License Issues

General (non-technical) Testing Forum for Moderators / Admins
#1

Couple things,

First because your servers have been up and down “i guess while you move them” none of my apps have been showing ads, and on a weekend where ad money is at its highest no less.

If that wasn’t enough you show a nice alert saying the license is “invalid” with a link to your website, this is extremely unprofessional since I bought this plugin it should not be doing any of this.

Now I get the issues and everything else as in the other forum posts, and as you know I am extremely easy when it comes to this stuff and the way I built the back end I can turn CB off remotely but doesn’t change the fact that I had a bunch of pissed off emails starting from yesterday and continuing on to today.

So I am hoping that this “update” that you are doing to the plugin resolves these issues, I am not happy about having to recompile and resubmit everything but if you built in some kind of caching for licensing or just a single check or whatever that would be super.

The worst part about your licensing scheme is if they happen to be offline or shady internet you get a nice alert instead of failing silently in the background.

At a min you have to get rid of that pop up alert it should just fail silently and not show the ad not interupt game play that is crazy.

If you can’t tell I am a little upset over this, regardless of how much you have spent developing vs how many people have purchased the fact is I did give you money for a product that is currently not working.

I am not even sure why you have licensing in this plugin to begin with I don’t think piracy is a major thing with corona I could be wrong but out of all the plugins I have bought particle candy etc. this is the only one that is using licensing and it is causing major issues.

I don’t think my request to get rid of your alert licensing failed pop up is to much to ask, nor is it a hard thing to do in code.

At this point it is either fix your plugin or I just have to drop it and upgrade to enterprise and build my own cb intergration because while I just started testing out the advertising stuff inside apps and games they are still making between 100-200 per day and that is just a few of my games so the last 2 days your licensing has cost almost 400 dollars. 

And either way I will now have to update all of my apps that are using it and resubmit to google and apple, costing more me more time etc.

Please do something, I don’t really care about anything else except you delivering on the product that you advertised and I purchased.

Christopher

#2

Hey Chris. The alert box isn’t supposed to show for live apps. We mention in our docs that testMode should be set to  false  when releasing your app. This prevents the box from showing up at all, regardless.

We see that this is a theme that seems to be repeating though, and can see how annoying it would be to have missed that in the docs and result in showing that alert to live users. 

The even more annoying part about this is that we were forced  into moving servers. All the ups and downs that were happening prior to you seeing a notice on our site informing you of such, were not of our doing. Our previous host, suddenly (without any prior warning) started putting a cap on the number of running processes a website hosted with them could run. We literally have about 6, 4 of which are invoked by our cms as part of it’s framework, and that we cannot disable.

We had countless  calls with them and it became clear that our package, that has been fantastic to all of my companies throughout the years was no longer good enough. 

So acting immediately, I eventually managed after countless phone calls, to get them to sustain the sites stability for enough time for me to back it up and get out of there. I proceeded then to purchase a VPS, so these “limits” were now of my own doing. Been working tirelessly over the weekend to get it back up again, and due to some complications at our irish registrar, it’s taken longer than I would have hoped.

That being said, I hear you. I have also lost a lot of money over this weekend. It’s not acceptable, nor do I condone it and accept full responsibility. I can offer but my sincerest apologies, and also give you the news that i’m sure many of you hoped for:

  1. We are working (as fast as possible) to remove our online based licensing system. Instead we are going to use special per customer license key files. This will mean that you will just need to add the license key file to your projects root directory, and that is it. Along with providing your license key to init as usual. So no code changes will be required. 

  2. We are removing the “License alert box”. This will instead be just a print statement to the console.

So after this is completed, you will no longer be at the mercy of our licensing servers. We wanted to do it like this originally, but after spending so much time and money on making these plugins (that we are far from recouping), we wanted some form of control on piracy. Unfortunately, with the options available to us, it seems that any attempts on doing so are just hindering legitimate customers and ourselves. 

Please accept our apologies for not doing this sooner.

#3

Gremlin, 

Don’t take this the wrong way but your apologies or how much money things have cost you have no weight on this conversation without some kind of timeline of when things are going to be actually what someone is paying for nor does it give me any kind of solace.

1: Why would testMode default to true?

This is backwards from any test parameter in the world, but in any case very few people read documents and 9/10 times just look at the getting started code and look at the documents if they can’t figure something out which is my case. So what does testMode being on actually do? Other than the annoying alert box. Moving forward you might want to try an industry standard and set testmode = false by default and make someone actually turn it on.

2: What is your time frame for changing the licensing?

The reason I ask is because people are really bad about (or refuse to ) upgrading to new versions of apps/games and so you get a lot of fragmentation, not to mention the 7 day turn around for iOS and the last thing I want to do is update over and over.

As far as I am concerned this should be your one and only priority as this plugin is useless with the licensing server, if I were to put this into my casino I would take down your entire network as it gets about 1k to 5k installs per day and the average time spent playing per day is about 1 hour and have about 80k - 165k players “online playing” at any given time.

I need a time frame ASAP, this should not be a big deal for any programmer you already have all the pieces.

Sorry but I also need to push out an update for some issues in some of my games and not about to wait on a third party because as it stands my games that are currently using your plugin will be at the mercy of your plugin / technology / licensing server for some time because of the slow user upgrade process.

How you deal with the situation is going to say a lot about your plugins, and while I did have plans to buy a couple of your other plugins I can assure you that I for one will not be buying anything else from you guys until this is resolved.

I am sure you are going to have a lot of other people with the same issue as me and if your upgrade to make the licensing stuff local is going to take longer than a week I think I will be jumping ship on this and any future products from you guys :frowning:

Christopher

#4

Hey Chris.

Well, the site is back up now, but perhaps not for everyone. The domain record could take a further 4 hours to propagate at latest I am told. I can access the site at the moment and licensing is working (but again, depending on dns propagation). I’m not going to say it will work for everyone just yet, depends on the dns etc. 

I am aware my personal losses are not other peoples concerns, but again, this was not something I could even prepare for. My host practically shut my domain down due to some frankly ridiculous reasons (nothing to do with the number of hits, we were handling well over a million every couple of days), and didn’t even give me a heads up. So i got screwed by association really. Anyway…

  1. TestMode was true by default because it allowed a way for people who tried the plugin, without reading or realising that you required a license key to realise that you did indeed need one. So with this on by default it allowed us to show a message to inform users that they needed to purchase the plugin.

Although it appears the flip side of this is that for people that have bought the plugin, and not read that testmode has to be set to false prior to release, have got the aformentioned issue.

This won’t take long at all to remove, about 5>10 mins or less per plugin. This will be done whilst upgrading each plugin via point #2

  1. Timeframe for licensing is asap, straight away. I’m targeting having it completed and pushed to all plugins by Monday. This may roll into Tuesday, as i will also have to generate existing customers license files for them, and email those off. 

I also have to leave in the existing licensing workflow for existing customers who haven’t (or won’t) upgrade to the new system. 

I more than anyone am most annoyed about this situation, it has cost everyone money and damaged my reputation too, all for something that was out of my control. You could argue that it could have been avoided by not using this licensing system in the first place, but we are all human. This is what i chose.

I hope I can show, with my efforts next week, that I am taking the situation seriously and hope to win back your faith.

Thanks

#5

Gremlin,

You are right you could argue either way on steps that could have been taken but hindsight is always 2020 so wouldn’t worry to much about that, and wouldn’t worry about your reputation I think you are taking the right steps by putting this on your hotplate and resolving it sooner than later.

I think you will find that your responses and actions here today (at least with me) will prove to be a positive point on your reputation not a negative :slight_smile:

Thanks for the timeline, that helps me out a lot on being able to plan my next release :slight_smile:

On a side note, I would leave the license logic “server” up for as long as you can because I have seen it take 6 months for people to finally upgrade :slight_smile:

Christopher

#6

Glad to hear that Chris.

I hope to not remove the licensing server part for say at least 6/x months after I make and announce the licensing changes. I’ll decide what “x” is then also :slight_smile:

Rest assured i’ll be burning rubber until this situation is resolved, and am ensuring that the solution is elegant, easy and most importantly of all… 100% reliable, for all involved.

Edit: see this post http://bit.ly/1sY6VWY

#7

Hey Chris. The alert box isn’t supposed to show for live apps. We mention in our docs that testMode should be set to  false  when releasing your app. This prevents the box from showing up at all, regardless.

We see that this is a theme that seems to be repeating though, and can see how annoying it would be to have missed that in the docs and result in showing that alert to live users. 

The even more annoying part about this is that we were forced  into moving servers. All the ups and downs that were happening prior to you seeing a notice on our site informing you of such, were not of our doing. Our previous host, suddenly (without any prior warning) started putting a cap on the number of running processes a website hosted with them could run. We literally have about 6, 4 of which are invoked by our cms as part of it’s framework, and that we cannot disable.

We had countless  calls with them and it became clear that our package, that has been fantastic to all of my companies throughout the years was no longer good enough. 

So acting immediately, I eventually managed after countless phone calls, to get them to sustain the sites stability for enough time for me to back it up and get out of there. I proceeded then to purchase a VPS, so these “limits” were now of my own doing. Been working tirelessly over the weekend to get it back up again, and due to some complications at our irish registrar, it’s taken longer than I would have hoped.

That being said, I hear you. I have also lost a lot of money over this weekend. It’s not acceptable, nor do I condone it and accept full responsibility. I can offer but my sincerest apologies, and also give you the news that i’m sure many of you hoped for:

  1. We are working (as fast as possible) to remove our online based licensing system. Instead we are going to use special per customer license key files. This will mean that you will just need to add the license key file to your projects root directory, and that is it. Along with providing your license key to init as usual. So no code changes will be required. 

  2. We are removing the “License alert box”. This will instead be just a print statement to the console.

So after this is completed, you will no longer be at the mercy of our licensing servers. We wanted to do it like this originally, but after spending so much time and money on making these plugins (that we are far from recouping), we wanted some form of control on piracy. Unfortunately, with the options available to us, it seems that any attempts on doing so are just hindering legitimate customers and ourselves. 

Please accept our apologies for not doing this sooner.

#8

Gremlin, 

Don’t take this the wrong way but your apologies or how much money things have cost you have no weight on this conversation without some kind of timeline of when things are going to be actually what someone is paying for nor does it give me any kind of solace.

1: Why would testMode default to true?

This is backwards from any test parameter in the world, but in any case very few people read documents and 9/10 times just look at the getting started code and look at the documents if they can’t figure something out which is my case. So what does testMode being on actually do? Other than the annoying alert box. Moving forward you might want to try an industry standard and set testmode = false by default and make someone actually turn it on.

2: What is your time frame for changing the licensing?

The reason I ask is because people are really bad about (or refuse to ) upgrading to new versions of apps/games and so you get a lot of fragmentation, not to mention the 7 day turn around for iOS and the last thing I want to do is update over and over.

As far as I am concerned this should be your one and only priority as this plugin is useless with the licensing server, if I were to put this into my casino I would take down your entire network as it gets about 1k to 5k installs per day and the average time spent playing per day is about 1 hour and have about 80k - 165k players “online playing” at any given time.

I need a time frame ASAP, this should not be a big deal for any programmer you already have all the pieces.

Sorry but I also need to push out an update for some issues in some of my games and not about to wait on a third party because as it stands my games that are currently using your plugin will be at the mercy of your plugin / technology / licensing server for some time because of the slow user upgrade process.

How you deal with the situation is going to say a lot about your plugins, and while I did have plans to buy a couple of your other plugins I can assure you that I for one will not be buying anything else from you guys until this is resolved.

I am sure you are going to have a lot of other people with the same issue as me and if your upgrade to make the licensing stuff local is going to take longer than a week I think I will be jumping ship on this and any future products from you guys :frowning:

Christopher

#9

Hey Chris.

Well, the site is back up now, but perhaps not for everyone. The domain record could take a further 4 hours to propagate at latest I am told. I can access the site at the moment and licensing is working (but again, depending on dns propagation). I’m not going to say it will work for everyone just yet, depends on the dns etc. 

I am aware my personal losses are not other peoples concerns, but again, this was not something I could even prepare for. My host practically shut my domain down due to some frankly ridiculous reasons (nothing to do with the number of hits, we were handling well over a million every couple of days), and didn’t even give me a heads up. So i got screwed by association really. Anyway…

  1. TestMode was true by default because it allowed a way for people who tried the plugin, without reading or realising that you required a license key to realise that you did indeed need one. So with this on by default it allowed us to show a message to inform users that they needed to purchase the plugin.

Although it appears the flip side of this is that for people that have bought the plugin, and not read that testmode has to be set to false prior to release, have got the aformentioned issue.

This won’t take long at all to remove, about 5>10 mins or less per plugin. This will be done whilst upgrading each plugin via point #2

  1. Timeframe for licensing is asap, straight away. I’m targeting having it completed and pushed to all plugins by Monday. This may roll into Tuesday, as i will also have to generate existing customers license files for them, and email those off. 

I also have to leave in the existing licensing workflow for existing customers who haven’t (or won’t) upgrade to the new system. 

I more than anyone am most annoyed about this situation, it has cost everyone money and damaged my reputation too, all for something that was out of my control. You could argue that it could have been avoided by not using this licensing system in the first place, but we are all human. This is what i chose.

I hope I can show, with my efforts next week, that I am taking the situation seriously and hope to win back your faith.

Thanks

#10

Gremlin,

You are right you could argue either way on steps that could have been taken but hindsight is always 2020 so wouldn’t worry to much about that, and wouldn’t worry about your reputation I think you are taking the right steps by putting this on your hotplate and resolving it sooner than later.

I think you will find that your responses and actions here today (at least with me) will prove to be a positive point on your reputation not a negative :slight_smile:

Thanks for the timeline, that helps me out a lot on being able to plan my next release :slight_smile:

On a side note, I would leave the license logic “server” up for as long as you can because I have seen it take 6 months for people to finally upgrade :slight_smile:

Christopher

#11

Glad to hear that Chris.

I hope to not remove the licensing server part for say at least 6/x months after I make and announce the licensing changes. I’ll decide what “x” is then also :slight_smile:

Rest assured i’ll be burning rubber until this situation is resolved, and am ensuring that the solution is elegant, easy and most importantly of all… 100% reliable, for all involved.

Edit: see this post http://bit.ly/1sY6VWY