Mark Zahra

Hi Nestor, I’m really sorry about this, I’m looking into what happened with your purchase. My colleague, Mike, replied earlier via email and I have refunded the double payment today.

We’re now looking into the issue with your download links and will get back to you over email as soon as we have that figured out.

Again, our sincere apologies for this. It’s completely understandable for you to be frustrated with the experience. This is not up to the standards that we hold ourselves to and we’re looking into why it happened to your account and not others in the first place.

Side note: We strive to reply to all emails within 24 hours, but we’re working to bring that down further, especially for urgent cases like this one.

Hi @lacittanews, I’m sorry for the confusion. We have thousands of people using our plugins, even on shared hosting, so we’re still unsure of where the problem lies and whether it’s related to your hosting or not.

I’ve just had a look at your emails and will be investigating the issue again to see if we can find any new potential causes for the errors, which seem to be related to feeds being invalid or paused from what I can see.

Having looked at your website, I also see that you have thousands of imported posts, which is quite a high amount, so this may be causing some slowness or timeout issues as well.

We’ll get back to you again as soon as possible.

Hi @vandengaart, we’re having our developers look into this because the two should not be connected. Spotlight relies on your theme to provide the fonts in the Instagram feed displays, so we’re checking to see what’s happening on your site. We’ll get back to you soon, thank you for your patience.

Hi @jipasveld, can you please follow up on that email and mention this thread so we can know it’s you? We’ll take a closer look at the problem.

I’m sorry, @dylantov, we didn’t deal with this situation well enough.

An apology is definitely warranted. Although I sent you one in my final email after the refund was processed, looking back at my personal conversation with you on Messenger (where you had reached out, aside from the email), I offered my help and informed you that we’re investigating the issue, but at no time had I apologized. That’s on me.

My reply above was definitely not meant to come across as disingenuous or as any form of PR strategy. That’s just not what we do.

As you saw from our personal discussions on Messenger and via email, we started to investigate what happened as soon as we saw your report.

We are definitely at fault for the delayed replies, no matter what caused them, and that’s something we’ve already implemented improved policies for so as to avoid it happening again in the future.

We’re also discussing better ways of handling refund requests on more technical requests and those we cannot reproduce internally or on other sites. In your case, we tried to help solve the issue before going ahead with the refund, which we often do successfully. In this case, we didn’t do enough and made mistakes along the way.

Your hypothesis is the same conclusion we’re coming to as a team. Even if there’s no way to confirm it, we reviewed what happened and the only reason for the live site to be impacted was for your staging site to have been pushing changes to live. Despite the fact that we were not aware that there was such a solution installed on the staging site during our testing, we could have done a better job of understanding your setup and time constraints before making any changes.

Please understand that we’re not ducking responsibility in any way. Quite the contrary. Discussions have continued even until today to figure out what we can learn from this and everyone involved is very aware of where we struggled to live up to our own high standards.

Hi @dylantov, we rarely receive 1-star reviews so I’ve taken the time to reply in a way that would be helpful to others reading this thread in the future.

I was disappointed to see how your support ticket had progressed and a refund did seem like the best option for everyone in this case.

The time between replies was definitely slower than the norm (we do our best to always reply within 24 hours). The delays in your case were mainly due to the issue being so unique and to our team being unavailable for health and family reasons (the timing just didn’t help).

We couldn’t reproduce your issue on our own test sites and haven’t seen it happen to others, so it took a while to figure out what was causing it.

When running our tests on your staging site, we pointed out how we had managed to get the plugin working on one page but not another, so there seemed to be something strange happening but we weren’t able to put our fingers on it.

The initial investigations had shown that the staging site had many plugins requiring updates. Unfortunately, even after working with you to address that problem, we weren’t able to make the plugin work well with your setup.

We did run an internal investigation with regard to your live website, as promised, and it turned out that there were no changes made by our team on that site, including any of the theme files. We take these things very seriously and have had a policy in place for many years not to make any changes to a customer’s live website. As such, we believe that something else happened to cause that change to happen, but I understand that it would be very difficult to narrow it down from your end.

In the future, I do recommend using a plugin such as WP Activity Log when providing access to your site to other people (this is one we use ourselves). It would help you narrow down what happened in such situations and would also help people like ourselves figure out the potential cause of a problem when working with you.

Our team has already started internal discussions to learn from this experience and do better going forward, so above all else, I want to thank you for your patience with us over the past few weeks. A 1-star review is never nice to see, but at the end of the day, they reflect someone’s personal opinion which they have every right to share. All we can do is learn from it.

Hey @weareqed, that notice should only appear once and should never reappear if it’s dismissed. The fact it keeps popping up for you tells me that there may be something conflicting with Spotlight and causing this to happen – perhaps another plugin that uses Freemius, which is what powers these notices.

This isn’t the experience we want for our users so we’ll be happy to take a closer look. I can assure you that what you’ve seen so far is in no way intentional.

You did mention other clients that may be using Spotlight. Do you see this on only one website or are there others experiencing the same issue right now?

Can you please reach out to us through our support form and send us a list of the other active plugins on this site in particular?

Since it’s the holiday period at the moment, it may take us a bit longer than usual to rectify the problem. I hope that’s not too much trouble for you.

Fantastic, thanks @itsadesignthing.

Thanks, @itsadesignthing. We reproduced the issue with your setup.

To fix it, please remove your Spotlight-specific entries in the WP Rocket settings (the ones recommended in our documentation), and then regenerate your preload cache.

Let me know whether that works for you or not. We’ll update the documentation about this too.

@itsadesignthing, what JavaScript Optimizations have you enabled in WP Rocket? We suspect that one of those optimizations may be the cause of this issue. An error in the browser console indicates that React is not being loaded, but we checked and it is being loaded. So something is interfering with Spotlight’s JS in accessing React on your site.

Hey @jipasveld, had you reached out to us via email about this issue?

Thanks, @itsadesignthing, I’ve asked our developers to take a look and we’ll get back to you with more insights soon.

Hi @itsadesignthing, we had integrated Spotlight directly with WP Rocket a while back so that the two work perfectly together right out of the box.

Can you please expand on what issues you’re having on this site so that we can investigate further?

Hi @faisal95bd, this is one we’ll need to look into deeper. Could you reach out to our team here so that we can take a closer look, please? Reference this thread so that we’ll know it’s the same issue.

@jipasveld thanks for the screenshots. Would you mind reaching out to support [at] spotlightwp [dot] com so we can take a closer look, please?

We may need to take a closer look at your site to see what’s causing this error to happen over and over. Since this is a public forum, you may prefer to share certain details with us in private.

We will then update this thread once we find the solution.