I'm throwing in the towel here..

I refuse to continue to bail a sinking ship.

I will not be active here anymore. If you need something, find me elsewhere.

This is bull crap, who makes these list? http://www.boonex.com/o/location

Freaking ESASE is on this list and he won't even respond! I like many other top supporters are changing our minds to continue to be ignored and then helping you fix your sloppy code. Man you have pissed of many people today!!!! Screw this. 

I have spent money supporting this project and countless hours helping many members for free, only to loose them to your hike in price and the screwed up market. Kicking Deano.

[REMOVED]

Maybe we should revolt and start by not supporting any more members for free, at all. I wish I could remove all my post now, I am starting to regret sinking money into my support side of things, by the way, it ranks higher on Bing than you do for actual customer support. I wonder how this will all be taken? I may get punished, I really could care less at the moment.

To make things worse, you change the market so bad that the top MOST helpful vendors are almost running away right now, Andrew nor AlexT bother to update obvious major problems in the forums, they just go about there merry way. 

[Moderator: Removed defamatory comments.]

It is frustrating.  We thought the Market was going to improve, then we seen the trusted vendors list turned into a joke.  Now the market restructure with Staff Picks at the top.  To be honest, we don't care what the staff thinks is a "pick" just like we don't care who the staff thinks is a trusted vendor.  Then after all the complaints about the recommended hosts they are still there and the real Dolphin hosts are not even mentioned.  These hosts hurt the reputation of Boonex and drive people away from using Dolphin because they think the platform is broken when in truth it is the host that is broken.

There are a lot of people here trying to help improve Dolphin.  Our feedback is better than any you can get because we work with Dolphin on real sites with real members that tells us what is wrong.  Yet, Boonex ignores what we have to say, is anything more evident of this than the AutoPilot for the forums?

One of the biggest problems I see is that Boonex (Andrew Boon?) does not really listen to what we have to say; or at least it appears that way at times.  If Newton, and Deano and Pranshank and Denre and all the others like them are driven away from Dolphin, it is really going to hurt this community.  Not, it is likely to kill this commnunity.  I am still relatively new here, I would hate to see what I have invested be jeopardised.

I have spent the whole day on freelance sites today, discovering new horizons. I was trying my best to contact all boonex' guys directly for a long time and make them hear me and everybody else, but no replies.

With the marketplace it got back to exact the same problem as it was before: with cut titles and messy layout. Nobody cares about what vendors and regular users thinks. I have no idea why it went this way.

Once more awesome module was about to come out of my hands, now I'm not sure if anybody will even find it on current market. 

I'm looking for another way to survive. Once I'll find it, I'll quit.

I can't leave right now anyway even if i wanted to. This is pretty much my job. This is what i do to earn a living. That's why i get so frustrated when things change that will have a serious impact on that income.

So no. I can't just walk away. But i do have other plans in mind and i am going to have to get started on them. I can't rely on this anymore. I need to put a backup plan into motion.

The 'motives' were introduced a year ago in this blog posting: http://www.boonex.com/n/introducing-motives

We all disagreed then and still do today as to 'who' makes/made the list. A great example is this one: http://www.boonex.com/o/facebook. Nowhere do you see any of ilbellodelweb's products, who in my opinion, makes some of the best Facebook-like modules there are.

As for the Market 'makeover'... Well.. I don't like it either. I am amazed that the 'search' function is no longer there. That happened to be the tool I used most. The 'official' word has not been announced that the Market is now completed, so you might want to wait before picking up and heading out.

I am not sure if they are still working on it or not, but if they are, this should have been done outside on a demo or something. That is, unless the intention was to purposely implement it here on the live BoonEx site just to see what the reaction would be...

 This is exactly what I was thinking. So I assumed that marketplace is pretty much finished as long as it's on live site. A couple days or weeks without sales and it will be really bad for many developers like me. 

I am amused that the market now has 'providers'.  Perhaps it's no accident that someone used the term 'providers'.... a euphemism for prostitutes.

 If you WANTED to you could,, I,m working on a couple of projects I would be more than glad to hire you to help with.

The problem with this place started when they killed the 99 dollar basic license ,, then there was this new freaking annoying layout.. and now the market.

I would say when the price hike happened we lost a good 40 to 50 percent of the good group we had here, Speaking for myself and others who I know for fact spent ALOT of money.. I'm talking thousands in modules, thousands in custom work, and THOUSANDS in running ads and SEO.. was never a big deal way back when, when you could build 5 sites and like rolling dice see which one pans out. It was like throwing it all at the wall to see what sticks, at one time I remember I had 7 up and running with regular traffic.. but when the drastic changes started coming and fast I myself downsized quick as did alot of others,, and the ones that didnt downsize took it as a perfect time to switch over to word press.

 I know for a fact alot of big money spenders were running on the servers Andrew and the rest of Boonex were pushing big time over a year ago TERABYTE ring a bell??... People lost entire sites over night!.. sites with hundreds of thousands of members just gone, no warning , just gone!.. People who paid their servers up for years at a time, people who slept comfy at night knowing payments were made way ahead of time and according to Boonex and Andrew it was the best hosting money could buy... and we all got to see how that turned out. ... so there went another 20 percent of good money spenders here.

  There was still a few left after that, then we all woke one day to this new beautiful layout.. and as we all see.. how many regs post here to help and stuff weekly??.. single digits .. you get others who might pop in once a month or so. We all seen it happening right before our eyes, Newt was calling it, as was HL and myself along with a few others. I just hope that once the tumble weeds start rolling across the board here and when then last forum post was made 75 hours ago (by gg of course) that people dont then say "hey where is everyone, what happened to this place"

still to this day if we name the problems we wanted fixed since the release of 6 they get completely ignored and its like certain questions were never even asked,, like Andrew tells his crew to not even address certain issues.

dunno, but i more less been gone for a while now I pop in from time to time to see whats the newest topics and issues but thats about it, im pretty much like Newt on this one ... but alot of you guys are cool and i have known for years, Deano, HL, Josh, Shanky.. the list goes on.. you guys are always free to contact me via email tgether2011@gmail   .. or even text me 7135350932

 Why cant we call? 

Thanks bud ;)

I know a lot of people here seem unhappy at times but I'm sure we will all be in contact and still helping each other out at Boonex at some point for years to come ...

As for giving up on Boonex or Dolphin .... HELL NO!  I have not spent 10 years learning and building my businesses around Boonex and Dolphin just to walk away although there are many other things I do indeed do away from Boonex / Dolphin also.

Hmmmmm, my predictions weren't bad at all!

Jan 10th:  "Nails In 7.1.5 coffin"
"But let me tell you what I predict (if you guys keep this foolishness up)...one of these days, (very soon), people are going to get tired of being pissed on and calling it lemonade, they are going to boycott boonex, go create their own forum or use the existing ones, and everyone else will follow suit.  Then other newbies such as my self will come here, see there is NOTHING here, its just a dead forum, no activity in the last 6-12 months, and think "oh wow, this shit is extra dead, and before it died, there is all sorts of negative complaints and feed back, then hit that back button to exit.  By that time, you will have NO members, and your wallets will be much lighter. (or have you guys made that much where you could care less now?) I mean, it wouldnt make no difference if D8 is the best script ever with NO bugs, every possible feature that could be created already added by default, but by that time it will be too late cause there will be no market for it cause you destroyed it. "

"Be honest and ask yourself, What if modzzz and the others said "elf it", we certainly do not need them, and all of the (good) devs here abandoned here and worked together.  Where will boonex be?  Then ask yourself, what if they had've did this a few years ago, would there even be a 7.1.x?"

"What would've probably happened is that you guys would have a very fierce and direct competitor that would have taken all of your potential business because they are offering SUPERIOR CUSTOMER SERVICE, SUPPORT, and PRODUCT.  Your shit (osho) would lack the extra shit theirs would have, it would be a no brainer!  Earlier I said "I have no special (coding) skills, which is a great thing for you guys right about now because honestly, if I did/could (code), that is exactly what I would be doing right now, boycotting and linking with other talented devs who are equally tired of this unicornshit, and compete against boonex, because thats just how damn angry you have made us, by shitting on your main support system."

My .2 cents

 RE:

 Aw take some Midol and have a nap.... you'll feel better.

 Take a hard look at pligg . Badly in need of modules but much more versatile. Developers  take a hard look at this. potential is certainly there.

 Thanks for advice, looks pretty interesting.

Pligg appears to me more of a WordPress type CMS with members.  Our Quam Plures allows the same as Pligg.  Pligg does not appear to be a social networking application.

 Well, if I will want to eat bread tomorrow, I'll agree to work with any CMS :)

There is always ning I guess. HAHHAHA

obviously none of us are really in a position to just walk away from dolphin. Hopefully things will get better (fingers crossed)

 I think some of us have worked to damn hard with Dolphin and invested too much cash into Boonex to just walk away!

Saying that, I love Dolphin and the possibilities and would not want to walk away either ... I have also built a number of small businesses / services around Boonex and Dolphin.

I do think it's also good to have other options and not solely depend on making a great income / success via Dolphin.

 Josh you are right about some of that, but when is enough, enough?  .. how long do we have to just "settle" or "overlook" certain things??  ... yeah there is alot of cash backing what I have, but I am almost to the point at putting just as much money behind Deano to continue the project he had going to at least get on a solid platform where the customers will be heard!

 I hear you man ... I'm not saying anyone here is wrong for their views ... this just my own opinion really.

I do think there are many things Boonex should be looking at right now and taking immediate actions on, I kind of feel sad to watch what is / was a strong community slowly falling apart.

I believe things will get better and improve again ... I'm happy to stick around and continue my work, but without expecting too much too quickly from Boonex.

Fellow Dolphins...

I had a look at Oxwall Software and it looks very promising.
It has really good plug ins and very nice templates...

I love dolphin but this make me think twice... who has seen it??

Also look at the market area hint hint :-)

 Just compared Alexa rating.. not good yet. Based in India, personally I have not really good experience with Indian software market, with all my respect to them.

I was going to re-write post and deleted it ...

Although it looks interesting and has lots of nice free plugins etc. I would not say it is as good as Dolphin ...

I can see that it takes Oxwall some time getting updates done too ...

01 February 2014 and their logo is still wearing Christmas hat!

 It's still snowy, logo could get cold! :)

I haven't changed a thing about my site in a very long time. The last solid work I did on it outside of fixing the ever present code failure was to move to a new server and install 7.14.

That's it. If you check my purchased mods, you'll find they are all several versions behind .. Why?

The answer lies in this post. It's like waiting for the other shoe to fall.... Why bother? I fully expect to never actually see 7.1.5 and I know for sure that 8.0 will never make it to fruition.

Oh yeah, I bought mods from Esase as well. Total waste of money and totally got burned.

I think I made a good observation there ;) I also think it could be a indication that maybe their core team also take time their about doing things ... it would take 30 seconds to update that logo but it's still wearing that hat!

 Very interesting ... One of the things I hate about Dolphin is the massive list of half completed mods that cost you money on the backend to get working to a reasonably efficient level. Hell, even the photo and video mods are half-assed in their design.

Yeah, I must admit I have found this a big issue many times ... I did make thread a long long time ago saying it was wrong that some modules was being released for sale in the market without really being fully tested by the developer first. I also said that Boonex Staff should fully test each module being released first before being allowed onto the market.

Having a very active network meant that if I added modules without realizing they was fully working as described before purchase literally hundreds of members / visitors a day was seeing the errors and stuff not working and making all my efforts of driving my network forwards at times a waist of time and somewhat embarrassing.

 Yeah... Would be nice..

Recap: BoonEx is not responsible for any issues between Vendors and Customers.

I was aware of all that back then but the thing I was trying to get across is that the developers kind of represent / provide for BoonEx  and all us webmasters that purchase from the market. BoonEx also makes money from the sales ... so surely bad modules effectively scar BoonEx's reputation and trust.

 Me too, but read it in a sentence as it posted here, it makes more sense :)

 Yes, I'm starting to see ...

Recap #1: If you get screwed, hey life sucks!

Recap #2: If anything goes wrong please don't bother us.

Recap #3: Mess with us and we'll send the boys around ?!

Recap #4: oh yeah ... and have a nice day ;)

I looked at many platforms; including even some that were not in developer any longer.  Oxwall had some funny things about it; take for example photos, the viewer was flash based and to leave a comment on the photo, you click on the photo to view it and you left a comment on the pop-up window.  That alone threw me off of Oxwall, that was just way too clunky.

 Re-recap #2: Pay $400 and please don't bother us.

 Can't be any worse or clunkier than Dolphins worthless photo viewer.

check this out

oxwall.0rg/store/item/727

I looked but that is a third party plugin.  Go to the Demo, click on photos and you get the browse page like in Dolphin.  Now click to view a photo, it pops up and along with it is where you leave comments.  I don't like the way they did that.  I would have been working to rip that out if we had decided to go with Oxwall.

Now, if Boonex had raised the prices BEFORE we got our license, we would not have went with Dolphin because our budget; basically a team of volunteers with no budget, would not have allowed it.  We probably would have went with Oxwall.

Yeah. I can see where that might be an issue, sort of. Ipersonally don;t mind comments on the popup. Not a big fan of comments on photos anyway....

Maybe I should just load a copy on my server and see how it goes. I have more interest in doing that than I do working on my Dolphin site right now....

You might want to try the wall.fm free trial in the cloud. http://wall.fm/

 LMAO!

These days I just love to watch the flow of information on these topics...

Hey, it has one thing Dolphin does not have. A built in mobile version.....

And finally the forum isn't broken. It allows video and image embedding, posting from your galleries or anywhere you want to get it from not to mention SEAMLESS social media sharing of your posts anywhere you want....

But hey, what do I frikkin know.... I won't be around for a while. Got some testing to do. (ANYTHING is better than the fish forum)

As one who is not as active as I once was, I see this from a different perspective - and is some ways it looks even worse.  Like a friend you haven't seen for years and when you do he is bald, out of shape and has gained 60 pounds.  The people around him didn't notice, but your first thought is "he looks terrible".  \

This community is a shadow of what it once was - it is now held together by perhaps a dozen people, and that is generous.  As I have mentioned, and I think this is sad, the company and this site seem to have  lost the "spirit of open source".  It seems like every time I come back to the Boonex site it gets a little worse, and I still don't get why they don't "dog food it" and use the same software here.  

I wouldn't be here if I didn't like the software, and still think it has potential, but the problems are serious and it may not make much difference if the software is good if the support ecosystem is lost.   I have written before about what I consider to be the "dark secret" of Boonex - an abysmal "successful implementation" rate.  We don't have any direct evidence, of course, but the successful implementations seem to be few and far between.  This is also related to the "engagement" issue with the software itself - and I wrote about a guy who threw together a Social Engine site in like a day and got it immediately.  Yes, he was well known and had a big following already, but even I was amazed at how I could interact there quickly http://goo.gl/ZSOlul

I also agree that Boonex made a huge mistake with the pricing - $99 was perfect - new people always coming in, and no one got horribly ripped off if it didn't work.  I read an article recently that made the point that you should try to be either Walmart or Neimam Marcus - meaning you should either price for the high end with few sales, or the low end with massive sales, and the worst mistake anyone could make was to be in the middle - that was the "kill zone".  

The base problem is that Boonex doesn't listen.  Does anyone remember the "dooms day device" they had planted in this software?  The defaults were set so that members would be deleted automatically after a year, and there were heartbreaking stories here from people who had put a massive amount of work into this losing everything.  It stayed that way for like four or five versions before Boonex finally got around to changing it - and all it took was simple default setting change. 

A joke post was made here a while ago about how we all live in dread of "the announcement".  The " Trusted Vendors" list is just the most recent example, but Boonex has a history of suddenly announcing things right out of the blue that leave you wondering what in the world they are thinking.  I am not sure who they talk to or listen to, but it is not us. 

 OK, I thought I could stay away for sometime and "catch my breath" but it seems I can't.

Fu*king HL says take a Midol, well, I took a whole bottle (two six packs)of Bud... lol..

I just have got fed up with the sudden changes without the usual "blog/note" from Andrew or AlexT since they are the only two responding to the forums, AlexT more that Andrew...

Maybe something is going on there and they are actually "trying" to help, as GG mentioned getting together to chat; mistake as suggested because the room would be flooded.

But, that does mean that WE do have so much input that needs to be listened to, it you are reading our post, please just respond with some freaking simple responses.

I do miss my Boonex of old; new members do not know what it was like three years ago.

It was a fun time, we need to get back to that... more communication from Andrew and the team and our community.

In and out.. 

Thank you for feedback! 

We are working on Market update, which we've been working on after the latest feedback about "Trusted Vendors". What we're doing now is changing this into a more automated ratings algorithm, which would primarily affect positioning of products, instead of exposure of Vendors/Providers. 

You may notice, for example, that at this page - http://www.boonex.com/market/members/top we have a new ranking order, and no arbitrary "Trusted Vendors" list. Ranking is based on amount of positive feedback. 

As for the Market homepage and other prowling pages - please bare with us for a few days. We're working on tuning the algo for the "Noteworthy" listings, which are going to be at the top, with Latest, Updated and Staff Picks following. We have Staff Picks first right now due to unfinished algo - we just need to see how things work first. The new listing is comprised of new products, with special push given to products from Providers with high %% of positive feedback (high ranking of Provider also adds some %% for calculation purposes). You may see total score and positive feedback %% in Providers profiles now. 

 "Noteworthy" is essentially an improved "Hot List", which will be most prominently featured, once ready. See it here - http://www.boonex.com/market/browse/hot .

There're some layout nuances that we need to fix as well, obviously, so patience is much appreciated.

Again, as far as reasons for the change are concerned - we're doing this to step away from arbitrary selections and to create effective way to feature high-quality products, both new and old. 

Over the next week you will see some smaller changes and fixes, as well as a post explaining the new rankings and ratings. 

As, for "Collections" (former "Motives") - I agree that they need more attention, and renaming is a part of the plant to change them. Collections are to become more flexible in purpose and updated more regularly. We may as well utilise some community help on this, as soon as we figure out a safe way to do so.

Thank you!

Slow but for sure in the end.. I guess I should take lesson here.

We would appreciate some type of warning maybe, you normally do a blog update; what happened to those as a fore warning of upcoming changes?

 OK, a lot of work here still.

In the picture, Deartmedia is there, yet I purchased so many modules from him and yet cannot get them from the market.

This is the kinda stuff that is amazing. Beckmedia/Deartmedia/Imodz has been banned for couple years and now you show him in the top? 

If a new member were to purchase his "top" modules; where does that money go?

Better yet, how would the unsuspecting new member to know he is permanently banned?