So many problems so little help

sorry you have had this experience. from my view point this is how things have gone for me. i have clients running the dolphin script, they are provided professional hosting, dolphin installations, mods, tweaks, and tutorials. Of course all of this comes with a cost. yes you paid the $998.00 and you deserve th best level of support that boonex provides. if you are not getting that level of support, there is certainly a problem. i know these guys are working on this daily. there are those of us who have working knowledge of this script, not as a developer for the script, but as a user of the script, and we volunteer our time in the forums and blogs trying to help those who need help, as time permits. yes we all charge some fee for our time and efforts. dolphin is not a plug and play script, and many misconstrue the term community site builder to be similar to geocities or angelfire page builders that were so widely used in the 90's and early 2000's. this script is complex, and the only limits are your imagination, and your programming abilities.

you must first inventory yourself and determine if you are providing clear and concise information in order to receive exact results. the sites that i host, i also am employed as the sysadmin paid on a monthly salary for things they may need or want. i personally have not seen your posts asking for help, but i will look around and see if there is anything i can help you with.

my suggestion is this, if you are unable to manage the site, then consider retaining a sysadmin to keep your site up to date, as well as be able to provide you with on command support. i know you thought that was what you were purchasing when you paid the $998.00, and for the most part, that is what i would expect as well.

sorry you are finding yourself in a position that has you unhappy with boonex. i can assure you that they are working on all areas of support as well as functionality of this script.

hang in there, have some patience, and things will work out.

later,
DosDawg

The problem I think comes when Dolphin is advertised like this - and this is an exact quote from Dolphins home page -

"You just build the site of your dreams and deploy it instantly with the ease and elegance that only Dolphin can provide. For Free."

The ease and elegance would suggest something that is simple to use. It doesn't qualify it in any way. It is obvious it has ease and elegance for programmers, but for the general population this could be very misleading.

To "deploy it instantly" suggests that no time is needed to get it running.

I can see how a company wouldn't want to put people off and turn them away, but by advertising "ease" and "instantly" they open themselves up to criticism from people who dont find the "ease" when they try to build their sites.

I've been building my own sites for years now - I'm not a porgrammer but I can chop and change code in templates and wordpress to create websites, I can deconstruct and rebuild flash sites, I understand cron jobs, cmods, and how php is formed... yet I still have found Dolphin to be moderately difficult.

I do however love it, and feel that it is totally worth the effort.

Also this forum has been a great help and my thanks go out to all those who have offered help, including Dosdawg. If it wasnt for people like that I may have given up by now.

Overall I would say, yes the advertising is misleading and yes Boonex do seem to be overworked and neglecting their customers. But I believe the software is great and the price is unbeatable.

I just hope that the software continues to improve and that the support one day catches up...

And you know what... if Boonex is listening, I think they should hire someone just to do customer support and service, and pay that persons salary by offering "$99 a year service contracts" for the free product, and when that person isnt busy he could hang out in the forums and help others for free.

That would solve so many problems...

I say this because I like the software so much, and I so want it to work, but it bugs me when so many people have problems that dont get addressed.

Boonex needs to start listening to its customers needs...
Start producing softarwe that has "ease" and "instantly" built in.
And keep creating great software.

I found another couple of snippets on Dolphins home page...

With a huge variety of features & options, you can quickly develop your very unique and successful website.

Dolphin provides simple yet sophisticated tools to build your own community site,

Unique "Builders" that let you build numerous variants of your site pages, tweak functionality and layout without any programming experience.

So again, "quickly", "simple" and "without any programming experience"....

And a forum full of confused hopefuls like me!

I can fix the problems. You can mail me your issues.

yes, i would say this is misleading as well. i can program in php, but this scripts overall dynamics is just throwed off. there is too much redundant data that is being pushed across this site.

i think a lot of this code could be cleaned up, most specifically teh templating system. i remember reading where somebody was working on getting smarty templates tuned up for dolphin. that would be nice.

i think there is a severe problem with advertising one thing and producing an opposite, you are correct avhow, ,the words used are exploited for keyword search engines, there is no doubt about that to me. i think overall, that 998 is an excellent price point, however, if they are going to make a thousand bux on every sale, a % of that should be allocated to support. and those of us who are on here as volunteers could work a ticket system, and with that ticket system, you would be able to pick and choose your tickets that you could professionally answer in a timely fashion for an agreed upon amount from boonex. basically outsourcing the support of the script to those that are familiar with it. the developers are clearly busy and dont have time to support what they are developing. it appears to me that in all actuality they dont even have time to test what is being developed.

well thats my rant on this matter.


Later,
DosDawg

well, i bought smartpro and encountered a lot problem too. But, i must say that there are few support staffs who are really helpful & did reply my enquiries promptly.

The only problem now is the speed. I had to remove ads & profile music to speed up the whole site.

And, I launched my site to public yesterday. Guess what, it burst within 2 hours! Too popular I guess..haha.. I checked with the web host & they claimed that my site used too much ram/cpu resources and recommended me to upgrade from VPS to dedicated server. So, my site is down for at least 72 hours because they need to install the server...

So, I guess we really have to get prepared to fork out more money to get the site up & running smoothly.

Anyway, all the best!!
; )

I haven't been with Dolphin long but have to say I cannot believe the obvious lack of concern with support.

With all the unhappy users jumping ship (and more and more potential users turned OFF) Boonex won't have to worry about support very long at all ....

Still nothing from staff pitty you can't bump to latest blogs posts to be noticed