Title: Debilitatingly broken plugin
Last modified: April 17, 2018

---

# Debilitatingly broken plugin

 *  [owenism](https://wordpress.org/support/users/owenism/)
 * (@owenism)
 * [8 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/debilitatingly-broken-plugin/)
 * I’m not usually the type to leave a review, but my experience with this plugin
   was absolutely debilitating to my website.
 * After installing this plugin, my site’s loadtime on images dropped from about
   800ms to anywhere between 5s to 8s. This was devastating to my user experience,
   as I host a webcomic and page load time from comic to comic being as fast as 
   possible is crucial to me for new and old users alike. Not realizing it was this
   plugin causing the load time, I spent days optimizing my images, asking my hosting
   provider to take a look at/move my databases, etc. What I’m left with is a site
   that’s now very fast now that this plugin is no longer on it.
 * This plugin installs an option to lock each post, page, or comic that you create
   on WordPress. You can specify a dollar amount, and if the dollar amount is more
   than 0, it will lock that content to become patron-only. However, it will also
   occasionally lock ALL of your content to “$0 patrons only”, and will just straight
   up fail to load your site at all. When it does load the site, it still runs a
   check on all of your content to make sure that it isn’t locked. This makes even
   unlocked content load very slowly, and that’s only when it doesn’t completely
   error.
 * I had some users ask me in confusion if I was planning to Patreon lock my entire
   site considering they were getting the “this is for $0 patrons only” error message,
   and that’s a pretty confusing message to read. I some had users in other countries
   tell me my site was so slow that it was nearly unresponsive. My hosting provider
   had no idea what to tell me, and pingdom.com reported no issues with the site
   itself in any way that I could optimize. It was a very frustrating week, and 
   I lost tens of thousands of pageviews a day over the course of the week because
   of how frustrating using my site became for the hundreds of pages that are not
   and never were intended to be Patreon only.
 * I can only imagine that this plugin (as it exists right now, with these current
   issues) would only be functional for a website that WAS intended to be 100% locked
   to only Patreon users – but even this seems flawed, as I had 2 or 3 Patreon users
   still attempt to log in to Patreon-only content only to be cycled through the
   login screen multiple times. I had to clear the cache and flush permalinks 3 
   or 4 times before these users could even get in, and they then reported a day
   or two later that they had become unable to log in again. It was beginning to
   look as if I had to flush the permalinks and clear the cache every day to maintain
   viability, even if nothing on the backend had changed. And this was even after
   I set all Patreon-only posts to not be cached.
 * Of course, when I uninstalled it, it broke most of the images on my site as well.
   I found that if this happens, flushing your permalinks one more time seems to
   do the trick and restore broken images.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  Plugin Contributor [CodeBard](https://wordpress.org/support/users/codebard/)
 * (@codebard)
 * [8 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/debilitatingly-broken-plugin/#post-10196076)
 * Sorry to hear that you experienced such problems which our other users are not
   experiencing.
 * Good news is that a majority of those issues can be solved by upgrading to 1.1.1,
   which just came out.
 * The $0 locking situation is quite, quite weird though. I would like to get more
   details on how and where it happens and what settings you had for relevant posts
   and site.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘Debilitatingly broken plugin’ is closed to new replies.

 * ![](https://ps.w.org/patreon-connect/assets/icon-256x256.png?rev=1782351)
 * [Patreon WordPress](https://wordpress.org/plugins/patreon-connect/)
 * [Frequently Asked Questions](https://wordpress.org/plugins/patreon-connect/#faq)
 * [Support Threads](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/patreon-connect/)
 * [Active Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/patreon-connect/active/)
 * [Unresolved Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/patreon-connect/unresolved/)
 * [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/patreon-connect/reviews/)

 * 1 reply
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [CodeBard](https://wordpress.org/support/users/codebard/)
 * Last activity: [8 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/debilitatingly-broken-plugin/#post-10196076)