phpFox is a wonderful script to start a social network. However, recently, they have changed their forum policies which is basically completely censors what one can do or say.
If your primary interest is to buy the script and not use the forums or their support, then I would highly recommend it. HOWEVER - If:
You complain about lack of functionality in the product; you will be BANNED for “moaning”
If you ask a mod developer these 3 questions:
a. How Much
b. Release Date
c. Feature list
You will be BANNED for “Attacking another user”.
If you complain about support in the forums, you will be BANNED for “moaning” \ “Attacking another user”.
If you question why you have received an infringement in the forums - the rule is - you will AUTOMATICALLY BE BANNED!
Unfortunatelly, phpFox is the Cop, The Judge, and The Jury…
The most recent version AKA V2x, has a ton of features that are not complete yet, and thus several mod developers are taking advantange and fleecing the forum users. I have to state though that there are several good developers there who have very creative mods and themes for v2 and who are reasonably priced.
Bottom line, phpFox is now being run like a third world country as far as freedom of speech is concerned.
Haven’t used phpFox although have heard some bad reviews but all providers have bad reviews. It’s hard to make all customers 100% happy. You might want to look for alternate solutions and with support that’s 24x7, dedicated and live person, not “open forum” kinda thing.
Very true - it is impossible to make all customers 100% happy. The funny thing is that what prompted me to start this thread a month ago, still holds true. I suspect, that by them silencing users in their forum, they expect the bugs and luckster of features will go away.
In all fairness they have a decent product; at least out of the 5 or so others that I have tested. That said, their competion is building migration tools to entice phpfox users to migrate to them - and I can happily state that I am a customer of the competion as well - phpfox needs to really really think about what they are doing. I posted something to this effect on the forums, but - again, they have ignored it. Meanwhile, I am fast becoming an evangelist of their main competitor!
I recently opened a support ticket asking a very simple question; what tables in the mysql database are responsible for creating a user profile - this was for a project I was working on to merge with another site that had hundreds of thousands of users, and the plan was to export the users to a csv file. NO HELP whatsoever, infact, I got the “that is out of the realm of support”. Then, one of their support people asked me to contact him via email, which I did, and I wonder why he asked me to do so, because he has been absolutelly useless at even answering emails back - mind you, he did ask me to contact him… go figure.
This here is all about how you treat your customers, and thank god the competion is watching this space.
BTW, I did invite phpfox to visit this thread - since If I post it on their forums; well I risk being banned!.. And to be fair to everybody, I even invited the competion to visit here.