Author response

Hi, Jennifer.

First of all, we are really sorry to see your review, more after all the efforts are done to share all the necessary information for you to understand why you were facing the issues present in your site.

In brief and as it has been widely explained to you. You cannot expect that your site won't break at some point if you update your WordPress core files and you keep your theme without updates since February 2019 (you were running v2.7.0 // updated: 09/02/19 while latest version available is v2.7.4.1 // updated: 12/01/20). As explained, your site stop working because of a lack of maintenance in your website, your theme was not updated in more than a year so you cannot expect issues to happen. This is the way I tried to explain to you via our support area and we had not an answer from you:

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"Hey there, Jennifer.

This is an answer for your private ticket where you point that you feel unnecessary to pay for support and that you feel that your website stoped working and it was not your fault by it was the theme's fault.

In this sense, I'd like to clarify that having a website and managing a website by your own has its responsibilities. You cannot expect to update WordPress core files or some of your server environment configurations and to expect that an old theme copy will work flawlessly, because of this we release new updates in order to fix bugs, issues and also to adapt to the technological progress and improvements the main platform does, which is WordPress. In the same way that WordPress gets updated we need to update our themes accordingly in order to ensure full compatibility with the CMS, plugins and server environments. And it's important that you have your site up to date.

You must know about this high value a lifetime license has. You pay once for the theme and you get LIFETIME updates (while the theme is available, of course). Also, if you have an active support license which covers 6 month of support and assistance from our side.

In brief, I just want that you have more details and information in order to maybe have a different perception about the value you receive with the theme and your support licenses and also you understand that if you don't want to assume your website maintenance, you have services for this to delegate this task on. For example, to make sure that your site is properly updated by updating your WordPress version, themes and plugins is something that you should handle. If you prefer that somebody else does this for you, you have services like these:

https://sunnyhq .io/wordpress-care-plan/

https://wpbuffs .com/plans/

https://sitecare .com/wordpress-maintenance/

https://www.valet .io/

As you can see, starter plans go from 79-140USD/MONTH

What I mean with all of this is it's how important is to understand WordPress as the ecosystem it is, and how everything in between works.

Because of this, while you have your support license active we'll be here to attend and assist you with any queries or doubts you could have. Of course, always they are within the support scope, which does not include custom work, installations or similar tasks.

I have tried my best with your case by guiding you in the direction to you get your issues fixed out. With all of this in mind, just let me know if you could expect something different or feel that we are not doing this support work properly for us to improve and to do better our work and help you better.

Many thanks,"

Author response

Hey there,

I’m not sure if you are facing some kind of issue with the theme, in any case, I have searched for some previous contact from you and I have not found any. So please, if you are having some trouble when working with the theme, we would encourage you to contact with us in order to let us know and see how we can better help you, because very often use to happen that things that you could consider as an error, bugs or ‘poorly developed’ aspects, are just issues generated because of many other details involved with your site. In this sense, I’d like to do some considerations:

If you read some of the previous messages related to issues with images (as you point with your message), you should notice that all theses issues happened after the theme update v2.7.0, where we added a new feature where the theme now can lazy load images. This new feature needed that we changed the markup (HTML) and some of the related styling (CSS). These assets and related coded are hardly cached by browsers, because of this, when some users updated their themes, their browsers still had in memory the older markup and related styling and because of this reason, they were showing a mixed result and images were not properly loading. Something that gets automatically fixed out when just refreshing the browser cache and flushing the page cache in case of the site is using some page cache plugin. So, if you read completely these messages you will notice how all these users reporting these issues got this fixed out just by following our guidelines. This also includes new installations from scratch, where this cache issue is not present and no issues happen when rendering image assets, of course.

You also say that the theme is ‘poorly designed’ and ‘If you’ve worked with well developed themes’, which means that you consider our theme ‘non well developed’. Well, I’d like to do two appreciations here as well, if you allow me.

The first affirmation from your part is quite subjective and I totally respect it, but I don’t understand then why you bought the theme if you consider this and why near to 5000 users arrived to the conclusion that our theme could be useful and interesting in terms of concept and design for their projects.

Regarding to the coding and development with Lobo, I want to add that we have worked with many users that are developers (no implementers) and we received good feedback always. Because of this, maybe, you miss some of these popular builder with our theme, but we don’t see any reason because of we should use any of them when we could develop our own solution for creating the modular system our theme proposes. What you see in the demo is what you can do with our builder (modules), a very lightweight solution exclusively developed for our theme to provide a very straightforward content solution that no generates unnecessary code on page and no ‘lock-in effect’ with your content, as you can see with solutions like Visual Composer, for example. We understand they are very popular but we proposed from the beginning a different approach we detail in the theme description and with our theme’s documentation which is available on-line and you can read before purchasing the theme. We created a simple builder system with a very specific propose (to create a creative portfolio website), and not a multi-propose solution, which is not the theme’s goal. Lobo’s goal is to generate a website with the features you can see in the demo site.

Finally, you say that we remove messages that we don’t like. We cannot do this because comments are managed by Envato and sometimes, we find some comments that are directly false and written by users that just want to have the theme for free by writing a false review when we decline a refund request. When we detect this kind of abuses, we report them to Envato and it is Envato who decides if they remove the comments or not having into account the evidences we must present in order to they remove these comments you are referring to. Many of them are based on users that want their websites customized for free and they use the review system as a system for coercing authors to have this done for free. I could tell you about tons of bad usages for comments and the review area.

If you have some issue with the theme, you have some doubt, you have something to report because the theme is not working properly and you have found some bug, that could happen and use to happen. We are here to get this fixed out, because there is not exist a perfect piece of software and we work very hard from support to attend everything and we provide updates when needed and when the theme just needs maintenance, so please, do not hesitate to get in touch with us. We are here to help and to provide a product that it is helping tons of users to develop their projects and their business successfully. Even dozens of them are using the theme more than 5 years now without changing to a different theme.

If you feel that the theme is not properly supported or maintained, I really encourage you to get in touch with us via our support area. In this way, maybe, we can make your mind to change and you may re-consider your 1-star rating.

In any case, many thanks for your comment and review. As you will see, it won’t be removed because of this is your opinion and it is totally legit.

Best - Van.