YourMembers dump Zombaio & CCBill

[Esinem]

It's great to know that CodingFutures (YourMembers WordPress plugin) don't value their users. First they dump Zombaio because they had some glitches, now I hear they are axing CCBill because it requires them to actually do some work to keep it running. As far as I can see, they have been losing staff and it seems to be pretty much a one man band now. If Tim Nash's attitude to 'customer service' is anything to go by, I can see why staff left. For months, I was told the Zombaio problems were all my fault, even though I paid them to set it up and never touched that side of things (I know when I'm out of my depth).

So, if you do feel compelled to install this flaky plugin, you can have the excitement of wondering which payment provider they will dump next when they come across a bug. Given their support forum was taken down in May due to alleged database corruptions and it is still not fixed, you can tell their level of technical expertise. I suspect the real reason was to hide the growing level of customer dissatisfaction ;-)

Discontinuing support for Zombaio
Written by Tim
on Wednesday, June 26th, 2013 at 1:18 pm.

It’s always sad to remove things from Your Members but we are removing support for Zombaio and CCBill both payment gateways require additional steps to work correctly. Both are designed to be used with their own membership software and the way we use them are becoming less and less supported. Other the last few months we have had an increasing number of issues with Zombaio, and while many customers are happily running Zombaio based YM sites more and more we are finding strange random users not having their payment purchased. As such and with little assistance coming from Zombaio we will be removing support as of YM12.2 release.

For those currently using Zombaio the gateway will continue to work with YM12.2 but will not be officially supported beyond YM13, we will be looking at launching Epoch with YM12.2 and continue to support CCBill in the next release and will encourage people to migrate to an alternate payment system. We will continue to work to support the existing gateway until the launch of YM13.

If you are unable to migrate from Zombaio, we suggest taking a look at wp-zombaio written by a former developer on Your Members it is a WordPress implementation of the existing, obviously its not a fully featured membership system but does provide.

[CHMOD]

It's been like that for a few months between CCBill and YM. One of my clients have had numerous issues with them, not getting any help at all even after contacting them a few times. Alway being told that they were doing something wrong when in fact, it was the plugin itself that was the problem.

I had to fix the YM plugin for them. It is now working fine. But no help at all from the YM support team.

[JesseQuinn]

it's crazy how quickly things can change. My only experience of them was a year ago and I couldn't have asked for more competent assistance in getting things running at that time. Reading your posts here OP I can't believe the aggravation you've been through. Crazy.

I'm really sorry you've been put through so much grief, I hope you found a less headache-inducing option

[Esinem]

Tim used exactly the same "It's your fault, not YM" with me. It seems his standard answer! The net is full of similar tales of bad support and Tim's obnoxious customer dis-service.

Here's the latest tale of woe: http://winkpress.com/membership-plug...bers/#comments and I quote "Tim sent me the same rude answer, without any soution to my problem,
just saying that I?m wrong, and his plugin is perfect." Sounds par for the course

[Esinem]

Tim used exactly the same "It's your fault, not YM" with me. It seems his standard answer! The net is full of similar tales of bad support and Tim's obnoxious customer dis-service.

Here's the latest tale of woe: http://winkpress.com/membership-plug...bers/#comments and I quote "Tim sent me the same rude answer, without any soution to my problem,
just saying that I?m wrong, and his plugin is perfect." Sounds par for the course

[bothead]

Thankfully I don't use them but got this email this morning.

"
We just wanted to let everyone know what?s going on and why we went dark for the last month.

The Your Members project was started in 2008 with the simple goal of making membership sites, it wasn?t even meant to be sold just for our own use. Over time it grew to be one of the most successful early premium plugins within the WordPress eco-system. With our success our staff grew and we got more and more ambitious in ideas and plans. Feature after Feature was added and the codebase grew along with our customer base. During early 2010 we started talking about Your Members version 2 it was going to be a complete rewrite, we decided to take a far more modular approach. YMv2 was never built. Instead we added more features and refined the original codebase, the codebase in YM12 is still based on that original codebase and it is desperately in need of a rewrite.

We started work on YM13 early this year and it became clear the new version wasn?t going to work with our current codebase. Indeed it reached the stage where even little changes are causing massive issues. So in August it was decided that we needed to make YM13 the last release on the current codebase and start on YMv2. I was rereading the blog posts that are sitting in drafts explaining where we were going and why, we never published them.

It became clear it was just not financially feasible to build YMv2 we estimated it was 6 to 9 months work to do what we wanted to do properly and to do it we need to do it properly. We also believe we can?t continue to support and update the existing codebase.

We have therefore been looking for someone to take over Your Members, initially we looked to sell it and then we looked for someone to take on the project from a community point of view. We did have several offers but in each case we felt that they would not provide the community with genuine support and were either just after your email addresses or simply did not understand how much of a task this was.

So it?s with great sadness we are withdrawing Your Members from sale with immediate effect.

What does this mean?

As per our end user license, the moment we withdrew YM from sale a sunset clause is invoked, making everything in the YM download released as GPL. Until now we have had two licenses. One covering the php code which was the GPL and our own license which covered all other assets, now those assets are also covered on GPL.

We are also releasing a final version YM12.0.8 which removes all the licensing and authentication code, it should be available to download from your site in the next 24 hours.

We are placing the plugin on a new home on Github along with all the documentation and videos including premium support videos and documentation. This will also include the new administration manual which was due to be released last month. This information will be based at githubDOT COM/YourMembers/ we will be updating it throughout the next few weeks.



What should you do now?

This depends, YM12.0.4 is very stable and works well on YM3.5.2 but sadly will not work with WordPress3.6 due to a change in jQueryUI used by WordPress. For the near future we recommend you use this combination.

YM12.0.6 works with WordPress 3.6 but the way we fixed it has resulted in a couple of minor user interface bugs, nothing too serious but something to be aware of.

Longer term we are looking at which membership software is best fit for our existing customers and will be offering advice on migration. If you are looking to migrate now then we suggest s2Pro as the closest feature for feature system.

What will we do?

Coding Futures is ending, we had a good run and we are deeply upset that its had to end this way. We are still looking at the best way forward to support existing YM customers and continue the project but at this stage we consider it a long shot. We have discussed ideas such as Kickstarter and similar but ultimately we don?t see this working but are open to suggestions.

It?s the end of an era for us and we want to thank everyone for their support, the next few weeks are going to be hard as we continue to look to find a way to support the YM and wider WordPress community but also look beyond YM to the future.

Tim
On behalf of the YM team "