Fair play and Business

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by Etrack

That's what I deducted after speaking with you on your site but I might be wrong. I cannot know that for sure, bugged and poor code can be written by really anyone. It just happens today that most of such code pieces come from India, Pakistan etc and it also doesn't mean there are no any good coders there, it's just ...there are dozens of "coders" there or guys who try to be "coders" and most of them is low quality ones. But speaking of the code, it's really poor and not extensible. Also whenever I asked you if something could be implemented you said it either can't be done or that you will check with your coder and nothing after then.

Can you PM me some examples of that happening? Often feature requests will be marked as "under consideration" and then a decision will be made on them when the mod is being updated. We can't add every request to every mod, especially if it's very specific to one persons site, or will be a large amount of work that very few people are asking for/will use

There aren't dozens of coders at DBTech - at the moment there are 6. There have never been more than about 8 at once, and every one of them without exception has been from the UK (or ireland) or the US. Absolutely 0% of our code is outsourced, it is all done in-house by one of those coders.

Iain

[Simon Lloyd]

I don't mean checking all the sites I mean have your local script check locally and disallow exemption of both yours and standard vb pages

Business is only evil if you let it be

Nice to here your looking at it, and in the meantime for Christos, could he adjust your local script on his server or installation to exclude his pages?

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by nhawk

Iain,

If the navtabs were installed on my test server, I'd have no problem with the navtab copyright appearing on my mods pages. But in the example I gave, neither the post thanks or slider mods are present on that page.

The general disagreement is mainly caused by the global copyright managment mod you recently released. And would be the most difficult to manage.

Other mods, individually it's simple to restrict where the copyright is seen. Forgive any mistakes below..

For example

The slider would on on the forumhome and I believe the CMS page.
Post thanks on showthread and showpost (plus any other places it's used)
Navtabs - yes.. everywhere that navtabs can be displayed.

*nods* so the tricky thing here becomes what if someone using the Copyright Management mod is using a global mod that shows up everywhere, for instance.

Basically the amount of micromanagement that would take across our entire spectrum of mods, all of the scripts that would have to be made, everything that would have to be either included or excluded...

However it pans out, it's going to be a large amount of work somewhere, and it's not work that's going to benefit any of our users/customers in any way, or us. It's hard to justify that kind of outlay, really.

If there was a simple easy solution I'd jump all over it, but so much extra work and micromanagement for the sake of a few coders who would rather our copyright not appear on their pages isn't a burden I could really justify the business taken on.

It sucks to have to be "that guy" who puts the interests of the company & employees and our users & customers ahead of those of other coders but every now and it's something that has to be done, however nice it would be if there was an alternative

Iain

[Christos Teriakis]

Originally Posted by DragonByte Tech

For instance our Navtabs mod.......
Our profile hover mod,,,,,,

Really do you count them mods??..... They're toys my dear and nothing more. Mods are your Quizz, your Credits, your Gallery etc etc. Those ones that are getting a full page to work. All others that you mentioned are toys. Useful to some users, I admit it. But toys. You can't count them as mods that deserve to have a copyright notice.

Originally Posted by kapii

You need to check your sources, there is 1 coder on the DBT team that is from the UK, the rest are in the USA.

When What posts did you request features to be added on their site?

I won't really tell you who I am if that is what you're trying to find out. I'm just one of your customers. Does it really matter which one? I just asked a few times some things and not to implement them, I just asked if they can be done at all because I could not figure them out myself and I had a feeling that they would need recoding some bits from scratch.
Why I am telling this? I am not telling this to accuse you of the lack of the support. I am telling this to express my feeling which was like: "these mods are either really not extensible and nothing more can be done with them or they (you) don't know/can't do anything without their original mod coder".

[kapii]

Originally Posted by Etrack

I won't really tell you who I am if that is what you're trying to find out. I'm just one of your customers. Does it really matter which one? I just asked a few times some minor things and not to implement them, I just asked if they can be done at all.

I don't care which customer you are, just cite your sources, where did you get a response from a third world country coder on their site?

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

I don't mean checking all the sites I mean have your local script check locally and disallow exemption of both yours and standard vb pages

Business is only evil if you let it be

Nice to here your looking at it, and in the meantime for Christos, could he adjust your local script on his server or installation to exclude his pages?

I made a couple of posts explaining why that would be unworkable/unpractical.

As far as I know there's no real way for that to be accomplished. In theory if he wanted to code something so that on his personal site our copyright didn't show up on pages his mods generated, with no DBTech products on it, i'd be fine with that.

In practice posts like the one below where he essentially claims things aren't "mods" when they don't fit in with his agenda mean it's unlikely that would be done in a reasonable way.

Originally Posted by Christos Teriakis

Really do you count them mods??..... They're toys my dear and nothing more. Mods are your Quizz, your Credits, your Gallery etc etc. Those ones that are getting a full page to work. All others that you mentioned are toys. Useful to some users, I admit it. But toys. You can't count them as mods that deserve to have a copyright notice.

We can, and we do.

Originally Posted by Etrack

I won't really tell you who I am if that is what you're trying to find out. I'm just one of your customers. Does it really matter which one? I just asked a few times some minor things and not to implement them, I just asked if they can be done at all.

I can't really check into what you're saying, then. I'm not sure what the issue is with us knowing who you are? =/

Anyway, I can't check into your claims without some details so for now i'll just have to say I have absolutely no knowledge of what you're claiming ever actually happening - you seem to have been under the mistaken impression we're also a company that outsources coding so you might have us mixed up with someone else

Iain

--------------- Added [DATE]1370638097[/DATE] at [TIME]1370638097[/TIME] ---------------

Originally Posted by nhawk

As a totally, completely off topic comment to DBTech...

You might want to switch to curl for what you're doing. allow_url_fopen is a system level only setting and can't be changed with ini_set by a script.

Thanks, I wasn't actually aware that it was a system-level only setting

I've switched it to cURL in my dev environment and I'll implement it in the next version of the mod


Fillip

[nhawk]

Originally Posted by DragonByte Tech

....It sucks to have to be "that guy" who puts the interests of the company & employees and our users & customers ahead of those of other coders but every now and it's something that has to be done, however nice it would be if there was an alternative

Iain

I don't mean this to be cruel in any way, but..

It's this type of thing where I can say you don't know how many people have paid me to make DBTech mods work universally with every other mod on their site (sometimes my mods, more often mods from other people). I know of at least 5 owners that swear they will never purchase another DBTech mod because of this.

The DBTech way may not always the correct or best way.

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by nhawk

I don't mean this to be cruel in any way, but..

It's this type of thing where I can say you don't know how many people have paid me to make DBTech mods work universally with every other mod on their site (sometimes my mods, more often mods from other people). I know of at least 5 owners that swear they will never purchase another DBTech mod because of this.

The DBTech way may not always the correct or best way.

We always go out of our way to make our mods compatible with other peoples mods - we have an open offer to any coder who's work is incompatible with ours to grab a free pro license to check into it.

I agree the DBTech way might not always be the correct or best way, but it's the way that's allowed us to remain in business and successful where basically all of our competitors have failed.

[kapii]

Originally Posted by nhawk

I don't mean this to be cruel in any way, but..

It's this type of thing where I can say you don't know how many people have paid me to make DBTech mods work universally with every other mod on their site (sometimes my mods, more often mods from other people). I know of at least 5 owners that swear they will never purchase another DBTech mod because of this.

The DBTech way may not always the correct or best way.

Well then kudos to you, I have seen on their site, if it was requested, they go out of their way to ensure their mods work with any others.