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Hi folks! Rob here; I head up the support team at Modern Tribe. Thanks a ton for your feedback. Geoff is out of town this week, and honestly given some of the comments in here and the fact that there’s disappointment/confusion coming through in some of the more recent posts…I felt like it’d make the most amount of sense to step in and try to set things straight.
Right off the bat, I would like to apologize for the poor experience you’ve both faced so far. It’s clear that we let you down here, and I think part of that was due to the fact that we falsely set expectations from the offset regarding plugin integration and what the plugin can and cannot do.
The comment about Yoast is a great one, and we have heard this feedback in the past – looking at our internal ticketing system I see we do have a ticket to explore better integration with Yoast, and it has quite a few votes on our UserVoice page as well (http://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/4912419-improve-seo-search-engine-optimization). It’s honestly very tricky to ensure that a code base as complicated as The Events Calendar is be compatible with any number of the 35,000+ public WordPress plugins. We work very hard to ensure that our code is compatible with the most recent versions of the most popular themes, plugins and of course WordPress core. To that end we’d be remiss to not pursue this and deliver what our customers want to see. Better SEO – either through integrating with Yoast or improving our own to better handle things on its own – is on the roadmap. I suspect will be tackled over the next couple of releases once we get the remaining bug tickets – related to problems in the core plugin itself, which we tend to view as a higher priority than how well it integrates with third-party plugins – taken care of.
Out of curiosity: was there documentation or sales copy somewhere that suggested the plugin would integrate with Yoast? We try to be very cautious about the expectations we set – so if we’ve got something out there misleading folks, I’d like to get that cleaned up ASAP so we can spare others your disappointment down the road. Please do point me towards it if so.
There are two other great points raised in here which I want to touch on as well:
* I see a couple comments related to implementing a shortcode. I’m not sure if you saw in our last release, but we introduced our first shortcode in that release, have a few more coming in the release we’re working on now, and will be adding even more in the 4.0 build that is coming next. Preserving all calendar functionality in a shortcode is no small feat – hence why it’s taken us so long – and while we want to get it out for you guys, we also want to make sure it’s built stable and adequately tested. We’re confident the community will be excited at the finished product.
* Riza, thanks for bringing the “closed” thread functionality to our attention – we recently moved from tri.be to theeventscalendar.com and it looks like that’s a bug that slipped through. I’ve got it logged now and it should be addressed very soon…we appreciate the heads up!All that to say: we’re sorry we failed you. We try to be quite transparent about what the plugin does and does not do, so if you have ideas on how we could be clearer, I welcome those. Similarly: if you aren’t happy with the plugin and are still within 30 days of purchase, we’d be willing to issue either of you a refund, no questions asked. While it’d be a bummer to lose you as customers, I want to do right by you…even if that means directing you to a competing solution with a codebase and a support infrastructure more to your liking.
For now, PHP jokeying is probably going to be the best we’re able to offer when it comes to SEO concerns. As we make steps towards better integration with SEO plugins and third-party plugins in general, we’ll keep the community aware of the progress. And if that isn’t ambitious enough for you both or if you just want to move on, please do let us know. Thanks again for the feedback.
Hi Catherine! I hope you’re doing well, and that your week has been a solid one so far. I head up the support team here at Modern Tribe and wanted to chime in here after Gustavo brought this thread to my attention yesterday…he mentioned that he could tell you were frustrated based on your last few replies. I wanted to both apologize on behalf of the whole team for making this a less-than-smooth experience for you, and to check in on whether you’ve had a chance to give it another look based on your 2/4 reply. I’m hoping that – based on Gustavo’s step-by-step instructions in his post from earlier that day, we’ve got you what you need to proceed and succeed.
You raise a really good point about the idea that the venue information should be included in the tooltip. While this isn’t something I’ve seen a ton of requests for, I can understand the line of reasoning behind wanting it. I’m admittedly not sure it’d make as much sense as a core, out-of-the-box feature, due mainly to the fact that we’ve gotten a fair degree of feedback that community members want the tooltip to be as uncluttered + streamlined as possible. The more information there is in there, the more overwhelming it becomes and generally less attractive it looks. This is why we’re able to give users a solution if they want to customize their plugin to accomplish that…but don’t feel it’d be a good fit as an out-of-the-box feature, especially knowing that users can find venue information by viewing the individual event. Not to say we’re definitively correct in that assumption – but it’s been our line of reasoning so far.
I see you mentioned that you would have expected this to be a feature in the PRO release – the fact that we falsely set that expectation means we failed you here. Out of curiosity, was there something on the product page or in an overview video that suggested this would come with PRO? If so, would you mind sharing where you saw it? I’d like to get that cleared up so that we’re sparing others your disappointment down the road.
All that to say: I apologize that we failed to deliver on your expectations, and am optimistic that Gustavo’s last suggestion will help you out. If you end up wanting to take us up on the refund offer…let me know. It’d suck to lose you as a customer, but I want to do right by you even if that means directing you to a competing solution that might better meet your needs. If you want to go that route just shoot us an email to [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.
Thanks again for your feedback and helping us improve. If you would like to continue this discussion outside of the forums, I can always be reached directly via email – rob (@) tri.be.
Hey Andre! Rob from Modern Tribe here. Geoff is out on vacation this week, but I wanted to jump in here and thank you for your follow-up. It sounds like you were able to get this resolved…which is awesome. It’s a bit troubling to hear that you had to downgrade WordPress to get it sorted, since I haven’t seen any other reports of a conflict between PRO and 4.1. But if that’s an agreeable solution to you it sounds like it’ll do the trick for now.
That said, if you ever want to upgrade WordPress and find this issue persists, let us know – we’ll do what we can to troubleshoot the issue at that time. In an ideal world everyone would be able to run the latest version of our plugin alongside the latest WP – and since we build it to perform in that environment, it should work fine. Let us know when you want to give this issue another bash and we’ll continue trying to troubleshoot for you.
Since I see you’ve marked this RESOLVED, I’m going to go ahead and close this thread. Don’t hesitate to let us know if you need anything else down the road – and thanks for your support so far 🙂
Hi again Benjamin! I just wanted to jump into this thread: Geoff is out this week on vacation, but I see you have marked his last reply as the answer. Since it looks like you’re all set — correct me if I’m wrong there — I’m going to close out this thread. But if any other issues arise down the road or if you need help with anything, please don’t hesitate to open a new thread and let us know.
We are committed to getting WPML integration squared away in 2015. As soon as we have more information to share on a timeline or progress we’ve made, we’ll definitely let the community know. Thanks again for your interest and feedback so far.
Hey Lassooy! Hope you’re doing well. Geoff is out on vacation this week, but I wanted to jump in to confirm that we saw your post here and appreciate your confirmation that it’s all set. I am hoping that a feature we’re shipping in our forthcoming release — which lets you override the word “event” as you see fit — will help you out here as well.
For now I’m going to close out this thread. Let us know if you have any other questions or anything else we can help with going forward. Cheers.
Hey Ryan! Hope you’re doing well. Geoff is actually out of town this week, but I see you have marked his reply as the “Correct Answer.” It looks like you’re all set – awesome! I’m glad to see the team was able to get you sorted.
I’m going to close this thread out. But if you have other questions or need anything else, please don’t hesitate to open a new one and we’ll do what we can to help out. Thanks again for your interest!
Hi Arnold —
Thank you for the feedback here. As Modern Tribe’s head of support, I want to let you know that we take issues like this seriously. To that end we really appreciate you raising this concern…there’s no question this was our failure, and I apologize for dropping the ball here.
Just so you have some context: the PDF tickets were indeed present in the plugin during its first few iterations – but based on feedback from the community and the fact that those PDF tickets were universally loathed by our members, we moved away from that a few releases ago. When we relaunched our website last month (moving from tri.be to theeventscalendar.com) we failed to get the product page + readme.txt file updated to reflect this change. You should know that this was an oversight, not an intentional effort to mislead, and as Brook noted in last reply is one that we corrected immediately based on reviewing your thread and realizing the error.
Naturally though, that doesn’t solve your predicament here. As a result – while I can’t do anything to bring back PDF tickets, as doing so would require substantial development work to get right – I do want to do right by you here. Whether that means giving you a free license/renewal for a plugin of your choosing as a way of trying to do right by you, or giving you a full refund so you can purchase a competitor’s solution that may better meet your needs…it’s totally your call. It’d suck to lose you as a customer but since we failed to deliver a product in line with your expectations, you may decide that’s the best route to pursue.
Either way: we’re sorry to have let you down. As the outdated copy has since been corrected, hopefully nobody else will find themselves facing this same disappointment down the road. Thanks again for pointing it out and getting us back on the right track. Please do feel free to reach out to me directly (via email at [email protected]) if you’d like to continue this discussion offline.
Hi Marie! We can definitely help you out here, but mind creating a new thread? That’ll allow us to help you in as timely a fashion as possible 🙂 Thanks!
Hey folks! I’m Rob, and I head up the support team here at Modern Tribe. I’ve been monitoring this thread since Josh brought it to my attention a few days ago, and since the last reply here seems to suggest some disappointment, I wanted to jump in to clear up a few things. Before I do I want to both thank you all for helping us identify the problem at hand here and to apologize for the frustration some of you have faced.
It looks like for the most part, the core issue here is resolved: as Josh notes this is an issue that we’ve now got patched and awaiting to ship in our forthcoming maintenance release, which has passed QA and should be shipping any day now. Bluebeesocial, thanks to you in particular for opening this thread in the first place and working with us as we nailed down specifics. I’m optimistic that the release we’re about to ship will address this for you and a couple of the other voices in this thread who have noted they are facing the same problem.
To those other users who chimed into the thread here: you guys are awesome for spotting this thread and sharing your perspectives. To help serve you in the best way possible, though, I’d like to request that in the future you open up separate threads for your individual concerns. We request this for a couple of reasons: the first being, a lot of times a problem will appear to be the same at face value…but when we dig into it, we’re actually seeing two problems manifesting themselves in ways that look similar. It can take quite a bit longer to get someone’s issue sorted when we’re trying to solve two problems in the same thread. We want to get you replies as quickly as possible — and one of the paths we use to do that is through requesting that everyone open their own thread when they have a problem/concern.
Bennie, regarding the concern you noted: it’s clear we failed to properly set your expectations here, for which I want to apologize on behalf of the whole team. We tried to be quite transparent about the fact that we were slowing down here on the forums over the holidays — we had a big sticky alert across the top of the site, and announced it on our social accounts as well. But based on the fact that you were on here asking for updates that never came during that window makes it clear to me that we didn’t do enough to get the message across to the entire community. I apologize for that and would welcome any ideas on how we could have been more meaningfully transparent about this fact.
I do think it is a bit misleading to suggest that Josh isn’t taking the thread seriously, or that we “take weeks” to resolve issues. On the former, it’s pretty clear to me after reviewing the thread and seeing the amount of time Josh has spent trying to sort this issue with care and empathy that he takes it as seriously as we do any support request; with regards to the latter, we work hard to get replies to all threads within 24-48 hours except during our annual holiday slowdown. If you’ve experienced differently please do let me know so I can review the circumstances and help my team improve for the future.
The release cycle is such that we need to make sure all work is properly tested before it goes out: while we certainly could have shipped this patch a week ago, it would have gone out with a number of other bugs we felt needed to get patched. When someone on our team references a launch “the first week of January” that is a target, not a guarantee or promise. Unfortunately things can change often enough in the development world that what looks like a fine target one day can be delayed significantly the next. The good news is that we’re in the clear now and, as I noted above, the release should be shipping very shortly. (I’m expecting by the end of this week). If that isn’t an aggressive enough timetable for you — or if you simply have lost faith in our codebase and support infrastructure — know that we’d be happy to offer you a refund. While it’d suck to lose you as a customer, ultimately I’m more concerned about doing right by you, even if it means parting ways and directing you to a competitor. Let me know if you’d prefer to go that route.
Thanks to everyone for their feedback and thoughts. I hope the above sheds some light on where we’re coming from and how our processes work. If anyone has ideas for how we could improve or would like to continue this discussion elsewhere, I’d love to hear it and can be reached directly by emailing [email protected]. Otherwise please do let us know if the forthcoming maintenance release gets you where you want to be!
Shawn: excellent to hear – and I appreciate the follow-up. We are definitely always open to refining our processes if you ever do see other plugin or theme shops who are doing a good job. Doesn’t sound like that was as much the case here, but the offer stands – we’re by no means married to the current system in such a way that it couldn’t be refined based on feedback from the community.
Kevin: we can totally try to get you back on the right path. Would you mind creating a new thread summarizing your problems, so we can continue to serve Shawn directly in this thread (and can hopefully get you a reply in a more timely fashion along the way)? Thanks in advance!
Hey there shweks! Thanks for the follow-up here. Though your post on 1/2 came before the team had returned (I know you said the holidays are over, but we were explicit in our comments here on the forums that we were out spending time with our families until the holidays actually wrapped up on January 5).
Did you ever email our [email protected] inbox with a request for a refund? We never saw such a message come through – but Brian was able to find your order # this morning and we’ve got the ball rolling on a refund today accordingly.
Hi folks! I’m Rob, the head of Modern Tribe’s support team. Thanks for the feedback so far in this thread. While I’m not going to address ellsworthmedia’s problems directly since it looks like my colleague Brian has been able to help make some progress there already, I will say this regarding your problem Shawn: usually we only request people set up a dedicated test site when it’s a last resort. I understand that it’s a frustration and I apologize that we don’t have a more streamlined approach. I’d be interested in hearing – since you note that you wish there was an official Woo solution – how Woo themselves handle these types of problems (when they’re unable to recreate and haven’t seen widespread reports of a problem) independent of asking users to set up a test site like this. If they’ve got an approach you’ve found effective, I’d love to see our team follow suit. In the shorter term know that if going this route isn’t something you have time for and you’d prefer to take a refund (so you could use the funds towards a solution more in line with your expectations), let us know and we’ll get that processed. It’d be a shame to see it go that route since I see Brian has been responding quickly + actively to try his best to get this sorted, but I’d totally understand if you felt that route made more sense and want to do right by you here regardless. We’re willing to go whatever is your preferred option.
I am a bit concerned with your comments, though, kloader. It’s clear to me that we’ve upset you with the level of support we’re able to provide. For this, I apologize on behalf of the whole team – our goal is never to leave someone angry, and the fact that you’re feeling that way means we didn’t properly set your expectations or have your back. I’m a bit confused myself as to where the anger comes from: I reviewed your forum activity here, and all I’m seeing is one other thread from you (https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/ok-i-purchased-events-calendar-pro-so/). Best I can tell the scope of that thread was fairly limited and by the time it wrapped up, your issue had been addressed. Is there other forum activity that I’m not seeing – a thread where we weren’t able to help, a post that went unreplied, etc? If so please let me know. I want to get this relationship back on the right path, but as it stands, I’m not clear on the source of your anger.
That said, I will not tolerate people on the forums here throwing around terms like LIARS, or accusing us of not wanting to help – especially when there is no basis or supporting evidence provided for such comments. We’d be happy to offer you a full refund, as we do all customers, if you’re still within your first 30 days of purchase. (Just send an email to [email protected] and we’ll get the ball rolling on that). But if you’re going to hang around – which I encourage you to do, so we can get your calendar working the way it’s supposed to – I want to set expectations that such hostile postings are unwarranted and inappropriate.
If you’re willing to give our support system another shot, please open a new thread – rather than continue commenting in this one – highlighting the scope of your problems. You have our word that the team will reply in a timely fashion with as substantive an answer as possible.
Hi there Marc! Thanks for the note here. I wanted to follow-up with some information for you after Brian brought this thread to my attention today.
The most of what we’ve got on the documentation front regarding licenses is what you saw in the Licensing section of the terms – basically, that we release under GNU – and then this overview of what the license does and does not do: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/what-does-buying-a-license-get-me/.
The point you touched on, regarding whether the plugin is vulnerable to work without a license code: this is close to the reality. In fact, the plugin as it stands works 100% without a license plugged in…which is the main reason we don’t make it available to the public via GitHub and instead keep it as a private repo. Buying a license doesn’t unlock new functionality…but it does grant access to automatic updates within the plugin when a new build is released, and provides forum access for support. But if someone got their hands on a copy of the code elsewhere, they would be able to run it so long as they understood they wouldn’t get help or future updates.
Does this help shed light on things? Let me know if not, or if there was another answer you were looking for here. Thanks in advance!
Hi there David! Happy 2015 🙂 I head up the support team here at Modern Tribe, and after my colleague Brook brought this thread to my attention today, I wanted to jump in to see if I could help sort things out. It’s clear you’re frustrated — for which I want to both apologize on behalf of the whole team, and to try and get things back on the right track.
It was absolutely inappropriate of us to close your thread. I can see exactly what happened: as a team, we have a policy of shutting all threads when they’ve gone 2 weeks without getting a reply. In these situations, we generally do not wait for the user to come back and confirm they’re set — if they leave a thread unattended for 2 weeks we assume they’ve either found a solution or moved on. But around the holidays we failed to account for the fact that folks like yourself may be taking downtime, and that 2 week closure window might not be appropriate as a result. To that end I’ve just now instructed the team to leave December threads open a full 4 weeks from the last reply, rather than just 2, so we can spare others your disappointment down the road. I really appreciate your feedback in helping us realize we’d dropped the ball here.
When it comes to the core issue here: you are correct that we introduced a bug related to duplicating recurring events when we refactored the recurrence functionality around 3.5. Though we patched in a subsequent release, it looks like you’re still dealing with the effects of that 3.5 problem. To this end I’ve asked Brook, who will follow-up with a separate reply momentarily, to get a copy of your DB so we can clear it out for you. While we haven’t done this for other users, I want to do right by you here. And although we cannot guarantee his solution will be 100% perfect, it should help out.
That said: I’m a bit uneasy when I see comments like those in your reply that seem to suggest threats if we cannot serve you here. This isn’t behavior that is appropriate for the forums and I ask we have a mutual level of respect across the board. As with anyone, we’ll try our best to help you out here — but I’m unable to guarantee anything. If knowing this means you’d rather take a refund now so that you can begin searching for another solution with a support infrastructure more to your liking, let me know and I’ll get the ball rolling on that. I am optimistic however that we can get you on the right path here and hopefully earn back your faith.
If we’re able to, and if you decide to keep using the product, hit me up (rob @ tri.be) next time your license comes up for renewal. I’d like to comp your next renewal as “on the house” one to show we value your feedback and business.
Thanks again for your feedback, for improving our processes and for helping us grow. Expect a substantive solution-based reply from Brook shortly, and do let me know if you have other questions or concerns.
Hey again Roy! Rob from Modern Tribe here – I head up the support team, and wanted to thank you for the feedback here and for being vocal about this issue. Though it looks like Brian has already been able to provide a workaround that should help get you on the right path, after some internal discussion we realized that this is a more severe issue than we’d initially thought…and as a result are prioritizing it for the maintenance release we hope to ship this coming week, rather than waiting for the broader 3.10 release we’ve got planned for March. Thanks for your help in pushing it forward there.
We did close down for the holidays, which we clearly failed to properly communicate to you based on your 12/29 note (which came right in the middle of our planned downtime). But now that things are back to regular capacity as of this morning, we’re working to QA the tickets for this small maintenance release so we can get it out the door ASAP. We really appreciate your patience so far!
