vinceesq

@juggledad, you can’t have it both ways: be outraged at my suggestion that you are soliciting a job and ask me 3 times in a row what your support would be worth to me.

Well now that you have explained your issue clearly, I spent some time and have a solution. What is my time and the answer worth to you?

Which one is that? Make up your mind, man.

Also, when you suggested you have dug in further and have a paid solution for me, I assumed your previous suggestion that you have quoted above was not applicable any more. You also refused to explain where exactly in the template I should have placed my code.

Anyways, you’re right. You have 20,000 posts, but have you ever counted the number of people you have snubbed or otherwise offended? I personally saw lots of threads in the forums where you are giving ppl an attitude before you would provide the much-needed support.

I think you are leaning towards paid support only, and that’s what you should do, in my opinion. You always sound extremely unhappy when you provide your support for free, and it always comes with an attitude. It’s fundamentally wrong, when you choose ppl that you would be nice with and help them out, and then rebuff others. It’s like a charity work – if you do it, you do it for everyone who needs it, not just to some ppl of your choice. A free forum is a form of a charity work – you come there to help everyone! If you are not prepared to do that – just leave. I also think you already have a solution – it’s right there in your signature after each and every post:

How valuable do you find support on this forum? Valuable enough to donate on a regular basis? My time has value and at the rate donations are coming in, I may not be here much longer…food for thought.

There you have it – just do it, man!

I have also posted this question on Atahualpa’s own “free” forum, and this is the answer I have received from @juggledad:

Well now that you have explained your issue clearly, I spent some time and have a solution. What is my time and the answer worth to you?

While I have nothing against paying for support, I do think that a better approach and the more honest one would be to make Atahualpa’s own forum a premium support only. I do have an issue paying for this solution that others would see and use for free. It particularly pisses me off that there is a solution on www.ads-software.com outlined in my previous post but I can’t even try it without knowing which Atahualpa’s template to use it on. I was basically hoping they would direct me to where I should exactly try it, but…@juggledad wants money… In my world, for @juggledad to hang out on the “free-support” forum and solicit jobs and money from members who think it’s a free forum is not COOL!

I think the theme’s developers should look into this and make a decision – there are lots of free themes out there that come with paid support only. And that’s fine, as long as the users know exactly what they are getting into.

And support only seems willing to help if you pay them

I absolutely agree with this statement. They are aggressively soliciting money for any meaningful support.
Atahualpa is a great theme with more options than probably any other theme out there. However, if you need to change or add things, it’s extremely inflexible. It’s so hard-coded that any solution that you find on www.ads-software.com for free is impossible to implement with Atahualpa unless you are a coder and can dig around to find out how this free solution might work with Atahualpa. This is when the support guys jump in and try to twist your arms and get paid for the solutions.
Just keep in mind that this is a great theme but with paid support!

I have just updated the plugin to the latest version, and everything seems to be working now, at least in FireFox: the scroll speed is fully adjustable and the Rotate Mode seems to be rotating the messages as it should. Also, I double checked the “rel-nofollow” option, and I am happy to confirm it’s working as well.

I don’t know what you’ve done Joe, but the plugin works just fine for the moment. Congrats.

Minor issues:
1. Is it possible to center the scroll? If I set the width to 700px, can I center it? I tried to center the code on the page, like I would do with an image, but to no avail. The scrolls still starts from the right (but not from the far right) and goes into the far left corner (“left direction”).
2. The “up” and “down” scroll direction don’t seem to be working for me.

Joe,
Sorry I wasn’t able to look into your responses above until now.

Basically I gave up on your plugin because, obviously, it’s not ready to work out of the box on all themes and browsers as most other plugins I have used in the past 3 years (and I used a lot!) do.

Following your request I tested the plugin on a different theme (twenty-eleven) and on a different website on the same machine and in two browsers – FireFox and EI. I got the same issues, though! The scroll speed won’t change under any circumstances (it’s faster in EI, though) and the Rotate mode works in just one mode. I also disabled all plugins except yours on this website to see if that would make any difference – it didn’t.

So, now we know that it’s not the theme. You can keep blaming my pc and the browsers, but I don’t really see how the browsers might be responsible for such performance. I am running the latest FireFox and IE versions, and I only have a few extensions in FireFox that never caused any issues.

I can’t test the plugin on other machines because I am not publishing the ticker. By the way, I tested No Follow feature and, guess what, it’s not working! When I ticked this option off and updated the ticker, I got e quick message saying ” Loading Panels Failed”, and there was the error number that I didn’t grab. When I checked the page source of the preview page, the links had no “rel-nofollow” attribute attached to them!

Joe, I understand that this plugin works for you on Mac and Chrome but it simply doesn’t on my HP Compaq and FireFox/EI browsers. I am sorry to say this (particularly considering the effort I put into this to make it work for me) but there are unusual number of conditions the plugin might work under, and I simply can’t spend more time on it. The rating I gave you is fair and reflects my experience. I am not saying it’s not working at all, I am just saying that some of the functions of the plugin I like it for do not work for me, and therefore, I can’t use it.

If there is anything else you’d like to suggest to make it work for me, please do. Otherwise, I’ll wait until you do a complete overhaul, which this plugin probably needs.

The Easy Rotator plugin is no longer an issue: the plugin owners kindly made changes to their plugin to make Ditty News compatible.
The issues I have had while working on the edit page of the plugin in FireFox and IE browsers are now resolved: at least, we can now enter and save text and links.
While those are great improvements, the plugin is still barely usable as The Scroll Mode is extremely slow in FireFox, and only a little faster in EI. The speed setting is somehow not working in both browsers. The Rotate Mode is not functional in both browsers as well.
While I can live with the slow scroll speed I still need the links to be “no-follow”. I have requested this feature, however it’s not clear when it will become available.
I was eager to try this plugin, but I guess I will have to wait until future versions.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I tried deactivating the plugins first, and it turns out that the plugin called EasyRotator for WordPress by By DWUser.com is the culprit. Your plugin freezes when this one is active.
Having said that, I also tried your plugin on a different site, where I don’t have the EasyRotator installed but do have the same theme – Atahualpa. And, it looks like the theme is also not very compatible with your plugin. While I was able eventually to add messages and links, I couldn’t get the scroll speed to work faster – it would drag forever regardless of the values entered.

I yet have to try the plugin on a site with a different theme, but the bottom line is I won’t be changing the theme on the site I wanted to implement the plugin.

Let me know if you would be willing to look into the compatibility issues, for both the EasyRotator plugin and Atahalpa theme. If not, I guess I won’t be able to use your plugin.

On a separate not, I was wondering if the links assigned to text messages are nofollow. And, if not, how do we make them nofollow.

Thanks again for your support.

It is on the top left sidebar.

Thanks, satguy01.

I have to say that a no-reply from the author of this plugin is extremely disappointing.

I need to warn everyone that at no time this plugin should be left enabled on your site as it is extremely resource intensive and will crash your server pretty fast, particularly if you are on a shared hosting. This plugin almost caused me to lose my baby account with Hostgator, as my account has been suspended 3 times in the past 7 days. I have been forced to remove this plugin from all my sites eventually, and only this caused the server to finally come down.

While it appeared the plugin did a good job on some sites removing broken links, it was also totally useless on others. It would find the broken links but would not give me a list of links, just a blank page.

I guess it only works well on smaller sites that don’t have thousands of links. I still have it on some other accounts with my smaller sites, and there has been no complaints from the host with regard to spikes in sever loads.

Anyway, this has been an extremely frustrating experience and the fact that I have not heard back from the owner of the plugin, tells me this is an issue he is aware of but unable to resolve.

Vince