Moderator
t-p
(@t-p)
My particular beef atm is I bought a theme
– These forums are for free themes/plugins available in the WordPress theme directory at https://ww.wp.xz.cn/themes/ and WordPress plugins directory at https://ww.wp.xz.cn/plugins/. So please contact the developer/vendor directly with your question.
– As the author is aware, commercial products are not supported in these forums. As you are their customer I am sure they will have no problem supporting you there.
To clarify, many (most!) free plugins and themes have paid options. If you buy one, as I did, that does not entitle the provider to abuse WP’s conditions. But they do. Read a few from here: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=wordpress+admin+messages+abuse
The concept that this is a support q is pretty far out. Oh, or maybe didn’t actually read / understand the request? It is admittedly not the biggest issue going, but an entirely predictable behaviour that the whole premise WP is founded on would put the control for such misbehaviour back in the user’s hands, which it isn’t as clearly it requires honorable behaviour.
Anyone not displaying good faith compliance is going to inconvenience hundreds, or in the case of the particular group I have highlighted, tens of thousands as they have actually changed their business model to go on an aggressive sales drives. They even say somewhere I read “because we can”. Ethics of admin post messages is a very small matter to them. If I asked I doubt they would fix it. The point is, WP core should be able to deal with bs behaviours when we see them.
I am losing 31mm of a 330mm high screen, so nearly 10%. What if another one does it? One did, but that was a plugin I could replace with a different one. Themes are not so easy to swap out, and they know it! Hence the arrogance of the sales drive as I don’t doubt some will pay just to get their screen space back! It has been going on for some months now, and finally I think it is time to delete the capacity to abuse the rules, as opposed to just trying to belt this particular one back into line.
Anyone care to make an intelligent response to the core subject matter? Thank you.
I second the issue as this is usually happenning more and more frequently. Plugins and theme authors are more frequently abusing of the admin notices making them persistent.
Yes, this happens with lots of paid plugins/themes.
Yes, this forum is not the place to discuss about paid items.
But also, I have seen a number of free plugins using the admin notifications to up-sell their premium versions, and as Vince said, sometimes they force the notifications to appear all along the admin section rather than on the desktop page or in their own settings page. Also, some authors are shiping their free products with the Freemius system which may be annoying sometimes.
In some other cases, I have seen a number of admin notices from different plugins piling up on screen, making the UI very annoying to operate on mobile.
I know the admin notification system and it’s very flexible but it does nothing to stop abuse. It should enforce some way to limit the respawn of messages, because in the other hand, imposing a minimum delay between messages could prevent the plugins to show really important signs.
Can this issue be posted to the core trac so core developers may take a look at it?
Well here’s a surprise. I did ask the q and got told the “answer” is here: https://www.proteusthemes.com/help/remove-license-expired-nag-notice/
This is “interesting but not really relevant” as I am suggesting the question should not ever be asked in the first place. But isn’t it fascinating that this particular supplier is welded on to their abuse of WP protocols they have the following solutions, none of which entail removing the abuse in the first place:
1) Pay, and boy do they go on about that. Their case almost sounds reasonable, until you know one tiddly little extra fact – the product came with “life of product” free upgrades; ie pre-paid. So this is scaremongering to get people to pay and that is why it is really there, nothing to do with anything else and certainly any finger waggling from me won’t fix it as obviously, it is working!
2) Go add some code to one of the inner workings of your theme files. So, how does that go when those (free!) upgrades? Do it again, most likely. And how does your typical WP theme purchaser deal with that? Unhappily, if at all.
3) Manually install this plugin (Couldn’t find it searching in WP plugins): https://github.com/tommcfarlin/toggle-admin-notices so I did – Wow, it works!!!
OK, so this is a credible user friendly solution of a sort. Bit of a sledgehammer approach where I would rather be able to force notices to be hidden by radio buttons next to them or something like that. But hey, if nobody cares enough to put this up to get control back for long-suffering users I have an answer for me.
It is still not OK to have such blatant abuse continue in an ongoing way and never going to be OK to use a loophole that it is a commercial product so should be allowed to flagrantly breach the rules with no pathway to deal with it in a community-caring way….
The points that you’re agruing are valid. But there’s one really big difference – the theme that you’re using (the commercial version) was not found through this site, and is not goverened by the “regulations” of this site, so they can do pretty much what they want to in that regard. No one on the themes theme here can do anything about that because it’s something that’s outside of this system.
It is still not OK to have such blatant abuse continue in an ongoing way and never going to be OK to use a loophole that it is a commercial product so should be allowed to flagrantly breach the rules with no pathway to deal with it in a community-caring way….
There’s no loophole here. What you’re talking about is two completly separate systems that will almost always have different regulations and motives. Here, the theme and plugin review team look at quality and functionality, and don’t allow things like nag screens, excessive advertising, etc. On a commercial theme site, the primary focus is on selling. That means that if a theme sells and makes money, they will most likely not be concerned about little things like quailty and support.
I do agree that it is frustrating, but you should channel that frustration to where it is best seen – to the authors of the theme. That way they’ll know about these issues and maybe do something about it. They might already know seeing as how they have got the information available on stopping that nag notice. Sure, it’s not optimal, but that’s what they have available.
To put this back on you a little bit, what would you expect to have available? Any person out there can create a WordPress theme and sell it, and all of those themese can really do whatever they want to.
From my experience the best way to deal with this is done in stages:
- Contact the author and ask them to recify this. Might happen, but might not. It’s 100% up to the author.
- Contact the vendor (the place that you bought the theme from), and try the same. You’ll most likely have the same luck, but you never know.
- Leave a review that states the fcts. Don’t go overboard with anything, but stick to facts about the issue instead of anything emotional. It might not help you, but it might help someone else down the line that is thinking of buying the same theme.
Thanks for the feedback @catacaustic, I was almost sure that way is the only way to follow and nothing else can be done with paid products.
Anyway, I will take a look at that plugin found by Vince. I’m sure it works. Yet nulling all the calls to admin notices may be a double sided sword because there are some of them that you may want to notice.
If I were you, Vince, I’d take the option of pasting that code into the functions.php file, as it’s the least bad solution 🙂 Given that possibility, I wouldnt expect that a formal rant in a review could cause any effect on the authors, as they drive their business as they like it.
Regards to everyone.
It may be that I am not understanding something clearly. I understand and agree with pretty well everything said prior. The REASON I was posting here in the first place was because I believed this was the appropriate place to request core features / approved core plugins (or whatever the politics / realities are of saying “you need this” to a typical WP user that just wants to do the job) to resolve a latent intransigent problem with the WP product.
I am suggesting this persistent admin messaging practice practice is abuse. I don’t care exactly what the prior / ongoing relationship of the abuser is with me or anyone, they simply shouldn’t be able to partially cripple the core WP product by indefinitely taking screen space off a user.
As it happens, I think the manual toggle plugin is pretty useful as it means I can keep notices I am interested in doing something about later, but not now (rather than dismissing then forgetting them), and deal with any of these bs non-dismissable ones in a “keep them out of my way” kinda way. It is pretty neat really. Yet the author hasn’t even got the thing listed as a discoverable official plugin, for some reason I have not attempted to find out about and which is irrelevant to the core q here anyway.
So, is there any appetite to deal with in some credible way the realities that any supplier of themes or plugins has the capacity to leave admin messages up indefinitely? How might that happen? Allowing messages to be put up without a dismiss button is the true failing here, and that is a WP core issue. All I don’t know for sure is if this is where to ask the q that a fellow caring and sharing human being will ensure it gets “in the list”. Thank you.
Yep, I got the point. And yes, there’s something else you can do: post your concerns to the WP trac and get answers from people who really works in the making of WP: https://core.trac.ww.wp.xz.cn/
While I do agree that nagging upgrade and ‘please pay us for support’ messages can be though of as “abuse” in some context, it’s not a reason to re-write the admin notification system.
My reason for this is that there’s a whole lot of times when you will need to show a big notice to a user that they can’t just dismiss. What if there’s a hacked file? What if a database table has crashed? What if a required plugin isn’t installed? There’s a lot of instances where a notice that can’t be dismissed is needed.
I know that I’ve made some plugins (for private clients, not public stuff) that has notices like that because they are needed, and if they show there should be no way to dismiss them because there’s a problem that must be recified for thier site to function the way that they want it to. What you’re suggesting is that those important notices will also be able to be dismissed, and that’s when the general population says “Hey, your stuff’s broken and I didn’t do/change anything!” even though they’ve gone and dismissed an error message telling them exactly what the problem is without rading it (because the majority of people just don’t read things that are actually important).
I know that your individual situation isn’t even close to ideal, but that’s what happens when you use commercial themes and plugins. Some play the game well, and some don’t. You just managed to find one that doesn’t do things as nicely as others, but that’s no reason to force a change that would affect every other user out there.
Gawd-dang, the topic is bobbing about in a widely nuanced ocean of “relevant aspects”. Yet again!!!
Thanks for your not-so-caustic explanation cata (may I call you that?).
So this moves the OP to “pet peeve” status. I think, in the manual download plugin, we have an appropriate answer to an issue of such status. I will leave it to others to explore if such a solution to an undoubtedly widely shared pet peeve (check those Google results) is such a thing that merits further attention. Thank you.
Just a thought, but have you considered removing those plugins and not using them anymore?
Realistically, if a plugin annoys me, then I remove it. If I need the functionality, then I rewrite it to do what I need to do without the annoyance. But that latter part is just me, because I’m a programmer.
If a plugin does something you don’t like, stop using it. Tell the author why you’re not using it, and consider that in a free market, maybe other people will feel the same way and use an alternative. A plugin that is popular but annoying is what I would see as a market opportunity.
