please stay away from phpfox.com I dont want you to be robbed like I and thousands of others were and are…SmokeyC4 aka Coyote
Well this is certainly an interesting twist of events. I was leaning towards PHPFox until I saw this post. Perhaps you could explain your position Smokey?
I am not trying to pre-empt Smokey, but this is a link to a thread just created by him… http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=474739
After following this entire thread, I would never use phpfox. Not sure what to make of Smokey’s thread, but even if it half true, it is quite disturbing.
Dalt
I wrote everything that phpfox has done earlier under SmokeyC4 its like my third or fourth post and it says Warning!Warning!Warning!
They are the worst theives of any company that sales sites on the internet today.
They are nice like Angels until you make the purchase and then your site falls apart peice by peice,feature by feature.
Every top notch professinal site builder including php site builders call phpfox sites scrap metal.
Its all over the internet what they are doing and wait till you see who really owns them.
Im not out to hurt phpfox like they did me,im out to save others from going through the same thing I and thousands have bought into.
They are in a lot of trouble for criminal acts such as fraud,theft,counterfit sites its unbelievable.
Im praying hard that the new site im buying in 8 days from webscribble networking will not do to me what phpfox did.
Just trying to warn you friend
Coyote aka SmokeyC4
I already bought PHPFox - basically I had inquired with several different developers who recommended it. Some recommended DZOIC Handshake but in the end I went with PHPFox. Bad move? Anyone else with experiences with PHPFox they can share?
- James
You might want to run a search here at Sitepoint. there are many, many opinions on this thread, and on a few other noteworthy ones.
(I haven’t used it, but based on the comments of others, I opted not to…even though, I must admit I’m verrrrrry tempted…)
I usually don’t reply directly to a post, but for those who are considering not purchasing phpfox because of what was written by smokeyc4, it would be your loss. This was the BEST move I’ve made with regards to my website. I am still customizing it (I haven’t relaunched the new website yet) the way it needs to be customized, but PhpFox is constantly adding functionality to their product. The product is also supported by a lot of developers that give away free modules or sell modules to enhance the software. After spending well over $12K trying to get my current customized drupal-powered site to work, I finally went with PhPFox and have had a great experience at a small fraction of the cost. The support I have received from them has been second to none. Literally! I actually posted something in the PhpFox support forum about how great their support has been and many others have posted their great experiences right after me. The only thing I can assume from smokeyc4’s post is that he had an illegal copy of the software and they shut him down. This may not be the case, but there is no other reason that they would consistently try to bring him down as he claims. I’m not saying that he knew it was illegal or that this is what definitely happened, but there has to be more to that story. That being said, there is no way that they were able to go into his website and screw everything up without having passwords and usernames. Godaddy.com is a reputable firm and would not give out this information to anyone. I know this for a fact because I had to go to arbitration with another company through ICANN to have someone’s site brought down that was trying to use our name for their website. Godaddy informed me that I had to go through the legal process to get the matter rectified. This is what they legally have to do. They don’t just give out usernames and passwords to anyone. I’m not coming down on SmokeyC4 and his comments, but that just cannot be the whole story. I researched many other scripts, as you can see from my previous posts in this forum, before purchasing PhPFox and I’m glad to say I have never looked back. I hate that I had to count my losses from my previously developed Drupal-powered website, but after choosing PhpFox, I now have full support, a wealth of developers to choose from for features I want, and a site that works from front to end. This script is worth several times the money in my opinion. BTW, I’m not quite sure why he paid $400.00. The script retails at $300 and costs another $75 for the removal of the license. Again, Well Worth it!
Sorry to hear about your experience with Drupal. If it makes you feel any better I’ve spent thousands of dollars of my own doing custom projects. Great learning lessons. I’ve got a huge amount of money out on custom development projects now and I’ve learned one very important thing: RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH. I didn’t want to make the same mistake in developing a social community since most of the time, cost energy, etc. goes into the site AFTER you’ve developed it. You can’t be penny wise and pound foolish.
So thanks again for feedback.
- James
That’s for sure.
Does anyone know how some of these ‘out of the box’ solutions scale up?
I’ve seen some farily large Drupal communities (with various configurations of sns components). Are there any large, active sites with the out of the box platforms. I’d be curious to know what type of server set up they have to handle the traffic load.
Fascinating stuff guys. I’ll say this much having used phpfox and investigated Drupal.
(1) salexa, I haven’t heard what the problem was with your drupal site. It would be helpful to all of us to understand why you’d even consider abandoning it after spending over $10K on it.
(2) Running a “large” phpfox site I can tell you that the code is spaghetti. There are lots of bugs and problems. Having the company sold several times doesn’t help with development either. I haven’t bothered installing the new version because of issues that have been reported to me and I can tell you that version 1.1 was the focus of numerous spam and hacker attacks. It does many things other scripts do but I can’t say it does anything well. It is cumbersome to use and very challenging to customize. If there is one thing it did provide it is personal home pages and a somewhat integrated but very limited gallery.
There is no perfect system other than custom development. I’m working on this atm since I may be better off writing my own phpfox type code from scratch with developers building it properly from the ground up. In the meanwhile I’m going to be using an integrated solution. I’ve had to delay my launch because the main site that I run and operate for work is growing too quickly. 
Slinky,
I abandoned Drupal for two main reasons. The first reason is because I can’t afford it anymore. I had to make a decision to either cut my losses or keep paying thousands of dollars for developers to develop the functionality I needed and to maintain the website. They upgrade their versions every few months - before they have a stable release, I did the first upgrade and simply lost faith. I upgraded to v4.7 some time around October from 4.6, and then they were releasing 5.0 at the beginning of the year. The second reason is because the most simplest functions were not working on their stable releases (i.e. 4.7). You can check out my website. It is still being used and is up and running. However, a few hundred of my subscribers have registered but never logged in. The reason is because the registration doesn’t work properly. In addition, you can log in with the correct username and password and still not be logged in. The software believes you are logged in (it shows you have logged in in the admin log file), but the user is still sitiing on the front page. When you’re trying to be taken seriously in this industry, the basic functionality of being able to log in is crucial. This is the first place where you lose potential and current customers. You get one chance and then they don’t come back. I logged the bug and never received a fix. I hired a Drupal development company and they could not fix it. They finally told me later that the bug is inherent in the core of Drupal.
I will say this though. No software I’ve ever used has been perfect. It doesn’t matter if you create it from scratch or buy it from other developers or companies. Microsoft software has bugs, Oracle software has bugs, etc… I know that some people had bad experiences using earlier versions of PhpFox, but the latest version is working well for me. It is now built on plugin technology. That being said, I haven’t relaunched my current site with PhpFox yet - so I can’t vouch for performance as of yet. I will let everyone know how it works sometime next month when we relaunch with their software. However, as it stands, I’m pretty happy and am paying a lot less to add to their core functionality than I ever did with drupal. Drupal developers are EXPENSIVE!!! I thought about Joomla, but the cost of custom development of a web site from scratch is just too daunting. If you have the time and skillset to do it, I say all the more power to you. I wish you the best of luck. Unfortunately, I am not a developer and I don’t have a lot of time to rebuild a website from scratch and lose more customers.
I hope this helps.
Is this it?
If so, it’s fixed in CVS
After using both of these scripts, I can safely and emphatically say that Joovili is far superior. Joovili has a very stable core and new features are constantly being added. Support is knowledgeable and readily available.
New things are being added to Izabi, but the core needs a lot of work. Simple, basic things don’t work with this script. The mods that are being released are programmed by 3rd party individuals. Many of them don’t work after you buy them and the programmers are difficult or impossible to find if you have problems. Izabi is a free script with paid addons, but I would steer clear of it unless you just want something buggy to play around with.
Some things sounds really fishy over here. Do you work for webscribble?
Well, I also purchased my script 2 months back from them. It was up and running in less than 1 hr and from that same day I been working on the customizations. I had only ran into a profile customization issue whaich was again an official free mod/extension and not part of phpfox core. I created the support ticket and had it fixed in 3 days and that delay was on my part as I wanted to apply the patch myself and they sent 2 revisions after each response. I have done an extensive research on almost over 10 social networking scripts, installed most of them and made my decision for PHP Fox. I would strongly recomend them.
What was the problem of having your site down? What version of PHPFox you installed? Do you have any support ticket numbers to back up your statements? Please consider adding all these facts and figures while generlaizing your experience to every one.
Again I am in no way related to PHPFox but just a client who is satisfied with the level of support and core feature set of the software and assure you that it is worth each and every penny of yours.
This wasn’t the only issue. However you got me excited when you said there was a fix. The fix you referenced is for a different problem though. Thanks for the info, nevertheless. Do you work with Drupal?
I have seen several posts in this thread suggesting the idea of people pooling resources to obtain a customized social networking script that would then be free to be used for multiple sites.
I have seen several posts in this thread from established members stating that they would consider doing something like this.
I would like to discuss something like that. I have found that buying phpFox, and then all the modules that would be necessary, ends up being over $1,000.
Could someone please tell me where is an appropriate forum to discuss a project like that…or PM me, please?
I still really like elgg. I don’t know that I’m ever going to get my project out of beta, but that’s not due to the software.
Hi:
Can you please tell me what Video and Music components you used on your site. Nice site BTW, although now I cannot go to it…giving me a error.
Also what is the component for the event. I have used jevents and seyret for the video, but like yours better.
Thanks
Elgg looks somewhat promising but I’m confused about it. It says it’s an open source social networking platform, yet all the sites they’ve listed to be running elgg are all University sites and do not look like your typical social networking type sites at all.
Hi
I am new here and have read this thread with interest, I have a working example of phpizabi alicia with all the bugs ironed out and seems quite stable.
I am working with Joomla at the moment and would appreciate any criticism or advice for features please.
It is in it’s early stages but before I go any further would like some help with what would be the best features to put on.
www.metatube.co.uk
Thanks
Jeff