Farms

Hey thanks @joshuanan 🙂

Hi @cosydan6 I just wanted to drop by to say thank you for helping us fix up this issue and thank you for revising your review based on that, it’s seriously appreciated.

Hi @cosydan6 sorry for the negative experience, it certainly shouldn’t be the case that you were being harassed for a review (that’d 100% be a bug / issue) and we never seek to apply undue pressure or offer payment for reviews.

If you could let us diagnose what went wrong (possibly a cache issue) so that we can fix it (and like @wpmudevsupport17 said, hopefully fix your review too – 1 star reviews really really hurt our ability to provide and support free plugins at wp.org, you need like 20 5 stars to ‘adjust’ in the eyes of the algorithm) then that’d be great.

Ha @codimex that is very kind of you to say (that you liked them) and thank you for the concern (that they are going away).

So I’ll start with the bad news… they are going away from our product suite 🙁

The reason for this is that we are more and more business to business these days, basically supporting web developers, freelancers and agencies who – on the whole – use the options we provide to hide the characters and don’t like them from the start.

So a more ‘professional’ brand is required to convince them that our plugins, and WPMU DEV as a whole is, well, professional.

But there is some good news… they are staying for our blog, social media and wordcamps.

This is not just because we bought a lifesize devman costume that fits me (we did though, it’s very very hot!) but because realistically the WP community (plugin developers, core contributors, community folk) is not really our target audience customer-wise and you lot seem to like them and know that we are the real deal already (you do, right?)

So there’s life in them yet 🙂 But just not as before…

Thanks for the concern… and thanks @wpmudev-support7 too 🙂

Sorry that you felt that way, Jenny 🙁

Our policy has always been to ask for a review but offer a one click ‘close’ option that means you won’t be bothered again.

This is free software that we spend thousands of hours on making as good as possible for WordPress users at no cost (and, of course, released as open source under the GPL) – we even offer support here for any issues you might have (and we’d be welcome to help you too if there’s anything specific, for example with Elementor… we even wrote a big guide on it here https://wpmudev.com/blog/optimize-elementor-wordpress-smush-hummingbird/ ).

Your 1-star review, however, really hurts our reputation (the math means that for every 1-star review we need to get 10 5-star reviews to rate decently here). Which in turn makes it that much harder for us to provide the free products and support that we endeavour to do as well as we can.

The recommendations we offer (e.g. avoiding or caching a google font, or considering minifying some CSS) are all based on pagespeed / lighthouse recommendations – but you can also ignore them.

If you could give us the opportunity to help you out with them (or anything else to do with the plugin) and also to let us know how we can avoid the feeling of ‘nagging’… and we could help turn your 1-star experience into a 5-star one, well that would be really awesome.

Possible?

Can I ask exactly how and where the level of distraction was so great that you determined that you should damage the reputation of our plugin (without ever having used it) because of that?

Hi Corey (& Dan),

So sorry to hear about your negative experience, I’d totally be upset with that too so if it’s our fault that the messages have come back, then I can only apologise and assure you it’s a mistake that we will work bloody hard to make sure doesn’t happen again! No laughing matter for sure.

In terms of marketing you can totally blame me for that though (eeeep) I figured I wanted the new style notifications to be more fun / interesting / less boring (and thus, I admit, more clickable)… my logic was that as they are removable (and hopefully just the once) then it wouldn’t make much difference if they were 150 or 300px – I’m already planning on scaling that back, if we get a bunch more feedback like this then I’ll push that along, promise.

Honestly, the absolute last thing we want to do is spam or upset our users, all we want to do is provide a quality free service (that meets most peoples needs) with a few extras that will help us pay the bills – but having said that we’ve obviously upset you, so I appreciate you letting us know so we can fix stuff up.

In the interim I’d love to offer you a free annual membership by way of apology, just ping me at [email protected] and I’ll get that done for you – I really don’t want to lose you as a user, free or paid.

Hope this helps clear things up, James