Upgrade to PRO 3.5 freezes backend

[Rob]

Hey dutchess! Rob from Modern Tribe here; I head up the Support/Community team, and Barry brought this thread to my attention since it’s clear you’re unhappy with the level of support you’ve been provided. I wanted to step in to see what I could do to help make things right and get us back on a positive path. Right at the offset, let me apologize for the poor experience and inconvenience you’ve faced so far…I know what’s like to be stuck trying to troubleshoot an issue like this. It sucks and can be incredibly frustrating. I feel your pain.

That said, there are a few points I want to shed some light on regarding our processes and how we approach support:

• I realize that this feels like a bug to you, but I would caution against using terms like “malfunctioning plugin” and “correct your bugs” – since it appears to me after actively reviewing this over the past week that the problem here is something specific to your environment: either the host, or something else at play behind the scenes at your site. What I can say definitively is that this is not something we’ve seen other reports of or are able to recreate ourselves. The only possible way we could identify what’s going on here would be to actively log in and debug your site. After reviewing with Barry it sounds like that’s no small task and would require a rather significant amount of support resources to accomplish. Unfortunately we just aren’t set up to provide that level of support for a $65 plugin – the license entitles users to user support that we’re dang proud of, and to future codebase updates. But it doesn’t grant access to an unlimited wealth of resources or one-off integration/customization issues. While we’re generally able to log in and troubleshoot an issue when a situation is widespread and is clearly impacting multiple users, there’s only so far we can go on one-off issues like this. Ultimately this looks to be an integration issue with your site…rather than a bug in the plugin codebase. If you have information to the contrary or if I’ve misunderstood here please do let me know.
• I’d welcome feedback from you on how we could be more helpful during the support process. Your last note suggests that support isn’t particularly helpful and merely recommends the deactivation route; but I can see by reviewing this thread that Barry has done his best to help you in as upbeat and productive a manner as possible. To be honest this thread has already gone on substantially longer than the majority of our support exchanges and is only drawing to an end now that Barry has exhausted his options for troubleshooting.
• Regarding quality assurance: your impression is absolutely correct. We do rigorous QA testing – literally dozens of man hours – per release, and focus on as many edge cases as we can factor in. While we catch the majority of issues there are of course always going to be bugs that only rear their heads in some of the use cases our customers encounter (but that we haven’t accounted for ourselves). This is a pretty standard practice in the development community: a plugin update is built, tested to the extent where we’re confident releasing it, and we patch whatever bugs are reported by the community from there (adding those to our QA checklist as an item to watch for next go around, so edge cases are always being tracked and the QA process is always improving). But I’m not sure any amount of QA testing would have caught this — as I mentioned above, this doesn’t look like a bug so much as an integration issue. And even with your detailed instructions and steps to recreate, we are still unable to create this problem locally.
• As for your last request, to put you in touch with one of the core developers on the team: Barry actually is one of the core developers behind this plugin, and I can assure you he has as strong a command of the plugin codebase as anyone. There is no real means of escalating this issue beyond myself at this time – and since it sounds like that might not be to your liking, I wonder if you wouldn’t prefer a refund? We want to do right by you and want to give you a plugin codebase that better meets your needs and which has a support system more to your liking; while it’d suck to lose you to a competitor, I also want you to know the offer is on the table here if you’d prefer to go that route.

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Anyway – all that to say, I’m sorry once more on behalf of the whole team that we let you down here. If you’d like to continue this exchange in private, or want to take me up on the refund offer (no questions asked), please don’t hesitate to reach out to rob (@) tri.be.

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