Hello pablorotem9

I see you have only one other ticket created, and the last response to that ticket was on October 15th 2018, made by our agent Bogdan, who told you he cannot log in with the credentials you gave him, so he waited for your response. Ticksy closes every ticket if no reply was received for one week, and even after that you could've just replied, and the ticket would automatically reopen. Another thing is, I see you signed up for Ticksy on August 20th, 2018. I don't know if this is when you purchased the plugin, but if it is - you still had support until February 2019 - if the plugin didn't work all this time, why didn't you just open a new ticket?

I saw your review on Envato, and I understand your frustration and surprise regarding the price.

The main reason of our decision, however, is not the wish to try to ‘rob off’ the existing or new customers.

Reality is that our products require a growing amount of effort to maintain. Each day we receive 80-100 support tickets, and we do our best to resolve each customer’s issues. In parallel, we are developing new products and new features for our products. So that takes a growing amount of investments to be able to keep on at this pace without sacrificing quality on any of the fronts.

Envato, on the other side of things made a lot of very disappointing decisions, and overall we don’t like the direction to which it is heading as a marketplace (the policy is now more corporation-style). I think they are trying to transition the customers as much as possible to using Elements. They are not doing anything to help authors with items promotion, 99% of the marketing and advertising activities are financed by us (another big cut of our revenue, to make sure the new customers keep coming). Their aggressive marketing of Elements everywhere, including the checkout, is at the same time “cannibalizing” a noticeable amount of the customers that we bring to our item page, without us even receiving a referral cut for that.

Add to that their fees that sum up to almost 50% of the item price for exclusive authors. And the fact that the licenses are lifetime (no more than 10% renew support). It is very hard to maintain and scale the software development in an economically viable way under these terms. As an example, some customers open up to 60 tickets during 2-3 years, typically not bug-related but just assistance requests for a custom use case, average time to resolution is 15-30 minutes per ticket, so you may understand that a 50% cut of a lifetime license cannot pay for 30 hours of  a support manager. That’s an extreme case of course, but it explains the point.

So Envato was actually a very expensive and not so helpful middleman at this point. When we just started it was a great place, and we are very grateful for the starting opportunity it gave us, but now the products and the business itself “overgrown” the marketplace model.

We built and launched our own online store, and started selling the items through it, having to opt out of exclusivity on Envato. And as non-exclusive authors we would now receive an average 20%-25% of each sale, which would be complete nonsense economically.

We considered disabling our account completely, but in this case our existing customers would not be able to access future updates (which we provided as lifetime at the time of their purchase), and would be very upset. So we set a restrictive high price instead. We understand that many new potential customers are upset, but the alternatives would be even worse.

For the existing customers like yourself we prepared special incentives to convert to become our direct customers, without having Envato as a middleman.

If you're interested in converting to our yearly subscription license, I can reach out to our sales team, and have them provide a discount for you.

My apologies for such a long text, but I wanted to make sure you understand our decision and hopefully see that it is reasonable. For obvious reasons we cannot provide the full explanation publicly at Envato pages.

Another thing is that you wrote that we deliberately ignored your support request (even though you have only one), and closed the tickets because we wanted to get you to extend support. We've answered every comment you wrote us in the previous ticket, and we don't expect you to be checking your messages every day, but the fact that our manager waited for your response about the login credentials is how that ticket ended up being closed - you didn't reply after a week, so the support system closed it. Again - you could've always simply replied to it, or open a new one. Also - extending support is not mandatory, and if you don't wish to do it - you don't have to. We answer all our customers, regardless if their support expired or not, especially when they are experiencing issues like you are. We simply cannot let any of our customers down when one of our features is not working - no matter that their support period ended.

Anyway, I logged into your website, and saw that I cannot create SQL query based tables, and the issue is error 404, just like you described. 

The HTTP 404, 404 Not Found, 404, Page Not Found, or Server Not Found error message is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) standard response code, to indicate that the browser was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested. Further, when the requested information is found but access is not granted, the server may return a 404 error if it wishes to not disclose this information, as well.

So, the issue with error 404 is just what Bogdan explained last year - 

If you’re receiving this message when trying to save wpDataTable based on MySQL query from your WP Admin,  it means your hosting provider is restricting access to some of WordPress’ native functionality.  To solve it, contact your hosting provider to ask them to remove this restriction.

It doesn't necessarily need to be mod_security, but some other form of protection implemented by them.

I can try with some workarounds, but I'd need FTP credentials, and also I cannot guarantee that it'll work 100%, since this is an error caused by the server not any of the plugins installed.

Kind regards.

Hello again pablorotem9

I simply pointed out that the last response you received from our team was that the log-in credentials do not work anymore, and without them they couldn't investigate the issue further. We're talking about the same ticket, right?

https://tmsplugins.ticksy.com/ticket/1682478/

I see that the responses were pretty timely, first one being the same day, then the following day, then after August 23rd, your next response was on October 8th. Then, again, you and Bogdan spoke almost every day until October 15th. It's not really that important who took the most time to reply to a previous message, I'm just asking you to stay professional and objective in the matter.

As per Envato's profile: This author's response time can be up to 5 business days.

We do try to reply as soon as possible to all our clients, and if it took more than a day I do apologize. We have a lot of tickets coming in for all our plugins, and we simply cannot get to answering them all right away.

The length of my reply didn't actually have much to do with mod_security, but instead the price of the plugin, since you mentioned that we're expecting you to pay $275 to be able to use it. My comment explained the high price, and our decision to leave Envato. You can still purchase the plugin for $59 a year, and get full support during that period, and all upcoming updates.

We rarely encounter issues like this, and that is why it can take longer for us to determine what the actual issue is. We're not blaming anyone, we're simply implying where you may want to look for the cause of the issue, because the plugin does work up to a point when it tries to pull the information from the database, and there really is not that much free space in the code to let any errors slip through, but instead comes as a result of an admin-ajax call being blocked - hence errors 404 or 500. If the plugin had a bug with SQL connections, it would be the same for all 23.000+ customers, not just your installation, wouldn't you agree?

While on the subject of the amount of sales, although I hate going into numbers, some points need to be put out there. Willingness of customers to leave reviews doesn't actually provide any valuable information about the quality of the product. We are grateful for customers like you, who care to leave a review about a product they purchased, but a vast majority doesn't like doing that. We do have around 21.500 sales on Envato alone, and only 966 reviews (only around 4.5%), but if you take a look at plugins that have 10+ times the sales we do, for example Slider Revolution Responsive has 335.000 installations, and only around 9.000 reviews (comes up to around 2.5%), WP Bakery with around 390.000 installations has around 10.600 reviews (around 2.7%), ours doesn't sound so bad.

You will get premium support, and I guarantee we will do everything we can to help you with the issue, but we need some more room to dig through. Like I said - if the issue was with the plugin itself, it would have been noted by a lot more customers, and inability to use SQL query based tables is something that simply cannot be a bug that'd get through any updates. Everything is thoroughly tested before release, and I can vouch for the plugin working 100% as described. Why it's not working for you is something we have to determine.

Anyway, I don't want us wasting any more time on statements which don't have anything to do with the issue - we're wasting both your and my time there, so I'll ask you to focus on the issue at hand.

I just tried to log into your website again, but I couldn't:

Also tried with wp-login.php:

When I visit the home page, I get this:

When I go there, it takes me to the database log-in, and the credentials you provided do not work:

With that in mind, can you please re-enable the log-in credentials for crm.hashuk.net, and provide me FTP access, and C-Panel access, so I can take a look at the database, and our installation files?

Kind regards.