dolphin verses una

personally I think dolphin is the best, I have looked at una and the truth is I am not impressed, the backend made me fill like I returned to kindergarten, to give up on dolphin in my mind is a huge mistake if una is the next step up, all the time and money put into a brand and all the support from buyers like me over the years to throw that away doesn't make good business sense to me, why cannot  dolphin be upgraded to keep up with all the changes going on, if your relying on building that same support base back up for una using customers like me who loves dolphin that the second bad business decision in my mind, I do not believe the customers who have supported dolphin will automatically jump on the una band wagon after all the time and money we all have spent supporting dolphin, are we all supposed to say? well those thousands are already spent, lets start all over and spend more thousands on another pie in the sky and spend our time rebuilding everything. I for one think dolphin should be kept alive by someone, if the owner has gotten bored with it give it to someone else to keep developing it because if your counting on supporters of dolphin to support una, well I for one customer do not like una! sorry but after thousands spent and a whole lot of time I am feeling alittle betrayed here.

Bang on.

Betrayal is a good way to put it.

Greed on the part of some, could be another.

If buyers don't come, putting the prices up is not a great business model.

Better to improve the product and make it a must have. Sadly, Dolphin was neglected for far too long.

Sometimes when the way is lost, it's hard to shine a light on the path.

Elsewhere, it seems others hoping to save the project are also praying people will pay for a licence and modules all over again.

That's not a fork, but a knife in the back.

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Michel - Meta-Travel.com
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I have another slant on all of this because the issues with Dolphin closely follow those of Oxwall. The difference being that Dolphin is presumably owned by an individual, whereas Oxwall is owned and supported by a Foundation.

You can call this a Conspiracy Theory if you like, but I've seen enough over time for me to believe there's some truth in what I'm about to say.

Dolphin was originally aeDating (AEwebworks) and appeared under that name until 2006 or maybe later. The developer decided that the need for a Social Networking script was falling, possibly because of the appearance of MySpace and Facebook. I assume the code was up for grabs, or Andrew Boone may have even been associated with the company. In any case, Boonex took over, re-branded the product, and from what I can see, set about making a lot of very useful changes. The Dolphin of today is nothing like the aeDating script it once was.

My guess is that there was a large user-base, especially in Russia where some people run hundreds of identical dating sites under different names. That user-base, like us, had a lot to lose if aeDating, and then Dolphin fell over. I'm guessing Boonex was well supported by this specialist user-base, but over the years they probably threatened to desert the ship unless Dolphin was upgraded to meet the needs of a Generation Y market and mobile devices.

Boonex tried to do this upgrade a few years ago, promising us Dolphin 8, but it was soon dropped and UNA was born. It was possibly easier to build a modern script from scratch rather than trying to modify the pre-mobile era Dolphin. This also allowed Boonex to modify their marketing strategies and follow the modern trend of making people pay annually. More importantly, it gave them an opportunity to legally drop their promise of free lifetime upgrades.

In fairness, Dolphin license holders have been offered a free copy of UNA, but how many of us remember Andrew Boone saying UNA is different to Dolphin. He almost went as far as saying, they are like chalk and cheese. Now they're literally saying UNA is the 21st century version of Dolphin.

UNA is not being marketed as a commercial product and I find that interesting. Although we Dolphin users know of it, the product itself is either not mentioned, or rates towards the bottom of the most popular CMS/Social Networking scripts. You can't find it on YouTube unless you prefix it with "Boonex" and then you'll only find videos produced by Boonex. Their channel has 140 subscribers, hardly world shattering. Yet work continues on developing the product, but for whom? My guess is the Russian dating market, a market no-longer interested in Dolphin.

If you search for UNA in Google, you'll be lucky to find the site. If you search for Boonex UNA, all you get is references to the product in this forum, thus I'm guessing that Boonex has not financial need to promote the product to the general public, other for them to be Beta Testers.

UNA's outrageous pricing structure of up to $5,000 a month convinces me that they don't want our patronage. Why should they if they have a steady income stream from all those dating sites? 

To sum up, I don't think we've really been betrayed, unless you paid for licenses recently. We've all attempted to read between the lines one way or another and a lot of members here seem to think Boonex is a large company. The truth is, thousands of legitimate Internet companies are run from an office in the corner of the lounge and the directors are the wife and kids. Some of these companies have elaborate web sites, but under the skin, they may be smaller than the local corner store. Boonex has never advertised that it's a huge corporation, but a lot of our members may think it is. It's possible that Boonex has a few stake-holders and it's not difficult to figure out who they may be. If I was one of them, I'd be asking "How can we possibly make money with Dolphin in its present form?"

The answer is - "We can't. Let's move on!"

That goes for all of us.