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Refund request sent to you just now by PM.
I am not in the least emotional Robin – I’ve been around the block enough to be very unemotional and hard-headed for that.
I wish you luck with the project.
Hi Robin,
I appreciate you are now as irritated with me expressing my concerns about your product as I am with its issues. I’ll address your comments in order, so far as I can:
1) I see nothing in the Documentation which says to use Woo Commerce for non-digital products. I do see in the product edit a checkbox to say whether the product is not downloadable and a physical product. I think 99/100 new users would assume – in the absence of instruction to the contrary – that is how you price a physical book or print. A short note by that check box would save hours of wasted time and frustration.
2) Most of the issues I experienced could and should have been addressed properly in the documentation. It’s rarely sensible to assume a level of experience based on your expert knowledge the new user is unlikely to have. That is the classic mistake of clever people who design clever things for others to use, but then can’t/won’t explain them properly, or at all, as in this case.
3) Your further points:
a) I don’t expect to have to worry about updating your product when I download it in November. If the update was available six months ago then why are you issuing an out of date plugin? There may be a good reason – if so then I suggest you print a prominent warning when the download is made. Customers are not mind readers.
b) I did not update Woo Commerce and in fact I confirmed in my last post that I was using the same version you suggested in your post – 3.7 – which you said was working perfectly when you tried opening licences, so that is a totally spurious argument. It follows I did not make mention of these issues in my posts as I was completely unaware of them. You seem to be suggesting on the one hand I ignore Woo Commerce updates when highlighted, but must apply Symbiostock updates. Which do you want me to do Robin, as it can’t be both?
c) True – I did not buy the plugin – that is merely your hook to sell Express. Nothing wrong with that, but you are splitting hairs – the fact is I bought a Symbiostock theme which has multiple problems for the unfamiliar user (by definition almost all users) and poor documentation in some respects – good in places but, like a hole in a bucket, the lovely shiny bucket ain’t much use with the hole in it.
I appreciate you don’t provide free support but that policy does make a decent, comprehensive documentation even more essential if you are taking money for the product. You cannot expect the paying customer to have expert knowledge of a complex piece of software without some means of support. Neither can you realistically expect him to pay $50 for a support question (which someone else on here said he had not had a reply to for a week – totally unacceptable). Again you can’t have it both ways Robin and just leave buyers to the mercy of a forum post which may or not be answered and may take days if it is – both of which I’ve experienced
I did not “threaten the project with bad reviews”. You solicited a review from me in a previous post and I was making clear that you would not want a review from me at the moment. I don’t generally leave bad reviews (and certainly never threaten to do so), but often leave good ones. I may still leave you a review – time and future experience of how this is dealt with will tell. You can be sure it will be fair, balanced and accurate.
As regards the refund, you and I are clearly never going to see eye to eye and will be a source of conflict to each other if we struggle to continue an obviously bad relationship, so yes please – but this is not going to be dependent on me buying elsewhere. That is my choice entirely and I may well revert to software I already use and was hoping to replace with Symbiostock (I can send order confirmation of this if you insist) or Free Digital Downloads or similar.
That sounds like a highly conditional “refund” offer and doesn’t impress, in fact it merely compounds the problem and adds to my irritation. If you are so distrustful that I might continue using Symbiostock, then I will give you one-time access to the admin of my test site so you can delete it – send me an email.
Why you think I would commit to uploading and keywording thousands of images using Symbiostock when I could never ask for support – paid for or via this forum – for the inevitable future issues defeats my understanding and demeans you. That’s why I’ve been using a test site before going “live” with this. Clearly a wise move on my part and a ridiculous statement on yours. Something else not thought through properly.
Please confirm you will make the refund and whether you want access to my test site to delete the theme.
Mike
I’m creating new licenses – I want one special one for ONE product only – a physical book for sale and delivery. It is not a raster file. I have created the license and called it “My License”. I try to edit it and state in the edit that it is a physical product. I set the price of £10 say. I save it and then try to apply that license to the single book product. I save/update the media/product.
I do that but when it appears on the site it insists on showing a whole bunch of size options for immediate download (I assume?) delivery. I clearly don’t need any of that, so back to the product and cklick “Licenses”. The only logical (but it doesn’t work) option to remove these unwanted options seems to be from “Default form values” choose “My license” and then below that “Add variation”, within which is the option “Delete all variations”. I do that as there is no other option of deleting these unwanted price options, and save.
The product STILL shows all the unwanted options and the £10 price I set for that license shows £5.99 under “My license” in the list.
I confess that although a patient man, who spends hours and hours trying to sort these issues myself before posting on this forum, I am finding Symbiostock the most unintuitive un-user-friendly software I have ever used. I’m no expert but I have been using websites for well over 20 years (but not WordPress until now). I’m frankly finding this much more trouble than its worth and certainly could not give any kind of review you want to read.
I’m sorry to put this for all to see Robin, but if you want to make it impossible for anyone to contact you without a $50 “Support ticket”, or wait sometimes days and days for a reply by posting on a forum – or wait and get no reply at all, as has happened – then that’s the natural result. The fact that the license feature would not work at all until an update was done (I only bought it a month ago) is not my fault. Now it does at least allow it to be opened but the Documentation is inadequate to answer the above and I’ve ploughed through all the license stuff again and again.
I’m about fed-up with Symbiostock Robin – I’m trying to run a business here and have wasted days and days on this. I really think you need to have a serious look at the product and the documentation support situation as right now it seems to me unfit for purpose. If the easiest option for you is to give me a refund I’ll gladly accept, write off weeks of wasted effort and start again with something else. If not then please urgently address these issues so I can do my work. I’m pretty annoyed, as you will realise. Over to you
Robin – I have Woo 3.3 and Symbiostock 3.3. I have just updated to S. Stock 4.01 – it IS now working and allowing me to enter the licence section.
There was obviously a bug in the version I had when purchased.
Robin – can you help with this please?
This problem is really holding me up and preventing me adding new products or applying a new license to existing products (as opposed to the sample default Symbiostock one they now have).
There seems to be no way of opening the “License” option in any media – new or existing – when I edit it. I get an endless “busy” loop. I have tried uploading new media and the same happens. I have tried to follow the instructions in Documentation and successfully created new licenses.
I do need to apply my own license to all images for digital downloads in time, but right now I’m trying to set the price for a single physical product (a book) and, so far as I know, have correctly set that media product to “physical product” in Edit and so on.
The site is not yet “live”, and never will be until I can get this problem sorted, but I have an advertising deadline for this book to comply with and cannot meet it (and will lose three months until the next issue) unless I can get this to work.
Thanks
The only thing I can suggest Steve is that it can take a few minutes for the cron job to kick in. I find the same with the manual processor in “Settings”. I often find if uploading say a single or image or two it’s quicker to do it manually rather than edit the cron job. Manually can sometimes take several goes to open a page that says “1 image processed” etc.
Maybe leave the cron job running for say 15 minutes and then have a look?
Also – just a thought – images must be FULLY edited (as opposed to “quick edit”) the first time and assigned a category, otherwise they don’t don’t show up
Ah – too far to pop in for a coffee to compare notes! Happy New Year………….
Are you in the UK Steve? Just interested!
Steve – I had the same problem and I believe one at a time is the norm. However, by creating a cron job in your website control panel and setting that to run every minute automatically you will soon get through a batch. I uploaded around 500 images recently and left the cron job running all night – all done in the morning. I switch off the cron job when not in use as it is liable to slow the site down I’m told.
If you’re not familiar with cron jobs there are some instructions on the image processing section of Documentation – or let me know and I can help you.
Robin – we now have a small issue with watermarks in that all my images appear to have the correct watermark but several only show the correct one when the thumb is clicked on, displaying the actual product image, but you can see the Symbiostock watermark on the little thumbnail. Any ideas please?
This is not vital and can be lived with, but would be nice to have it looking “right” for the more sharp-eyed customers!
Thanks Robin but I’m struggling to find any free theme which has galleries and will display my images, so I can’t really tell. I have tried five different themes and not one displays a picture.
Question: How long should it take for the processor to regenerate 500 watermarks and do I need to turn on the cron job or is it all automatic?
Update: I found a them which does display the images and some of the fort ones I uploaded do display the watermark but not the diagonal lines. These reptresent three pages only out of 50 and there is no sign of any more being processed
Thanks Robin – I think I’m getting to grips with it
UPDATE: I’ve spotted that a PNG will do for the watermark but nothing happens after I upload a new one. Am I right in thinking all images will need to be re-generated/processed before this appears? If so, how do I test that the new watermark is the right size before committing to that major step? There seems to be no way of testing it on say one image.
Thanks Songquan and Robin. Changing Status” to “Publish” worked perfectly first time and a large batch of images correctly published to the correct category.
I just spent something like 10 hours over recent days individually uploading 500 images. I have a couple of thousand more to do and the thought of it almost made me lose the will to live Could I suggest this little (but vital) tip is added to the documentation?
Thanks again
I THINK I might have narrowed down the issue:
What happens is I upload a batch of images through ftp, run the cron job and the images appear in Symbiostock/Media. You can if you wish select all and from the drop down list Edit/Apply. You can then choose to apply a particular category to ALL the images and then “Update”. Sure enough the category then appears beside each and every image. However, they do not appear on the live site under that category (or anywhere else) – whatever you do.
I’ve discovered that no images will appear anywhere on the live site until each one is SEPARATELY processed by going to “Edit” not “Quick Edit”. Quick edit only has an update button whereas Edit has a “Publish” button and that makes the difference. You cannot “Publish” more than one image at a time. In other words, each image must be individually fully edited and it’s not possible to do this in bulk. It must be one at a time.
Once images have been fully edited and published one at a time, THEN (and only then) can they be bulk edited to apply say a further category and the Update button used.
Is there any means by which this can be changed so they can be bulk processed? That would reduce the time spent setting the site up initially considerably. Thanks Robin
