I’ve been involved with wordpress for many years, as a so-so developer (plugins, etc), a content author, and an all around guy. Never, ever, have I seen anything this horrific though. Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

For the past few months, I’ve been looking for something to replace the stale orange theme for this place. I figured what the hell, maybe throwing money at it, not so much of a bad idea, no? Well, that’s where the major pain begins.

With ‘One Theme’ (one-theme.com), you’re supposed to be able to do everything. What they DON’T tell you is that unless your blog conforms to THEIR standards, you’re not doing anything. Oh yes, not a thing. Here’s what I mean.

If you’ll look at my page, you’ll notice that some days, I post things with more tags (ie: pagination), some days, I don’t. Why? Because I shouldn’t NEED to have more tags on a flash video, or a goofy image. You, as a reader don’t WANT to have to click on a page just to see that, right? I know I certainly wouldn’t.

With “One Theme”, you don’t GET an option. In fact, at this point, there is no option to even control how much text is displayed in the article itself. That’s right, so, you get FORCED to use some idiotic programmer’s “standard” of what is what, rather than showing what you, the author (you know, the person who BOUGHT the damn thing for $100 in the first place!) wants.

Oh, they say they’re fixing that, that’s all nice, but they say more:

And we plan to discount the the “more tags” in favor of a user specified content limit in version 1.1 because it is necessary.

HRRM, sooo, it’s all or nothing here. I must use the same tag on ALL of my posts (ie: cut them off in the same place) or nothing. Now, that’s just a bit ridiculous.. Oh, but wait, it gets more interesting!

we have to limit the content for excerpts manually and remove HTML in order to render the thumbnails properly.

So, not only do they tell you what you can and can’t put into your post (read it again if you don’t understand that), but they DON’T support the native wordpress features. Umm, that’s just total and utter rubbish. What do I mean here?

Well, take, for example this post . All it has is an image. That post, under “One Theme” would show up as absolutely BLANK on the front page, the category page, and anywhere EXCEPT for the post itself. All you’d see is the title, post date, post time, and that’s it, anywhere else.

Another problem? Plugins. You see that ‘addthis’ plugin after each post? Yeah, that gets stripped down to nothing too, because they want to tell you (ie: dictate) what you can put where, and how. They want you to conform to THEIR standards, which may not be your own.

This is a classic bait and switch here. You’re shown a beautiful theme when you go to their website, and it truly is absolutely beautiful, there’s no denying that. It’s NOT beautiful, however, when you get it home, unpack it, then realize it screws up your entire webpage.

Now, in all fairness, they DID refund the money, but that’s not the point here. They DIDN’T tell individuals that this was happening, up front. They DIDN’T disclose that they did certain things in order to screw with websites. That makes this 100% fraud.

Anyways, I’m out for the night, just thought I’d warn ya’ll about this ridiculous theme. Don’t waste the $100 they’re after, they can’t even provide proper support!

-=T=-

I’ve been an e-bay user for going on 8 years now. Since early 01, I’ve been doing things off an on through E-Bay. I don’t make a huge profit from it, in fact, helll, I use it to buy small stuff usually, get collections going again.

Typically, I login to e-bay a few times a year, make a collective set of purchases, log back out and forget it exists. I make payment instantly, and leave appropriate feedback. I’m a seller’s DREAM, if you play by the rules. By playing by the rules, I mean the following:

1. ship on time ( < 24 hours)
2. test the product to make sure it works (duuh)
3. fully disclose any problems (manuals missing, no matching case, etc)
4. provide paypal links where asked, not 3rdparty spamhaus links (all auction programs are spam and will send you unsolicited mail)
5. avoid sending spam to users

If you DON’T play by the rules of common sense, well, you don’t want to be doing business with me. I’m fairly reasonable, I’ll allow up to 2 weeks for intl. shipping, but 1 week is all you get for local. Being in the midwest, it does NOT take longer than 1 week for ANY package shipped from ANYWHERE to get here. Typically, it’s 2-3 days.

As you can see by looking at my profile, I have a reasonably good feedback rating. I say reasonably good, because numerous individuals have provided ‘retaliatory’ negative feedback, because they didn’t like the fact that THEY had negatives left for them. I’m fairly decent, a good E-Bayer, no strikes that were undeserved ( a couple because people refused to provide direct paypal links, but they were always reversed ) . So, why the warning? Well here goes.

Recently, E-Bay changed it’s policy for sellers. Now, sellers can NOT leave any sort of ‘negative’ feedback for buyers whatsoever. That both HURTS and HELPS. Here’s why:

This helps, because now buyers can (kind of) feel free to leave appropriate feedback. No retaliation from sellers, no worries about a seller trashing your reputation. Hey, it’s a good thing in that respect.

This also HURTS sellers, because now buyers can do what the hell ever they please. They have been given carte blanche by E-Bay to do anything and everything. Let’s say you bid $500 on an item and don’t want to pay for it. Don’t. Really, you don’t have to! In fact, hell, when the seller opens up a “non paying bidder” argument, well, hey, just tell E-Bay you were “hacked”, you were “on vacation”, you were somewhere else, and the item was re-listed. The item strike will be removed, and guess what? YOU get to leave NEGATIVE FEEDBACK for the seller!!!

I say this from personal experience. E-Bay pulled this one on me. Here’s how it went!

Item A went up for sale. Originally it was a BIN of 850, minimum of 500. I had no interest so I took it down for a few days.

When I relisted Item A, I put the BIN at 450, minimum at 300. That spaarked a good bit of interest, and sold for $395.

Now, since the auction ended on Monday, and I was leaving the following Tuesday (a week later) for vacation, it was important for me to get information , payment, and get this thing on the road to the buyer inside of a week. No worries, I send the “buyer” an “invoice” using e-bay, and informed her to ONLY contact me through E-Bay, to prevent the spam traps from catching this thing. Good advice, right?

Well , Tuesday morning came and went. No response. I again send her a message (through e-bay), and tell her that it needs to be taken care of, or she needs to respond to the message within 24 hours. STILL no response.

Wednesday came, I told her she had 24 hours to respond or pay, or it would be re-listed, and she’d have action taken against her. As expected, still no response.

Now we’re on crunch time here. I have a package on my table of 100+ games (ps2) needing to be shipped and paid for. I send a second chance offfer, adding more fees to the account, to not get a purchase. No worries, the individual wasn’t obligated to respond.

Friday, I re-list the item again (this is the 3rd re-list, imagine the fees going into paypal/e-bay right now), blocking the fraudulent buyer , and get it sold. It sells for about $20 more than the original, but that’s neither here nor there. Buyer pays within 36 hours, and I’m good to go.

Now, the ORIGINAL (fraudulent) buyer has been active for a week, or better now, winning auctions, leaving feedback, receiving feedback. It’s clear they’re them, just because the feedback left matches their previous feedback, and it’s a damn mess, seriously. They’ve listed items in that week, and done everything account related, so I KNOW they were there, on their own account.

Since they’ve listed items, I bid on a couple of the cheap ones. I pay around $6 including shipping for two “toys”, with the intention of leaving appropriate feedback for all transactions (including the one the buyer ripped me out of).

I LEAVE said feedback, and within 24 hours, i get notice from E-Bay that my account is suspended, because (and I kid you not, here’s the reason) I was an

Unwelcome Buyer- Intent to Disrupt a Listing

Well, that was the ORIGINAL buyer, not me, but ok, fine. I email E-bay about this misunderstanding, and their words (I shit you not people):

Your account was suspended for a minimum of 3 days for violation of the
following policy:
Unwelcome and Malicious Buying – Bidding on or purchasing an item with
the primary intent of disrupting the listing, with no intention of
completing the transaction.

Wait, wait, WHAT?
I WON the item
I PAID for the item (unlike the original fraudulent buyer, who DID intend to disrupt the listing)
I left appropriate feedback for ALL transactions (negative of course, because she was a fraudulent buyer)
E-Bay suspends MY account ( a good account after almost 8 years) because of this idiot’s whining about getting PROPER FEEDBACK?

This too, can happen to you folks. Be very, very careful when dealing with the crooks that are E-Bay!

Vshare is a case for all of the above. Read on for more information

I picked up a copy of vshare earlier this year, in an attempt to start another youtube clone site, look through things, see how complicated it would be to do. Well, the price was right ($9.99), but the service, support was all wrong. We’re not talking ‘small’ wrong , we’re talking completely and totally wrong. An example here:

Multiple threads were started about individuals having problems with tags showing up. Well, after months and months of some so called ‘admin’ saying “it’s a server problem”, I looked into the issue further, and found that it was only partly a server problem, but that the server problem could be overwritten by configuring the application properly. Did the admin thank me for the response? Of course not. My thanks? I get a deleted account.

This is the kind of support you can expect from these guys, quite literally crap service, crap product.

After a bit more investigation, it turns out that vshare admin were hired to develop clipshare (www.clipshare.com), and that vshare is an exact copy of clipshare, down to typos, admin handling, login handling and the like. Talk about a MAJOR, MAJOR theft issue there.

Some will say “you get what you pay for”, but, honestly, I have not found this to be so. Hell, -=I=- offer quality, low cost administrative rates through my business site , so it’s not always a case of “you get what you pay for”, more like “we don’t have any morals or know how to provide support”.

Buyer beware, V-Share , bad, bad news. Stay as far away from these guys as possible

I’m curious as to HOW they got the info (I NEVER use that card online), but the lesson learned was quite simple. Check everything DAILY. Not that I DON’T mind you, but it is still a very very valid lesson. If you don’t know where the charge came from, report it to your cardholder.

Anyways, a tip for security. There’s more out there, but this one came up when doing this. Good luck, and enjoy!!!

-=T=-