Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

[Martin]

Ah... so the module is encoded and requires a license check... Slightly worrying that it's required for EVERY visit.. That's just plain poorly thought out..

[MegaFemaTron2]

Wow, thanks for letting us know. That's awful. Most code that needs a license checks it once. Or just checks it in the admin and leaves the customer facing site alone.

Ah... so the module is encoded and requires a license check... Slightly worrying that it's required for EVERY visit.. That's just plain poorly thought out..

Yes, very disturbing to see our site down for an extended period of time and not be able to do anything but put it in maintenance mode just when we are ramping up on our traffic. The functionality we can't do without because our product names are crazy and they need to stay that way but are bad for URL usage. Now I'm trying to see what the budget is looking like for getting someone else to write something to do the same thing.

We get a stark white page for our site with this message: License Invalid Please enter your license key in the config.php file. If you are not sure where to find it, refer to STEP 1 in the installation guide,or contact http://www.netvisionwebsupport.com for help. Please ignore code error below.

The module and class file are both encoded. And no content shows without that licence checking working so you are correct Martin, it is required for EVERY visit. Yep $169 down the drain on this (we "liked" them on face book to get the $10 off). If I've already paid and the license was checked once the component was properly installed it would not need to be checked again. If the license should fall in the wrong hands, then it would again be checked only when first installed and the domains wouldn't match. So I don't get why this mod is checking on every visit.

[Martin]

The module and class file are both encoded. And no content shows without that licence checking working so you are correct Martin, it is required for EVERY visit.

That's just poor, poor coding or abject paranoia... Worst case scenario I would have thought they'd have an encoded cache file that would record a successful authentication of the code for say a month, check once a day, at most (generating a fresh cache file each time it was successful) and thus fallback on that if it couldn't reach the mother server... It could even email their support to indicate a problem with your particular license so they could be pro-active but license checking whenever used just means you add a whole level of latency to the system and a bottleneck failover point as you discovered.

Personally I'd be demanding my money back... As is, it's not fit for purpose...



Oh and before you ask... No, don't ask me, I don't have time to write something like this... I'm going to be putting my energies into CS-Cart when I can finally afford the darned thing.

[MegaFemaTron2]

Yeah we've been stewing over this for a little while now. We are going to go ahead and ask for our money back and remove the code. We really need this functionality but it's not so important that we're willing to let one person's module take our site offline.

I don't really get why he would think anyone running an eCommerce site wouldn't mind if their site went down whenever his was having trouble. It doesn't even matter how short of a time period it's down. The reality is, one added feature/mod should not have the power to take down someone's online store.

No worries about being asked to help out, we have a company we work with when we can afford to. With this, we are concerned with our magazine ads right now that have already gone to the magazines with URLs that won't work without this plugin. So whatever we're going to do, we have to do it quick.

[netivisionweb]

My name is Steve DeFalco and I am the business owner of NetVision, Inc. and author of Custom URL Slugs for Interspire shopping cart.

I came across this thread in searching out what people are saying about our software, to better improve our services.

THE LICENSING ISSUE HAS BEEN FIXED IN CUSTOM URL SLUGS PROGRAM
First off, I want to say that this problem we just reported to us just a few days ago. We immediately jumped on the report to see what was going on and we did find a bug in our licensing system that was doing recurring calls out for license checks...

Today, we have released version 2 revision 6 that addresses this issue by completely removing the license check from the software. From this point on, you will only be required to enter the domain you intend to use the software on at the time of purchase and there is a one-time only check done to verify this domain. After that, there will be no more checks made so even if we go offline or even go out of business (we've been in business for 11 years, that that's not likely), your software will STILL RUN with absolutely no issues whatsoever.

OUR RESPONSE TO A QUESTION ON OUR SUPPORT
I want to address where I read in this thread somewhere that we're not very fast to provide support. But, what I saw is the person was really saying they were posting in the Interspire forum and we were not quick to respond...

This is true, we don't have time to live in forums or to monitor everything that's said in forums. So if you try and post support issues in any forum, there's a great chance that we'll never see it.

That being said, we have a support website for our clients and even non-clients that want to ask a question and get a direct response from us. Our support site is: https://www.netvisionwebsupport.com. It is here, on our support site, that we provide support for all our products and services and we strive to maintain 100% client satisfaction! If you need support from us, this is the place to ask for it.

Lastly, with regards to support and what we charge. We DO NOT charge to fix something that is our responsibility such as problems with the Custom URL Slugs program.

We DO however charge when someone comes to us and says they have a problem with their website, gives us a report of the problem and all the login information. When this happens we tell the client that by putting in the ticket you are authorizing up to 2 hours of work. After all, this is what we do. Provide a service, and get paid for that service.

We DO NOT charge to just put in a ticket and ask questions or to fix our own problems.

---------------

I hope this response has cleared up any confusions as to our Custom URL Slugs software and our support policies.

BTW, the Custom URL Slugs does have a 30-day money back guarantee. But I can honestly say that in the last 2 years we've only had 1 request for refund, and that was with the original first version of the software that did not auto-generate urls for all the products in the store. Version 2 DOES auto-generate urls for all products, categories, brands, and pages.

We do have a $10 off coupon code that can be gotten by liking us on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/customurlslugs


Sincerely,

Steve DeFalco, Owner
NetVision, Inc.

[MegaFemaTron2]

We definitely were relieved to see this code change sitting in our mailbox just before we were about to uninstall this mod. A bug... funny.

It would help if you included your money back guarantee directly on your site or at least on the page for this mod . Your terms of services says no refunds and there's nothing else to the contrary. Also the person in the forum wasn't referring to support there, they mentioned you weren't responding to email or the phone. I also sent pre-sales questions before I bought your mod and I received no reply. I took a gamble on buying because we really need the mod. Had we not felt so strongly about the feature we would not have bought it based on the lack of information on your website and getting no response on our questions. Looks like we were able to get it after we bad mouthed you on an obscure forum.

At any rate, our worries are over with this thing and that's all we cared about. Cheers!

[MegaFemaTron2]

If anyone in the universe needs it, here is how you add the new product url field to ISC's export feature if you are using the custom slugs mod. We just launched our affiliate program and needed to create a datafeed. It's much easier to do by just creating a custom export template in ISC but the new product url field wasn't there.

OPEN /admin/includes/exporter/filetypes/products.php and FIND:

Code: Select all

		"productSortOrder"		=> array("dbfield" => "prodsortorder"),
			'productTaxClass'		=> array('dbfield' => 'tc.name'),
			'productUPC'			=> array("dbfield" => "upc"),

ADD this AFTER it:

Code: Select all

			'productURL'			=> array("dbfield" => "produrl"),

OPEN /language/en/admin/export.filetype.products.ini and FIND:

Code: Select all

productTypeHelp = "This field will contain \'P\' for physical products or \'D\' for downloadable products."

productTaxClass = "Product Tax Class"
productUPC = "Product UPC"

ADD this AFTER it:

Code: Select all

productURL = "Product URL"

That's it. Good thing is, now I can add all kinds of stuff in there for our datafeed now that I figured out how to do it.

[mipra]

I have been using this mode for almost 9 months now and I need to admit that I am a happy customer.
1. Steve comes with updates every once in a while. We have upgraded 3 times during these times.
2. The instructions are VERY...and I mean VERY detailed.
3. As far as SEO, that's another thing to discuss. However, we can easily inform our customer a better length of URL compared the interspire default's.
the downside was:
1. It took more than 1 day to get a reply from Steve or any other support in this matter
2. There was one time when an error occured due to the script and it was deemed to be our mistake. There was a charge of support requested that time which I deny since I was sure the error came from their newly updated script. At the end, it was found out that the script contains a bug. It was immidiately fixed and no charge was involved.

Nonetheless, $180 was a great investment for me so far.

[prospektas]

Hi guys, maybe someone will tell how to replace:

%252f to /
%3A to :
%2C to ,
%252b to +
%3D to =
%29 to )
%28 to (
%252d to -
%21 to !
%3F to ?


Thanks a lot !!!

[catalinux]

6.1.8 is the best version yet - There is only one (new) show stopper - The new catgegory tree jquery plug in has a bug, but can be fixed by commenting out these three lines of code:

\javascript\jquery\plugins\jstree\jquery.jstree.js

if(c === "jstree-checked") {
$t.children(":checkbox").attr("checked","checked");
}

These are lines 2811, 2812, 2813

6.1.8 however still contains what I believe to be bugs caused by negligence on behalf of Interspire - For example, The Google Analytics ecommerce tracking code does not work with the Google Async tracking code - So you cannot use the ecommerce tracking features of analytics without hacking the module - This should be corrected by Interspire.

There are many other various problems which could be easily fixed - you know about them all if you follow this and the interspire forum.

I upgraded from 6.1.1 to 6.1.8 and even I did modify "\javascript\jquery\plugins\jstree\jquery.jstree.js" the category tree didn't displayed correctly.

Then I found what the problem was. I edited "config/config.php" and changed $GLOBALS['ISC_CFG']['JSCacheToken'] = 'your value'; to 1. I did the same in "config/config.backup.php"
Now the category tree displays correctly.
I hope this helps.