoning that is useless. A rating is supposed to rate, not provide a platform for a bully who feels the need to feel better by giving random 1-star ratings on successful plugins like yours.

Again, thanks for the plugin. And as you said, hundreds of thousands don’t seem to feel this plugin is useless at all. Too bad this rating, like most all 1-stars I see, will never be changed.

P.S. – are you sure you want to hire him to support and maintain your plugin? Unless, of course, you really DO want to make it useless. Jus’ sayin’. ??

– Len

You know, now that I think of it, if there was one thing that could be added, a toggle would be incredible. I could then place a default shortcode around each item on the page, then when logged in as admin and looking at the page, I could simply toggle individual items on and off.

But that is a huge undertaking I’m sure, and surely would result in plenty of people finding compatibility issues too.

But if there were a way to toggle a default shortcode then that would be, well, wow! ??

Fantastic! I just installed your plugin and this was my immediate first and only question after seeing a bit of space where the content was hidden.

Your solution given here completely resolved it.

A very brilliant plugin and I just left you a 5-star rating for it.

Excellent and thanks!

Edit: that did it. ??

carlineeee,

Watermarks can easily be removed. In fact, the plugin author places that information with instructions in two large detailed sections as the first two questions on his FAQ page:

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/easy-watermark/faq/

And it sounds like you experienced an issue with your site that doesn’t involve the watermark plugin if everything is now gone from your site.

…if you would not enjoy me so much in the backend.

OMG I’ve not laughed this hard in ages.

Anyway, staying with the topic, the advertisements can be disabled on the misc page.

Quantumstate, I see that you said:

Saying that ‘PHP is code and CSS is styling’, is trying to make me out as a fool, given what you know of the significant changes I’ve made so far. Thank you very much for that. That is the attitude of a nasty person. But I won’t return the favor, I’ll try and educate you about the conveyance of information.

From:

Several n00b Questions, and a Suggestion

From reading the forum post linked above, it appears that juggledad was extremely thorough, providing point-by-point explanations for each of your questions. He went, in my opinion, above and beyond through and through.

It did, however, become clear you expressed little to no understanding regarding the process of customizing a WordPress theme. As you admitted, you’d just started learning CSS, etc. However, it appears you had no understanding for what css and php are, how they interact, or why they are different and what their purpose is for.

php is the language used to code the theme template pages themselves. That’s the raw code telling WordPress how to display the structure of the pages themselves – such as where to place different things on each page.

css is the language used to code the appearance of the web pages, telling the php code how to render the information on the pages.

For example, the theme’s php code tells where your information will appear on the page – sidebar on the right, menu at the top, links on the bottom, etc.

On the other hand, the theme’s css code tells what your information will look like on the page – making the text content justified, the background a particular color or image, to make buttons change color when you hover over them, etc.

Lastly, there was one very important thing that juggledad failed to mention when he said this:

If you have changed anything in the theme files, those changes will be wiped out during an upgrade.

What he didn’t mention is that you should always use a child theme with any WordPress theme. When you use a child theme, what you’re doing is overriding the default php and css code with your own while making no changes whatsoever to the original theme itself. That way, when the main theme is updated, your modifications will remain intact and not wipeout your changes. When an update for a theme is performed, it does, as juggledad said, eliminate all your changes.

Again, I do hope you don’t take offense at this, because I’m trying very much to help.

A final thought in general, I’ve always been amazed at how many people download themes from here only to spend hours, days and months trying to change things. This means you really didn’t like the theme in the first place if all you planned to do was radically change it from the way it was originally. I’m guilty of this all too often myself too. ??

Happy WordPressing!

-Len

Did you follow the instructions? Once you activate it you must then tell it you want bleeding edge nightlies. Otherwise it defaults to point-release, which would explain your “problem” (it’s actually doing exactly what it says it will). It will automatically stay at 4.1.1…

I changed it to bleeding edge, then went to the update screen and within about 12 seconds I am now running 4.2 RC1.

Oh how I wish there were a better way to rate themes and plugins. grrr. Personally, bbpress gets a fantastic 5 star rating from me because like you, James Huff, I’ve used it for a looong time and really love it.

Unfortunately, the open nature of the themes and plugins and the popularity of WordPress means it only takes seconds to install a theme or plugin. And for some, it likewise only takes seconds for an opinion to be reached that it “sucks” because it requires the extremely complicated process of reading the documentation, changing a configuration setting and, in some cases, a little bit of tweaking to work with a particularly customized theme.

I will admit that I made three or four tries of installing bbPress and it wasn’t until the second or third time I was able to finally get it to appear on my site (it dawned on me that forum and forums were two different things and creating a page named the wrong one meant no bbPress on my site). I also quickly learned that simply ‘activating’ bbPress doesn’t (and won’t) magically make a forum appear on my site out of thin air.

Since then I have learned to be patient. Read the documentation. Ask questions and ask for help politely. And then wait for help to come calling. And miraculously I got more help from people than I ever expected. I also learned that if a theme or plugin has an overwhelming majority of 5-Star ratings, then I knew it was much less likely the plugin “didn’t work” than the reality that it “didn’t work for me” because _I_ was doing something wrong. Usually fixing it was so simple I learned how to insure it never happened again.

Did you take a look at the settings page for the plugin? The first option allows you to change the default size from 512K to a larger size. And as far as file types, it utilizes the WordPress Media Library – so any file type accepted by WP should have no problem being accepted by this plugin (also any ‘limited’ file types would be a restriction in WordPress and not this plugin, since this plugin happily accepts any file type WordPress Media Library accepts).

Before writing this response I checked on my own site and was able to upload and attach to a bbpress post jpg, gif, png, pdf, doc, wav, mp3, avi, mp4, mov, mkv, and ppt. After all that I didn’t figure I needed to attempt any other file types. I was able to upload an avi video file as a bbpress post attachment that was 220 megs in size after changing the allowed attachment size to 256M as well as insuring my php.ini file permitted that size for my server. Sometimes, depending on where your large files are stored (i.e. blob) in MySQL you might need to change a setting there (i.e. my.ini).

There were a ton of settings for this plugin which, prior to seeing your post here, I’d not bothered to really look through. Now that I have, wow! It even lets me choose how the attachments are displayed, such as showing images and videos in a pop out shadowbox. There are also some pretty awesome things that can be done using shortcodes. Another thing I figured out here is that I can ‘force’ a pdf file to download when clicked rather than just open up in the browser (i.e. Chrome).

I’ve been happily using this plugin for months and am really glad I double-checked it when I saw your 1-Star rating and I’m glad I did. I now know it does a lot more than I thought it did. ??

This made my day, thanks.

I greatly appreciate the effort of the plugin authors. I certainly agree with you Jan; seeking assistance with any issues you’re experiencing by communicating with the plugin authors via their forum is a fantastic way to resolve any confusion you may be experiencing with bbPress’ functionality and usage. The forums are extremely helpful. Just skimming the questions asked by others is usually all that is required to find the answer you’re looking for.

Generally, with a plugin that’s been around this long, it’s highly likely others have encountered the same experience as you have – and received a satisfactory answer.