lesley

I am going to try to address all of the posts that are relevant that might need my addressing in this one post, so bear with me. @Mark I understand what you are saying, but at the same time you simply do not understand how opensource software works or where income is generated in opensource software. I can say pretty confidently that both thirty bees, prestashop, shopify, magento, opencart, 3d cart, and others generate only a small fraction of their revenue through module or app sales. The same goes for monthly fees, save shopify. There are two main ways that revenue is generated one is to make strategic partnerships the other is to sell user data. Many moons ago when Dekker and I started thirty bees we promised not to sell user data. Has it hurt us financially? Sure it has. Will I sell user data? No. I am sure people can find a lot of things I have done wrong trying to guide thirty bees, but I am working with the best intentions and not going back on my promises. If you want to try a SaaS version of thirty bees you can, its opensource, you can use it, fork it, change it, do what you want with it. I didn't start my journey into ecommmerce with thirty bees. I was around long enough to see Magento fail with a Saas version, PrestaShop failed twice with a SaaS version. If you want commercial metrics, let e know where you reside and we can get a NDA drawn up that will enjoin you, it will require an escrow. @Traumflug is right about finding developers. @datakick was a godsend. We all approached so many other developers and none would really consider working for thirty bees. Sure, there were a few takers, but generally they wanted upwards of $120/ hr and wanted to learn as they went. @rubben1985 I am frustrated as well. This is not what I wanted, I have a ton of people that I am friends with that are in this boat because I led them to this boat. That is why I am actively trying to find someone to take it over and not trying to sink it. Me getting sick royally fucked up all of the plans I had thirty bees and my life. @toplakd I realize this. I actually saw this coming and the company paid one of Dekker's people that works for Mollie to make a free GDPR module for thirty bees. He basically took our money, Dekker said the module was good, he just needed to tweak it, it was never finished and he left. It was a narrow scoped module just to provide the basics, but it was never released because we made a bad investment in a bad person. @datakick There were several campaigns. Both mailings and me physically calling people. I reached out to everyone I knew / know in the industry with varying degrees of success. Every dh42 email includes information about thirty bees in it. I have a decent size list of customers that have downloaded our free modules (over 26k ) they have been marketed to constantly. Could I have done more? Sure, at the time I didn't know what more to do though. As I mentioned in the past I did get into a partnership that provided money, but also took a lot of my time too. Builtwith is not accurate. I have seen internal metrics from a couple platforms as compared to builtwith, they skew both up and down. I would say its no more accurate than Alexa for domain rank. @wakabayashi You could be correct on the valuation. I shot from the hip trying to figure out a number. @Sigi Sorry about that, like most of our stuff the last 8 months or so, the forum has been under constant ddos attack or spammer attack. That has actually what has consumed more time than anything in the past 6 months, just keeping things up.

I am generally very open about things with our community. Some people might not like the answers I have given at any given time, but I have always tried to be forthright with them. I am unsure where you recent hostility against me or thirty bees has come from. You contacted me last year about partnering on a project roll out. You asked several different questions / opinions and I told you what I thought. You mentioned you might want to invest in thirty bees, but never anything past that, until you contacted me a week or two ago just to tell me to fuck off basically. You were mad because your bug reports were not handled satisfactory. Here is the last conversation for the people reading and wondering. But yes, I am up for whatever works, as long as it works for our mission and our community. I am not up for scaling module prices based on how much business a shop is doing. I am not for selling code that thirty bees produces. From the start of this company / project those have been the values. I might not be capable of piloting the company or project much longer, but I am not going to turn it over to someone that will exploit the community. These people have been awesome to me and thirty bees over the last several years and I am trying my best to leave them in capable hands with my integrity intact.

@toplakd apparently so.

@toplakd I will have to see how to report that. It might be fixed in a later version, we are not on the latest version due to some customizations in the forum.

And since it is a company, if it folded, you would not be harmed economically. It was just an off the cuff offer as well, using standard valuation models. The most important thing for me is putting someone at the helm that can take the company into the future. I feel I am no longer that person with my health challenges and everything that goes along with that.

@datakick is right. I did offer to sell him the company, with the company paying the fee, so he would not be out of pocket anything.

@theo I am not sure to be honest.

@toplakd Its because we have a better community. They care more about the product than just bouncing in once or twice to ask a question. Most of the negativity comes from strong feelings towards the project just expressed poorly.

@theo Currently there is no plan. I have actively been looking for someone that is capable of taking over. I had a talk with @datakick about it before he made this post, he was not interested.

I know everyone here is waiting for me to come and comment, to say that everything is under control, but if I said that we all know that would be a lie. The fact is I am getting better a lot slower than I anticipated and I am unsure what the future holds. But I am open to what it does hold. I am also open to answering any questions you all might have.

@Briljander Just so we are on the same page, have you been trying to cancel since december but you are still getting charged? I can see in our system and on the forum that you do not have the flair, so I am thinking that is the case. SInce the forum is not open source there is only so much we can do with it, but what I suspect, if my earlier assumption is correct, is that when you cancelled it cancelled in the forum software, but it did not cancel the paypal billing agreement. Let me know if I am correct with this and I can refund you since december. Its nothing nefarious we are doing, we are just using forum software made by another company and doing our best with it it.

Because every country is different and every platform is different, its hard to satisfy everyone and every law. Things are in weird places sometimes, but they are there. Let me walk you through finding the invoices, because they are kind of difficult to find. Click the arrow next to your name and manage subscriptions, Then from there click on view purchase, Then from there you will see a weird string at the bottom of the page called view billing agreement, click that link, Click that link and you can see all of the purchases you made. If you click into one you can download or print the invoices. Its all there, just is a weird spot.

Sorry about that, the forum processes were going out of control, I changed the header cache setting. I did not realize that block was considered in the header cache. I have it set back now.

As @Traumflug mentioned no native thirty bees code is affected by this, unless you are building from scratch and running that in production. If you are, make sure you are not using require dev in composer. It looks like there is another module that needs to be added to the list of modules with security issues, https://github.com/kuzmany/mautic-prestashop

There is no way really. There might be a couple migration tools you could use, but I have not tested them.

I know everyone is looking for a public update from me. I made a post on the supporter forum the other day about what is going on. My health has not been good the last 6 or 7 months. I have unfortunately had to reduce the amount of time I have been able to spend working on anything because of this. That is why I have not been around as much in the last several months. The things I have focused on when I do have the energy and am well enough are behind the scenes things like financing, taxes for the company, and things of that nature. I really wish I could give some kind of positive update, but the truth is I having a surgery next week that will determine how my life will go forward. I just cannot give a definitive answer on anything, or my role until after that and I recover a bit. I feel like I am letting you all down and that really pains me and has been stressing me out beyond belief these last couple months. I am sorry I don't have a happy update this time.

No, it will be after the first of the year before we can look into it.

We cannot decode it without your cookie key. It looks like that override could be the issue, I have not see that one before. Have you tried renaming it?

From what I read they are going to claim that the original OS license is not valid because a developer cannot license code that they do not own. So then they will start launching lawsuits against people using the code. That was the hot take I read on it.

I don't know if many people saw, but yesterday nginx was taken over by the russian government. That kind of leaves everything with their software in limbo now. https://www.zdnet.com/article/russian-police-raid-nginx-moscow-office/

What @yaniv14 says is the truth.

I wonder if something has been changed since we last updated the module. I will have to look and check it out in the next week or so.

@musicmaster I filled out a bug report to other developers from another platform this week. Let me quote that report. "On line 223 of the /classes/productexport.php file I think there is an issue with the join you are using to retrieve the images. Something around there seems to create an infinite loop which is eating 200gb of drive space up." That is how one developer tells another about a bug. More fixes under the hood, things are broke, ect are what shop owners say to me. If you have specific problems and not vague concerns, please describe them in as much detail as possible. I know of the course of this project you have been pretty good at describing windows related bugs / compatibility issues and they were fixed because someone knew what to look for and how to reproduce them. For smartlook, all it is, is a snippet of javascript. You put it in a site and when a merchant contacts you and says hey a guy named bob said our checkout is broken. You can go through the user accounts and look for bobs account, see when he created a cart, then go to smartlook and watch the video. You dont need any customer interaction. Just a name or a broken cart number. Regarding backwards compatibility, let me give a great example. @Traumflug spent a ton of time rewriting the whole rounding system in thirty bees. He basically rewrote the way that thirty bees handled prices so they would be correct. Are you suggesting that he should have written a shadow system that still spit out the wrong numbers that module developers might have expected in some modules? That is insane to me. I am not sure if we are having an error in translation, or if we have different views on what compatible is. If we fix a bug and it breaks something, we do not consider that a compatibility problem 9 times out of 10. We consider that a core improvement. Now on the other hand, if we remove functionality or say change how the shipping system works and break all of the shipping modules, that is a compatibility issue. Fixing bugs is usually never a compatibility issue.

Here is what we fight against. Fixing one bug in say shipping, that breaks a module that exploited that bug. When we decided to upgrade smarty so that we could be compatible with php 7.3, that broke some themes where the shipping exploited a bug. There was no way around that and also upgrading the smarty version. We try to maintain compatibility while moving forward. If we stopped supporting new php versions people would not be able to use thirty bees on many hosts. Its a tough position for us, but we have to move the software ahead. The easiest way I see to get at least two of your problems fixed is to reach out to the people that made the module and the theme. Ask them to update their software to support the latest versions. I feel @Jonny will likely update his. myparcel, I am not sure For your checkout issues, if it were me, and what I do constantly, is install something like smartlook on the site. That way I can see exactly what people are doing when the order fails so I can diagnose it. It makes repolicating the problem 1000% easier. You are not seeing the same thing that happened with 1.7 and you know it. If you look at most module and theme developers they release new versions when a new version of the underlying software comes out. We are not breaking things on purpose and telling people tough luck, we are fixing bugs. If a plugin or a module relied on that bug, that was bad practice. We can't bloat the software to leave bugs in it and try to detect when we think someone is relying on a bug.

Argh, the messaging system must be broken again. Let me take a look at it.