13 year old Dolphin has suddenly passed..

There have been some topics related to this, but for real. BoonEx is dying a slow and ugly death.

$400 US bucks and no support; that is really a hard sell for me and many "supporters" now, just look at the activities on the freelance sites, Dolphin projects are nil if any.

We sometimes get massive updates from AlexT in one day that get buried within 20 minutes of topics.

Andrew Boon is a joke, get real, is there anyone still working over there are have they moved on to another project?

I mean when you have a company that uses alias for their names this alone is a red flag and has been for years now.

This is Andrew Boon the executive that is in charge of Boonex.

I think the last time we have heard from him is when he posted about boonex being 13 years old, hmm.

Andrew, do you still work at this company?

[edit] forgot to mention, I have really been looking at socialengine now because of the support and activity..plus they actively advertise this product.

This almost feels like a  'in loving memory of Andrew'  thread ...

Im not sure why it feels like dolphin is sinking, has done since the move to 7.1... think it just didn't happen 'smoothly' enough for some reason.

Feels a little like it's 'hands off deck' from those steering the ship (to use current dolphin talk;-))

It's a shame, as the script has so much potential. Although there are others out there that do similar things, Dolphin does have 'something' that works well... I prefer it over other platforms for social networks, after you get to grips with how to do what you want it to do that is...

However, it does need a boost to support, activity, some sense that someone is feeding it. Kinda feels like its being starved at the moment.

Another pitiful example of total ignoring of PAYING! customers...

and we all know what happened with Markus, "He didn't work out for us." Andrew Boon.

 Maybe it was some rouge wave...

There's a note in bold that he's no longer involved. It's also a 126 day-old post.

I completely agree with the points above. Dolphin is a great product that could be sold a lot more if they want it. Anybody coming here for first time would see topics like "refund my money", "ban that developer", "you get no support", "this and that doesn't work(well this is common for a s/w)" and boonex doing nothing for that, will obviously not spend $400 on this and will run right away. Socialengine on the other hand knows how to sell and does marketing for that. They maintain clean market place and most important gives support for their product they charge customers for. If boonex continues to ignore (almost dead now) community and without taking any actions about what they have for costumers, this place is going to get more dead in sometime.

I feel sorry for the newer members that don't know where to start or who to turn to for help when needed ...

We seasoned members are the REAL support at Boonex and many of us including myself have taking this further than ever expected (I mean: to begin with I just wanted a easy to use and run community thinking that there was thousands of people at hand ready to help... but these days am leaning to code myself and, leaning different fixes/solutions myself and exploring/learning things I never expected I would be 10 years ago)...

I have no idea how I have kept things going so well in between my own real life, family and other duties etc and I can sometimes see why newbies complain about the lack of support and in-turn walk/run away ..

 There's a note in bold that he's no longer involved. It's also a 126 day-old post.

Things like this, and yes I agree it is a great program; just what has happened to them?

For starters, Andrew can be more open about the company.  I asked a couple of times for a financial report.  If Boonex is just making enough money to stay afloat, to pay the bills and develop the platform, then I am much more willing to be patient about things.  However, if Andrew is making good money and living the life of Riley off of Dolphin while I am living in poverty, and yes I am living in poverty, then I am ready to say the hell with me and anyone else being Boonex's support team.  If Boonex has the money, then why not hire some of the seasoned developers to help with support such as installation when someone purchases a Prime license and requests installation, Andrew can pass some of that Prime fee along to others that have supported the platform for free all these years.

I hearby offer to purchase Dolphin from Boonex before it sinks completely and run it as a propper company, as it should have been in the first place....... I guess they forgot the first rule of business - The Customer is Always Right. We, the users were the life blood of Dolphin, not the market vendors..... This whole situation was a lack of balance which could have very easily have been put right.

It's really nice and humbling to see so many people genuinely concerned. I'll give a brief update...

1. We are not sinking. Being a relatively small team we have to concentrate on certain aspects more than on others and now is the period when we concentrate on more strategic development. Current version of Dolphin is relatively stable and gives us an opportunity to work on some of the core features/aspects that we couldn't address for many years. 

2. It's not easy, but it has to be done. Think about spring cleaning, for example. It's a rather stressful exercise that may take a few days, may involve chemicals and may disrupt everyday lives of house occupants. That's what we're doing right now. We very well knew that committing to development and not pushing ongoing updates would alert clients, affect sales and generally lead to slower activity. Nonetheless, we decided to go ahead with it and finally get to do what we've been meaning to do for so many years (!).

3. Financial report. BoonEx is a private company. Small team. Sometimes we have good periods and sometimes (like now, expectedly) we make just enough to pay wages, which aren't very high at all (saving comes from a distributed team and big hearts of our employees that believe in BoonEx more than opportunities elsewhere). This, however, is a natural entrepreneurial risk - we've been though this a few times now and we know what we are doing. In fact, we only take such risks at times when something we truly believe in is about to come out. Go figure. 

I can't comment much on my lifestyle - it's a VERY relative thing, but to give you an idea - I do wish we could afford higher wages and going by without paying ourselves any salary is nothing new. Anyway, the day will come. ;-)

More importantly, when we say that a lot of things that we do we do for the idea - we actually mean it. We love Dolphin and the opportunities that it provides to our clients.

4. Support. We experience occasional backlogs with support tickets, but even now they are not a norm. Some specific issues happen to be overlooked, mostly due to miscommunication. We do, however, provide support on sales and assist with product and service delivery adequately. We do not provide individual technical support (no modifications, no sorting out incompatible hosting, no bug fixing 3rd party mods installs, etc.). The nature of web-software is such that it is easy to encounter various problems that may seem to be issues with the software, while they may be issues with specific hosting, installation sequence, modification, site settings, etc. We have very limited resources to work on individual issues and have to concentrate on software-specific bugs and improvements.  

5. What one pays $400 (or $800) for? First, and for the most part, this is to cover past, current and future wages of software developers that work solely on Dolphin full-time and will continue doing so for years ahead (releasing updates that come for free once you've got a license).  Second, ongoing maintenance and development of support sites and communities. Our marketing, overhead and other expenses are really small, so there is a lot of pure development hours value in the product. It is true, however, that buying Dolphin means buying software, and not so much services. One has to be prepared for that - it's a great software, which will be constantly updated and improved. That much we guarantee. 

6. Can't see many public commits? The bulk of current development is happening in private repos. This is mostly for "competitive advantage" reasons, but also to allow us to concentrate on development without interruptions.

7. Are we working more/less than ever? There is no slow-down on our side whatsoever. Last month was one of the strongest (in work-hours) we ever had. 

8. What are we working on? Dolphin. Not something bsolutely new or completely different. Not something that would render current activities absolute. Rather, something that had to be done for a long time and something we are very excited about.

I am not giving up on Dolphin and I look forward to seeing Dolphin and Boonex's future ...

I do think newbies etc feel a lack of support at times but I think we have all felt alone at times and had to figure things out for ourselves ... the learning side of it all is not a bad thing but I know some people don't have time to commit hours working out different issues they have with their sites.

I never did think all the Boonex team was driving around in Bentleys

If you count their numbers on how many web masters there are already. On Boonex frontage they say there are ower 200,000 web masters already. And to count low. Each BoonEx license costs about 299USD.  Multiply this 299 * 200,000 = $59 800,000 and then you split that on 13 year. 59 800,000 / 13= 4 600,000 each year.

How much does a brand new Bentley cost?

You get a brand new Bentley for $195,200

OK, I may be wrong ... who knows ...

In the past the price for a lic was $99. But i think that a lot of people forget what it costs to keep a (small) company up and running. i see it with my own business... they all want the best for free or hardly any costs. (GET REAL) people.

So what if they earn more money then what you make or want. At least we have a stable version of Dolphin now, so be happy. I am!! And with people like GG, Deano, Prashank25 and lots more we have a place where a lot is happening with great mods and even better help!

I am not giving up on it just yet cause I honestly cant,, I'm in too deep at this point, it would be suicide of my sites if I threw in the towel with dolphin and went with something else. Although I have been commenting all year about the decline in support, interest, and all around general input and updates from the Boonex official team. To be honest I went from hanging around this board at least a few hours each day to maybe checking in once a week, unless something really really breaks and I cant get hold of Newt on Facebook or Skype at that very moment. 
 
I am probably one of the last ones still hanging on to 7.09 but that is only cause I honestly was holding out to see what the coming new year brings, but I just might say what the heck and see if Newt might want to get together and at least bump Viptopia up to 7.1 this coming weekend.. just scared on how busy it is gonna get trying to patch ad fix and mod whatever modules break upon upgrading.

Andrew, maybe it is time now that the licenses have increased so much to pay your support team.  Perhaps the seasoned developers like Deano and Prashank would be interested in making a bit on the side to answer questions they have been doing in the past for free.  Andrew, if you lose the ones here in the forum doing support, you can kiss Boonex goodbye.

Now, how about that financial report that you seem so reluctant to give.

Still makes me "LOL"

I too will not give up on Dolphin... for a start I have far too much money and time invested... I do believe it to be the best current product and at the price I still considder it to be decent value.... It just still has the same old issues with market exploitation, dodgy modules, being unable to sell a license when you sell your site and a lack of support.

I am still waiting, for example, for a worth while chat module from Boonex. I have had to remove the current chat because it is a waste of time. There is a balance that needs to be achieved as far as support, market controll and rights of the user. I do have an unused license that I do intend to use when/if this happens.

I still think about 8....

If anything has died inside, it's that anxious anticipation I once had for the new D8 coming....Soon?

What hasn't died though- how much is it going to cost to enjoy it with all the modules we've been encouraged to invest in anyway without fear. Sorry, at this point there's no running from that fear that a sacrifice will need to be made- let go of more modules or pay extra to keep them.....OR watch everyone else move on while those deeply invested hang back to salvage the functionality we have with D7.

But, I too plan on sticking with it like the others here....Hoping a silver lining manifests.

Im not even 1% interested in DOlphin 8, not in any way at all. 

D8 means the death of D7 and thats not of any interest to me at all. 

D7 was the death of D6...

D7.1 was the death of D7.0.x ...

How much we have to re-invest into it each time? 

D8 should be something thats 'on the side' and should never take over the focus the staff put into the current 'working' version. Still a number of very basic elements on D7 that don't work as they should, basic functions that are missing to stay competitive etc... please sort these bits first!

 GG, he did state it is a private company, no reason or law that says they have to provide them.

Now if they were to have stockholders, then we would easily find them.

Andrew, thanks for coming in and assuring us of the "state" of things, a once a week post from you would be greatly appreciated, it only takes a couple minutes to compose a nice message like the one you posted here.

A "state of BoonEx report" if you will.

 Nice to see some response from the Captain...

The "Markcus" Blog/Note has been removed.

Again, it is very reassuring to get a personal response from the person in charge.

I actually thought they never read these; one of the moderators must have passed this topic overseas last night.

 I just read this. Social engine is out there too, but have you tried Diaspora? The decentralized social network. I installed Friendica, but it pulls other people in from other Friendica sites which is kind of wack but I am trying to find someone who can install Diaspora. I tried to install it about eight times and every time I tweaked nginx wrong or something. If anyone can get Diaspora to install, let me know how you did it because the instructions on their site sucks and you have to install everything from the command line starting with a plain OS install like centOS but they prefer Ubuntu. I had to create and destroy tons of instances on Digital Ocean cloud for this. But I joined one of their pods and it's pretty pimp once you get it installed. It is built to run on https. They raised over $200,000 on kick starter to "take out facebook" then facebook went public so they put the entire project in open source at github.But seriously Dolphin beats all other software even if it's only by a hair, Dolphin still wins. I installed every single one of them from social networking all the way up to prestashop, magento, etc. But magento is best for ecommerce for sure. 

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

 Cute boy though if I may say so myself!

 I guess they just staying a float. LOL

$4 600,000 each year.

200 000 copies so far. Not everyone need help on forums.

 I deleted my post

I wonder how many Lada you can get for $4 600,000 in Russia?

 completely agree with everything daihlo says

Andrew, while we have your attention, please see this post!

http://www.boonex.com/forums/#topic/Recurring-Subscription-payments-module-PETITION-.htm

I have also noticed a serious slow down since the release of dolphin 7.1

I believe it mostly has to do with the drastic increase in licensing prices.

And topics like this one don't help. It would scare me away if i was a newbie.

 Not meant to scare anyone, just some hint that they are paying attention.

Newbies need to be aware of these problems.

Think about it, your about the only serious developer that responds, besides modzzz.

If you, modzzz, and the few others like us were to stop being here, what would happen then?

Nathan and Zarcon are hit and miss, I like you guys but also know you have lives too, Andrew only chimes in when it is something this drastic (ESASE whom also works for Boonex, has let many down) as well as other Boonex employees that offer modules in the market with little support and admittance to not coming to the forums to check on "things."

Is this because they are actually working on details and spring cleaning for Dolphin? If so then their modules should be pulled from the market until they get done.

I hear of a moderator going after another developer; but yet they claim they cannot do things on other market products whom developers totally ignore PAYING customers.

 I seriously doubt most of those 200,000 paid for licenses. When they shut down expertzzz.com and moved everything over here they gave away tons of free full licenses, I have 6 myself. Plus all the people that just install it and leave the ads at the bottom without paying anything.

 Andrew and his wife are in Australia, the programmers are in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic... but I doubt those programmers are getting any of that license money (which I'm sure is no where near $4,600,000)..

not sure where the big $$ figure has come from for what boonex is worth...

I however have purchased 10 licenses at $99 each, plus several thousand on market.

I don't however, think that boonex 'owe' me anything because of the licence purchases though, they were for licenses to use the software unbranded which I still have.

But... it would be nice to see some of the basic requests that long term users point out acknowledged, such as the recurring subscription to paid membership issue thats been bought up by a couple of new users just this week on the forums (not going to mention M'boi and the issues with his module for this here!)

I would love to see some dev on D8 put 'on hold' and the 100% focus of the team on really fixing/doing up the current version which is great already.

Some of the module/function requests that have been bought up would be real advances in being able to successfully use the current version for us long termers, we would then be 'fired up' again to get busy on the forums and provide more interaction for newbies which is after all, most likely one of the biggest adverts for the script (the forums activity).

Would be nice if this post was looked at, read, taken into account, even acted on by 'the team'. 

Here's hoping...

There is a future for Dolphin, but I do think its at a 'critical point' where the team need to listen to the users right now before ship jumping kicks in!

- Unity members (indeed over 200,000 now) are not all paying customers. Dolphin can be used without a paid license and vast majority of people use it like that. So, no, we're not getting 4.6m per year. Not sure if we even got that in all 13 years. :-) Anyway, it doesn't matter that much. We love what we are doing.

- Most of what we are making is reinvested into development.

- My first car was a Lada, which looked sort of like this (sans the pretty backdrop):

It was so bad it literally made me cry out of desperation a few times. Bought it for $1200  back in the day. So, if I had 4.6mln I could buy almost 4000 of them, roughly one for every week of a healthy-long life. 

 yes I admit just for example I bought the full version and a great server and when I posted a big problem here is the answer: 0 reply

after that I have so many problems, but I'm ashamed to post on the forum

In any case, I took a big slap in the face in buying this script

good luck 

 
What. You mean this post? http://www.boonex.com/forums/#topic/localhost-raktemcom-2303-Sleep.htm

The one that is not a error report? The one that contains no useful information that can help us locate a problem? There is also nothing in there that tells us it is even related to dolphin.

The thing you also have to remember is sometimes posts fly by here very fast and we miss them. Sometimes you have to bump them.

I have checked all your topics you posted. You have answers in all of them except that one.

There is more to running a server than just having a good server. The server has to be properly setup and optimized as well.

I have been running dolphin for over 5 years, and i can assure you. On a properly setup server, it is very stable and reliable.

I should point this out to boonex. You should make it more clear that purchasing a license is not required for dolphin to run. That it is 100% functional without a license.

I see so many posts on these forums that seem to clearly indicate that people think that have to buy a license to get dolphin working properly.

It's like people don't have the sense to test drive it first.

Just a suggestion.

 Wow, they are coming out of the wood work!!

Next thing will be a post from HL.

 lol   

Hahahaha Newton27 (looking around the corner for him).....and that pic of Andrew...he looks stoned..R.O.F.L

i once had a yugo once that had like 1200 miles that i paid 300 dollars for,, it was when i was like 20 years old and would drink alot, when i would get drunk i would park my lincoln and drive the yugo so when i would wreck it i didnt care.. dont think i was out drinking and driving on public roads, it was when i lived in north east texas and would drive it on old back roads/ cattle trails so only person i was risking hurting was myself and whoever was dumb enough to ride with me... at times i miss that yugo :(

im pretty sure the russians built that car to kill us as a war strategy though, cause when it would get cold the brakes stopped working!

 lol. that would explain the imaginary 'Markus' character! ;-)

Hahaha too funny.

That's not what they are doing Deano. They are buying licenses because they think that doing so will make the free version work better.

What I've read here gives me no hope. All the rabble that everyone has been speaking, including Andrew is just that, misdirection and blah blah blah.....

I have done no real development on my site except to upgrade to 7.1. My members have gotten used to all the little idiosyncrasies and partial mod functions and have learned little work arounds to deal with them.

I won't be upgrading again or doing any further work until the Boonex team gets real. All the talk and promises in the world does nothing to cover the fact that no one is really spending any time on development of this project nor is their even the faintest hint of a completion date.... Oh BTW, calling 7.1 a final doesn't make it so. You have to actually complete it.

Or they are buying licenses thinking they can get some real support only to be told to go to the forums.  The forum is a community of users that assist but it should not be Boonex's support.

Most of the people who used to be "agents" haven't posted here in over a year. Is Boonex down to 3 paid employees now?