Paid Wordpress theme author stops supporting WP2.x before WP3 is released | Hacker News Reader

Paid Wordpress theme author stops supporting WP2.x before WP3 is released

getmochi.com

9 pointsbdickason20 comments

The open-ended declaration "I can't believe you made $50k!" seems inappropriate and may have annoyed the theme author.

That could be. I didn't think of it that way. It was meant to be more of a pat on the back! I'll definitely make sure that I qualify statements like that with a more direct positive enforcement.

Can't believe this post made it to the front page of HN ;)

I'm glad that it did :) Not for traffic, but because it taught me two lessons:

1) Don't write a blog post within minutes of an emotional experience

2) Focus on "what I learned" not "what they did to me"

I've now updated the post based on feedback in this thread.

Did you add the bold and the underline yourself? If so, you should say so.

Without that, I really can't agree that it was so horribly rude as to justify slamming the guy so publicly.

Yes, I added the bold/underline myself for emphasis. E-mails were sent in non-html form so plain text. I commonly use bold/underline in my blog to make it easy for readers who skim to catch the key points.

I just revised the post. I made a mistake and reacted to an e-mail that was perfectly fine.

The post now focuses on how different words can trigger emotions in customers, rather than slamming a great theme author.

Commented on your blog

"Sorry to hear about your bad experience with the theme. To be fair to Freshface and other authors on Themeforest, support is completely optional and he is doing nothing wrong. But I do also agree that it would only take a few minutes to look over to try and resolve the issue."

Thanks for commenting there! I agree with you, he'sd oing nothing wrong. I acted irrationally :(

I ended up fixing it and posted my fix in the comments :)

$paged = (get_query_var(‘paged’)) ? get_query_var(‘paged’) : 1; $args= array( ‘posts_per_page’ => 5, ‘paged’ => $paged, ‘cat’ => $lcp_blog_id, ‘tag’ => “Homepage” );

Thanks so much for the feedback guys. My initial post was bullheaded and a direct emotional reaction.

I thought that I was educating my readers on how to properly message something that could be conceived as negative and instead I was slamming a great theme author.

What's your real rationale behind not using WP3? Yea its in RC status, but I run the nightly builds and rarely hit problems. Plus themes aren't all that hard to self support. The code structure is really simple and its mostly CSS

One thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is that different people have different risk tolerances.

Conflicts like this one can emerge when people have different levels of risk tolerance that cause incompatibilities. It's not like one person is right and the other is wrong by using or not using WP3 RC.

I upgraded to WP2 early and had to wait for a bunch of plugins to catch up. Figure I'll wait for the few plugins (4 or 5 of them) to release WP3 support before I make the move.

I don't really think either person is being unreasonable. I don't think he was that rude either. If I were him I would've fixed the bug or implemented a work around but clearly he was more interested in additional revenue from new customers or upgrades.

Disclaimer This is a link to my blog. Feel free to vote me down if you feel that I'm being unreasonable.

Yes, I believe you are being unreasonable. ThemeForest items dont come with support. And the email he sent to you was perfectly reasonable. The dude is probably from Eastern Europe, so dont expect him to have perfect english. I highly doubt he was intentionally trying to be rude.

How long have you been using wordpress themes? It's pretty much DIY, paid theme or not. There's no way to get around having to fix things yourself when they break.

I've been using wordpress themes and plugins for a number of years. This is the first time I've paid for a theme.

This is a stark contrast between the author of the Post Page Associator plugin who gives near instant support: http://dennishoppe.de/wordpress-plugins/post-page-associator

I don't expect support, but after paying, it didn't seem unreasonable to ask?

If you don't expect support, how is it reasonable to write a blog post sullying his reputation when he did not provide it?

You're completely right. I've revised my post to focus on what words affected me, rather than speak negatively about his customer service.

You mean the customer service he was under NO obligation to provide right?

I don't get this. In your blog post you say "Themeforest has a “no support” policy which is understandable.", but then you decide that because you have paid for the theme, its not unreasonable to ask for support? Can you not see the problem here? If the terms of the sale are no support, then it doesn't matter if you paid for the theme or not, you aren't entitled to it. You are lucky you got a response at all, let alone a follow up email! A "take a look at this problem for 5 minutes" never takes just 5 minutes, and has the task switching cost as well. I'm sure he could easily spend all day looking at "5 minute problems" from people who have purchased the theme.

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