Vova Feldman

Hi @olga711,

This is Vova from Freemius. I’m sorry to hear about your experience. There’s a lot of misinformation that is worth clarifying for others reading it.

PayPal sent you a misleading response. Obviously, there’s nothing to ship back when it’s a digital product like a theme.

Your claim about slow support is unfair. You initiated the dispute on Saturday, during the weekend, and Candid Themes contacted you on Sep 5th (Sunday, and still the weekend), trying to help you out, but they didn’t hear back from you.

Also, deactivation of a license after switching a theme is intentional to allow you to reuse the license on other websites. The license was not canceled. That’s a false accusation.

When you purchased the theme, you agreed to the product’s EULA and refund policy, which states that refunds are processed within 14 days and only if you haven’t yet downloaded the product. Refund requests made after downloading the Product (but before expiry of 14 days from the Purchase date) are handled on a case by case basis and are issued at our sole discretion.

The refund policy of the theme doesn’t cover refunds due to conflicts with 3rd party solutions like NextGEN Pro Ecommerce. The issue may be in the plugin and not with the theme. Regardless, Bijay from Candid Themes tried to help, but you didn’t give them a chance. I’m sure that if they couldn’t fix the issue, they would have refunded you right away.

Anyway, a full refund was already issued.

Hi @thedarkmist, this is Vova from Freemius. Similar to Google Analytics, Freemius helps developers to get valuable analytics about the usage of their plugins and themes so they can make data-driven decisions instead of relying on gut feeling. Regardless, you don’t have to share any of your data, it’s consent-based (GDPR compliant), so you can simply choose to skip the opt-in.

We also have this special Q&A that we’ve created to address any data concerns.

If you have any specific concerns I’m more than happy to answer.

Hi @troywelch, this is Vova from Freemius. Any chance you have the errors/issues recorded somewhere so we can investigate?

Typically errors in the start.php indicate unexpected changes in the filesystem (e.g., folders rename via FTP). The SDK has a failover mechanism, which has got better and better as we discover more uses-cases, but perhaps this one is another edge case that we currently don’t support.

I would recommend installing our fixer plugin in cases like that:
https://github.com/Freemius/freemius-fixer

It would be great if you can send us a dump to [support AT freemius DOT com] so we can investigate.

Hi @tinycoder, it’s Vova from Freemius. What ISP are you using?

Hi @pracko, this is Vova from Freemius. Just to be sure I understand what’s going on in the screenshot you shared – is the admin notice showing on top of a plugin’s information dialog box? Did I understand the issue correctly?

Hi @stevek28, this is Vova from Freemius. I’m presuming that you have one of OceanWP’s paid add-ons installed. When the SDK is checking for software updates for the paid add-ons, our API returns HTTP error 404 to indicate there’s no newer version. This is an expected behavior of a RESTful API, so nothing to worry about.

Hi @lieliskaistm,

This is Vova from Freemius. I’d like to clarify a few things:

• Freemius is not a “spyware” nor “adware”.
• The opt-in is absolutely optional. Nothing is tracked without your explicit consent, and you can easily skip it.
• Usage tracking is a common practice in the software world and becoming more and more popular in WordPress. Many products are starting to incorporate some usage tracking, including popular products that many of us are using like WooCommerce and Jetpack.
• The purpose of the usage tracking is giving product developers some level of visibility on how the product is used, so they can make data-driven decisions instead of relying on guesswork. Which eventually leads to a better products ecosystem for everyone. You can learn more about the reasoning here.

Hope it helps.

Hi there, this is Vova from Freemius. I’m chiming in to clarify several things to reduce confusion:

• The Freemius SDK was added to Ocean Extra, not to the theme. So, if you are only using the theme (without Ocean Extra), nothing changes.
• The updates mechanism of the theme and all its free add-ons remain exactly the same through www.ads-software.com. It has nothing to do with Freemius.
• If you are not using any of the paid add-ons, after installing Ocean Extra, you will be shown with an option to opt-in or skip the usage-tracking. If you don’t want to share your data with the theme’s team, simply click the Skip option. If you already opted-in and like to opt-out, you can do so by going to the themes page in the WP Admin, clicking on OceanWP, and there you’ll find an opt-out button.
• If you are using any of the paid add-ons, you will have to activate a license to use it and to get ongoing updates. Since Freemius is responsible for securely serving paid add-on updates for license holders, the license-related info must be validated through Freemius.
• One last point, we/Freemius do not share/sell your information with/to anyone. The only people that can access it is OceanWP’s team members. Obviously, if there are issues that require our troubleshooting, with OceanWP’s approval, our team can also access the data. Pretty much the same license data that was previously sent to OceanWP.org now simply goes through Freemius, which is much more robust to handle licensing efficiently and reduce the heavy load OceanWP’s servers were facing before. All to all, just like Nicolas explained in the pre-transition announcement back in May, the main goal of the transition is to free OceanWP team’s time so they can focus on improving their products line and providing better customer support while delegating all the eCommerce and licensing related aspects to Freemius.

Hope it helps.

Hi @browniescomtr, this is Vova from Freemius. I just double-checked @javmah’s plugin, the permission to collect diagnostic data is absolutely optional and you can Skip the opt-in. You can learn more about why sharing data with the plugin developer is essential for the product development process here:
https://freemius.com/wordpress/usage-tracking/3819/woo-customers-order-history/

TD;DR; By sharing usage data with the developer they can make better data-driven decisions when working on their product. Which eventually leads to a better product that you as a user will benefit from.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Vova Feldman.

@bradvin I’m so sorry, it slipped from my head (was probably juggling too many things in parallel). I just sent a message to the VIP team, will update when I hear back from them.

Hi @grayson9,

My name is Vova and I’m from Freemius, the company behind the SDK that is used by the plugin and also responsible for the error you encountered. The error was discovered with WP 5.2 and we already fixed it:
https://github.com/Freemius/wordpress-sdk/pull/344/files

We also submitted a track issue that is related to the problem:
https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/47415

Once the @the-rock will update to the latest SDK release, the background error will be resolved.

With regards to the affiliate notice, you can simply dismiss it and it won’t be shown again.

If you did like the plugin I encourage you to give it another chance, the developer is doing a great job to support it, and we and the developer, are very responsive if there are any issues that require attention from our end.

Sorry again for the inconvenience.

Hi @elexem,

Due to WordPress limitations, when a WP Ajax call invoked, there’s no way to programmatically know if the request initiated in the WP Admin or the site front. Therefore, we had to come up with a workaround – adding a querystring argument _fs_blog_admin=true to all AJAX calls initiated in the WP Admin, which then enables the SDK to identify if the call triggered in the WP Admin or not.

So, the fact that you there are AJAX requests with ?_fs_blog_admin=true doesn’t mean that the SDK sends any data. To double check that you can install Query Monitor and check if there are any API calls to *.freemius.com.

Regarding the slow down, try to deactivate Glossary and activate Featured Images For RSS, and see if there’s still an impact on performance. If it does, perhaps the slow down is somehow related to the SDK. If it doesn’t, most likely an issue with Glossary.

Hi @roachslayer, this is Vova from Freemius. First of all, apologies for the inconvenience. It sounds like you hit some edge case with our storage data model. We are not aware of WP VIP to block the debugging page, we’ll contact Automattic for further details. With regards to the fixer plugin, it simply allows downloading our SDK’s stored data, as well as clearing it up to simulate a “fresh” install.

@tstachlewski any idea why it didn’t work?