Posts by sevenspark

^ beat me to it The author requests in their profile that you email them via their contact form to receive support.

Hi! This is a general ThemeForest forum. For product-specific support, please contact the author of that theme as they have specified on their profile page – either the item comments, contact form, or a dedicated forum. You can find the profile page by clicking the author avatar on the product page.

It’s unclear from the original post whether the message came through the contact form or not. I point this out because there was a thread the other day about a customer who had been automatically signed up for a newsletter from an author when they had requested support. This seems like a similar scenario.

It seems that some authors may not be aware of anti-spam laws and the opt-in requirement. Maybe this is something that should go into the author quiz at some point?

Hey Justin,

Just did some more tests and I found that the issue was the amount of text I was adding. If I add a sentence it saves fine. When I add everything I want I still get the 405.

So I assume there is a limit, but instead of getting an alert to this effect nginx just gets cranky

Hope that’s helpful!

Chris

n-media said
Thanks sevenspark. Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress works great, it kills spam for me 100%

Glad to hear that!

blimpage said
dtbaker is right – if you’re using an external support forum, re-checking the purchase code using the API will be the only way to know if a customer still owns a license for the item. If you’re only checking once every day or two, you shouldn’t have any problems with being banned from using the API. Also only checking active users is a good idea, if your system is able to do this.

Got it, will do. Thanks for the response, and again to Dave for the solution

blimpage said

sevenspark said
@kdubdent and staff, can we get at least get a notice in the statement as to what account the reversal came from? Once a customer pulls something like this, I consider our support “contract” terminated, naturally, so I want to be able to remove those customers’ access to support, etc.

Once a customer has processed a reversal, the item in question is removed from their Downloads page, and their license key is voided.

Unfortunately we can’t let you know up front which user the reversal came from, but if they send you an email through the contact form on their profile, the “check if this user is a customer of yours” link will show that they’re not anymore.

The problem, as activetofocus pointed out, is that many of us use external support forums, and once they have access we won’t know to revoke it.

@dtbaker, thanks for the suggestion, that’s a good solution. However, like you said, you can run into limits.

And yes, the issue has been around for a while – good point. But now that there is a system processing and documenting these transactions, it should be easy enough for us to be notified/alerted to deactivated purchase codes. Since we can effectively determine which users reversed payment anyway by reprocessing, why not just make it easy on us and save some API bandwidth in the meantime?

I’m not overly concerned about refunds. Sometimes a user feels entitled to a refund, and if Envato agrees, I have no problem with that. In fact, I wish that, as an author, I had the authority to provide refunds. Sometimes that’s what’ll make the customer happiest – even when there is nothing wrong with the product – so it’s just good business practice to provide them at times.

Reversals, on the other hand, demonstrate a disrespect for the system and suggests that the customer is unreasonable and dealing in bad faith. I want to be aware of customers like this as I have no interest in doing business with them in the future.

And again, just want to drive home that I’m making a clear distinction between refunds (approved by Envato) and reversals through PayPal. I have no issue with customers who request a refund for through the proper channels; generally they have simply misunderstood something – stuff happens.

WebSmacker said
Good points! Thanks sevenspark

Sure thing!

revaxarts said
I’Ve added Sales Reversals to the Statementer, can someone test it and confirm the functionality? Please clear the cache if you don’t see the latest version (1.9.0)

I can, sadly, confirm that it is working Thanks, Xaver!

@kdubdent and staff, can we get at least get a notice in the statement as to what account the reversal came from? Once a customer pulls something like this, I consider our support “contract” terminated, naturally, so I want to be able to remove those customers’ access to support, etc.

The idea that someone might request a reversal to get products for free doesn’t bother me; nothing we can do about that. But the idea that they might then continue to receive free support makes me… less happy

And please note I’m talking about reversals, not refunds. Though knowing who has received refunds would also be useful.

WebSmacker said

sevenspark said
...So there is no way to reliably attach a rating to a specific version of the product. We’re not a closed ecosystem like the App Store.

Umm, this would be easier than you think. There is a “Last Update” date on the items. I’m sure there is also a date for each rating. So…

current version rating = ratings >= last update date
all versions rating = every rating

As a buyer I would love to see the current version ratings. It tells you how people like/dislike the most recent version, the one that you would be downloading.

You’re making the assumption that the timing of the ratings corresponds to the current version of the plugin, but that is not an accurate assumption. Of course you could make an educated guess, but it wouldn’t be reliably accurate.

As an example, a customer who purchased a product a year ago could come rate the item today. Who knows what version they’re currently using and therefore rating? They may have upgraded to the latest version, or they may never have upgraded, so applying this rating to the current version may not be accurate.

We could simply ask them to select a version, but in my experience many customers don’t even know that products have versions, and wouldn’t know how to find out which version they are running if asked, so we couldn’t assume their reports are reliable.

Now, if we were able to create a real versioning system, where you could group ratings by the “current” major release, that’d be one thing, and I think it’d be a good idea (again, if it could be implemented reliably – which means more data about the user’s current installation than is currently collected). But to have the “current” version include point-releases does everyone a disservice.

In other words, if you’re on version 2.6, I agree that showing a “current” rating that only includes ratings from version 2.0+ is a good idea. But if you’re on version 2.6.1.2, and the current rating excludes ratings from 2.6.1.0 and 2.6.1.1, and even 2.6.0, that makes little sense to me. Volatile ratings are just going to make it harder to get a read on the quality of a plugin.

Keep in mind the volume here isn’t nearly as high as on the App Store, so you’re not getting as large a sample with each release, either. And a smaller sample size means less reliable data, which is really my point here. By providing a “current” rating we so restrict the sample size that the rating becomes very unreliable. That’s bad for authors when a few random bad ratings make a good product look bad, and it’s bad for buyers when a few random good ratings make the product look better than it is. A larger sample size is simply a more reliable indicator of quality, and we should aim to display the most reliable data we have

A simpler way to do this might be to display the ratings for the last 3 months, or last 50 ratings, whichever is more. This is easier to determine and gives a general idea of which way the product is heading, but again the data isn’t necessarily a reliable indication of the latest version of the product. It’s a fuzzy statistic any way you cut it, as the underlying data simply isn’t available.

Hope that makes sense