You didn’t drop everything and immediately implement my suggestion, how dare you!

There’s a LONG story of communications with this guy so I’m paraphrasing significantly. Suffice to say, this dude writes in asking for some feature we don’t have. We give him our standard reply — he can post a feature request for it (which is not a promise we’ll do it, only that we’ll consider it if it gets enough votes), or he can hire some other developer to do it for him. He then flips out and leaves bad reviews on 2 different sites.

He writes:

do you not understand how coding plugins and subsequent updates for them work? If I hire a developer to patch YOUR plugin, every update you have presents an opportunity to break a non-official coding change.

No, I don’t understand how coding plugins works. I just make a living selling plugins exactly because I have no idea what I’m doing. If only WordPress would implement some system of hooks and filters so us poor developers could implement non-official coding changes safely…. but who am I to argue, Mr. Not-a-developer Dude obviously understands better than me about such things.

This is a tasteless suggestion, also assuming I wasn’t prepared to pay YOU SPECIFICALLY to do this is a poor move.

We never asked for money, and we don’t want your money. (I don’t offer custom development services anyway, I have no time for that)

My 1 star review stands for the plugin, if I could take away another star just for this reply I would.

Wow I’m so sorry the review system doesn’t allow negative stars just for you.

I’m not sure who put you guys on the customer service team, but this decision is hurting your growth for this plugin.

What “decision” are you talking about? We said “open a feature request or hire a developer”, that’s it. What did you expect, that we should drop everything to implement some random feature just because 1 guy asks?

Any other plugin developer would have been thrilled to have a customer offer a suggestion

Yes because 1) obviously I don’t have anyone else making suggestions besides you, 2) clearly I have nothing else to do with my time, and 3) your request is definitely the best idea anyone has ever come up with, shame on us for not seeing your supreme wisdom.

To be honest I’m really disappointed at the service and will be
looking for an alternative plugin to use. Most plugin developers are
highly receptive to improving their products. This is a confusing
reply, and position to take on people asking to improve your product.

Yes, I’m sure years from now I’ll look back and regret this…. “if only I had implemented that one random guy’s feature request, it would have saved my entire business. But now, because I didn’t listen to that one guy, I live on dog food and cheap booze. If only I’d known.”

By the way, all of this was from a guy who’s business is selling… mushrooms. You heard me right, mushrooms. So obviously his ideas for how a software product should be developed are way better than anything us poor programmers could ever come up with.

P.S. Welcome to the blacklist!

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