Require Payment by Usergroup and Category

[allcompu]

Our vBulletin has for several years offered two paid subscriptions, Merchant and Premium Member. They have always enjoyed free access to post ads in the forums we have had setup for the purpose. We wish to continue that right in our Photopost Classifieds ... but in certain categories only.

So, for example, in our member to member category which is limited to non-commercial items, we have successfully setup where regular members are charged a fee and both premium and merchant members are free. But in a new category for commercial products, we want to charge regular and premium members and only give free ads to merchants.

This doesn't appear to be doable. Another case of global permissions without any way to customize at the category level? I do not want to remove the ability for a premium member to post an ad in the commercial category and I don't want to take away the free member to member privileges. But I do want to be paid if a premium member want to sell a commercial item.

Is there some way to do this?

[Chuck S]

This assumption is incorrect Fred. There is a global payment usergroup permissions correct however in edit categories for each category you place payment options like pricing etc. If nothing is set then payment is not processed so you can have categories that are paid and not paid for usergroups that have to pay.

[allcompu]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

This assumption is incorrect Fred. There is a global payment usergroup permissions correct however in edit categories for each category you place payment options like pricing etc. If nothing is set then payment is not processed so you can have categories that are paid and not paid for usergroups that have to pay.

That is understood Chuck and I still think I am correct. Let me simplify the example.

Category #1 is $5 for usergroup #1 and free for usergroup #2 and #3.

Category #2 is $25 for usergroup #1 and usergroup #2 and free for usergroup #3.

The problem is making usergroup #2 work correctly. My global choices are Free, Charge, or Limit Free and Then Charge. My individual category choices are to fill in a price or not. Thus usergroup #2 cannot be setup to pay in category #2 and still get free ads in category #1 because usergroup #1 is still expected to pay for their ads placed.

Unless you can show me how to set up that scenario, the lack of expected options now forces me to abandon category #2 (the anticipated fees from which was my main reason for buying PP Classifieds) or to risk alienating more than 300 members of usergroup #2 who pay me an annual fee for expanded privileges which include free advertising in category #1.

[Chuck S]

Fred

well what your looking for I think is not a feature nor is it of vbulletin to my knowledge in working with vb because our subscription feature is based off how they do things. Your not looking for any usergroup permissions payment settings at all. Your looking to make it strictly category by category. Your looking for something in the middle it looks like.

vbulletin subscriptions just like our subscriptions works simply by charging a user a specific fee to get jumped to a higher usergroup which has permissions you assign per category. Ours works pretty much the same way. My invision of how subscriptions work is to jump users into usergroups where they dont pay like normal users but thats just me.

Now our payment feature which is separate from subscriptions works by a payment structure per usergroup. These groups have to pay these groups dont. Now to further define areas where users do or do not pay you can create categories that have amounts to pay and those that dont. Thats done by placing a charge or not in a specific category but it does not break down into specific cat permissions of payment per usergroup. Thats a whole extra level of permissions that do not exist in the current model.

Your free to place suggestions in the suggestions forum. I dont think personally I have ever seen someone request such indepth a payment model.

[allcompu]

I disagree with your comparison on the basis of your own setup for permission to post, permission to view, permission to upload, etc. that exists for defining customization on a category by category basis. vBulletin provides all the customization controls needed and expected to perform the tasks a licensee expects of it. PP Classified does not. What I am pointing out is that requirement to pay usergroup by usergroup in any particular category is not an option in your program design. It was expected by me as a customer when I licensed your application and the lack of it seriously diminishes the utility and value of your application. The solution provided is a bare minimum approach and more flexible solutions would very likely be appreciated beyond my individual complaints.

If such an option were present, even though no request for it is recalled until now, my guess is that you would see lots of grateful licensees who would put such a feature to immediate use. From my perspective as a licensee, I cannot imagine such flexibility not being available just as I cannot imagine why moderation of feedback is so inflexible and poorly integrated.

This is yet another one of those things that I think would be relatively easy to add into the feature set of PP Classifieds. But that's just me.

[Chuck S]

Fred what I am doing is explaining how things are designed in the program. As noted your free to post suggestions for future versions for consideration when we are in an open development cycle.

Customer feedback is important and crutial and yes this is one of those things I have never seen someone personally suggest and no overall its not a hard thing to do. That is remove the global permission and add category by category permissions. Same thing with feedback some changes have occured but usually changes made are customer suggestions and no one has made your specfic observations.

However I feel I should clarify a point here. Your discussions seem to suggest you expect us to provide an immediate solution. That is not how its done whether its vbulletin or here. We support the code as it is written. We suggest customers place suggestions for future additions and then when we get ready to code a new version we look at those suggestions and prioritize them and then start coding a new version.

I do beleive I have posted once all the vbulletin 4 stuff calms down and they go gold I will be opening a beta adding new features to classifieds which will be a couple months from now I think.

[allcompu]

Just to clarify ... my initial post was to seek a solution in case I was missing the knowledge to set it up the way I wanted. Such solutions could have been

• to explain how to do it
• to suggest an alternative way to arrive at a solution
• to provide a minor code change that, while it would require me documenting it, would provide a solution

Instead what I got was a reply that the feature was there which required me to reply with another example to get you to see my point and understand the problem.

I had no expectation that you would drop everything and provide an upgrade to the application with my suggestions implemented. OTOH, I feel fully justified in spelling out for you my feelings when PP Classified has failed to meet core expectations on my part. As things stand now, I am considering abandoning the application and taking my losses on the dozens of hours invested in the application. Were I you, that would concern me.

Now you tell me to take my time and post this as a suggestion and maybe it will be in the next release when you get to it. If it were a bug report and my application wouldn't work as a result, you would be all over it. What I'm telling you is that, to me, it is a bug that will cause me to abandon the product. So I will respond that this thread should be suggestion enough if you care about the value of my time.

And please understand Chuck the limitations of forum communications. There is no personal animosity here. This is purely business to business interaction. PP Classifieds is, for me, the only game in town for having a classified section with a vBulletin forum. I bought my license based on my understanding of what your descriptions state and the expectations they allowed, without benefit of a trial, user guide or even much of a demo. I then invested further many hours of installation, reinstallation, setup, trial and error, and communications here.

The attitude encountered here is responsive on the surface but decidedly not very customer oriented. Too much of "this is what we support" and "that isn't something we support" and a lot of searching through irrelevant threads for answers in place of a user guide or links to relevant answers posted to FAQs. And I accept that as a conscious business decision on the part of Photopost. So, with all due respect, our ways of doing business do not match up. I will not take up any more of your time.

[Chuck S]

Fred this is the misconception here that you expect us to provide you a solution to something the software is not specifically designed to do. Not every software program is going to have every last feature like you expect it to operate. Thats just a fact.

Your right if there was a bug I would be all over it and provide a fix but when there isnt a bug which is why I stated to place a suggestion for consideration in the next version. I am sorry that opinion is not up to your merit but it is universally a position taken by all software companies I know even the mighty vbulletin which you also use.

Other customers who participate in betas and give suggestions can definately tell you there suggestions get listened to and most times included in the software. 90% of the features in the software come from listening to users.

[allcompu]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

Fred this is the misconception here that you expect us to provide you a solution to something the software is not specifically designed to do. Not every software program is going to have every last feature like you expect it to operate. Thats just a fact.

No Chuck. You are putting words in my mouth. My expectation was that I would be receiving an application that would certainly be mature enough at this point and well thought out enough to provide the flexibility and control needed for a variety of situations. It is expected that there would be some shortcomings where we would adapt to the program structure. Certainly some spelling corrections and phrase editing. We did not expect the core shortcomings concerning price/usergroups and lack of access to edit feedback.

In more than 25 years of both being a licensee and a licensor of software applications, I have never encountered a program that forced me into so many corners offering nothing but bad choices like your Classifieds does. While I can allow for not anticipating the price/category flexibility need, I am totally amazed at the lack of foresight you expose a forum admin to with what will happen to advertiser good will when they are maligned and no ability to correct it exists within the PP Classifieds interface.

Originally Posted by Chuck S

Your right if there was a bug I would be all over it and provide a fix but when there isnt a bug which is why I stated to place a suggestion for consideration in the next version. I am sorry that opinion is not up to your merit but it is universally a position taken by all software companies I know even the mighty vbulletin which you also use.

The difference is that vBulletin is incredibly well thought out and I cannot recall a situation yet that I have encountered with it in six years where I could not accomplish exactly the administrative solution I wanted. I can further state as a software developer and publisher, that our approach to the products we deliver is to deliver the absolute best product we can and to provide efficient, easy to use instructions on how to use our software. That often entails spending extra time and going to extra lengths to our competitors do not go to.

Calling it like I see it, the development philosophy of Classifieds is to provide solutions without full consideration of client needs, existing environments, or ramifications of some features such as feedback. You guys don't even understand the industry standard definitions of a reserve price at an online auction. In short, the development philosophy is "damn the details, get it done and out there."

Originally Posted by Chuck S

Other customers who participate in betas and give suggestions can definately tell you there suggestions get listened to and most times included in the software. 90% of the features in the software come from listening to users.

Unfortunately for both of us, we were not among them.

[Chuck S]

* to explain how to do it
* to suggest an alternative way to arrive at a solution
* to provide a minor code change that, while it would require me documenting it, would provide a solution

You have repeatedly stated your opinion you expect us to tell you how to change the code to suit your needs even after I explained how the code is written so I do not think I put words into your mouth here. No software is written the way everyone wants it. Thats just a fact. You can think of the lack of this feature you need however you wish but I can tell you in the few years this application has been around I have never heard not one of our customers need something like this. Your basically looking for a third set of permissions structures. We had customers want groups to have a specific number of free ads and we added that in as well as a max ads setting which I thought was weird but we added it. First time I have heard of how you want it to work. The payment structure has not changed in quite awhile. I beleive when I first started working with this application it was very raw. Payment was a global switch and I moved it into a usergroup permission years ago with the future notion that since the price is set in categories then payment would not be needed for every category.

There is no minor code change to do what you want. Beleive me if I could tell you one or two lines of code to make you happy I would have done so. Hense something as major as adding in a whole new level of permission structures takes minimum a new database field and changing of multiple files and some new code to define everything.

I can tell you I am very receptive to customers ideas and add in alot of what they want but it is not going to happen overnight thats for sure. When I get some time as I previously stated I can look into what might need to be done. I have some ideas on the top of my head for sure.

[Chuck S]

Now in the interest of showing you how responsive we are I was able to find a little time to add this into the beta. Feel free to update your files and try it out you should be able to further define which usergroups get payment per category but you need to run the upgrade script to add in the new field needed to track this

http://www.photopost.com/forum/class...4-support.html

[allcompu]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

Now in the interest of showing you how responsive we are I was able to find a little time to add this into the beta. Feel free to update your files and try it out you should be able to further define which usergroups get payment per category but you need to run the upgrade script to add in the new field needed to track this

http://www.photopost.com/forum/class...4-support.html

Content visible to verified customers only.

Well Chuck Honey ... I'm feelin' the love.

That's a solution I can put to work! Thank you.

I had some problems getting it to work that had nothing to do with you but will pass them along for your future support references ... unless you can take what I say and use it to improve your code.

For whatever silly and unknown reason, I had my subscription setup to add a subscriber to the registered member user group as an additional usergroup while changing his primary usergroup to the subscription group. Since Registered Member is a usergroup that is required to pay for all ads, it was overriding the free ad in a category for the subscriber. Once I unchecked the user's records belonging to that group everything worked as expected. So my suggestion, which might differ with other licensees, if it is practical, would be to pickup just the advertiser's primary usergroup and ignore any additional usergroups. Otherwise, be prepared for that to be an occasional problem you might hear in the future. Or maybe I'm the only idiot that has his subscriptions setup that way and it is just my problem.

The only other suggestion is just a phrasing issue. The caption you have for the new category payment section says:

These checked usergroups have to pay for ads in this category, unless a usergroup's overall payment access is disabled.

I would suggest the following as a clearer statement:

These checked usergroups have to pay for ads in this category, if their usergroup's overall Payment Required setting is Yes.

Again, thank you for your responsiveness to this issue. When and if I ever see a fix for the editing of feedback and separate moderation for feedback, comments and ads, I will be a happy camper.

BTW, a reserve price by industry standards is the LOWEST price the seller is willing to accept. Meeting a reserve price makes the auction official and irrevocable but it in no way ends the auction. While not universal, many sites allow a "hidden reserve price" to be set by the seller because showing it is considered to be an impediment to bidding even getting started. If the bidding never reaches the reserve, then the auction may be canceled by the seller. Your setup is that the asking price is the reserve price and the opening bid. If no one ever bids higher, then the auction is canceled.

[Chuck S]

Have a good weekend. Phrasing we can work on but as stated this is beta given the nature of how fast I added that I have not tested etc etc

As far as usergroup permissions the best possible screnerio should be used in the setup of all groups at least thats how it has always worked.

[Chuck S]

You can try removing this in pp-inc.php to see if it does what you want with user free ads

Content visible to verified customers only.

[allcompu]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

You can try removing this in pp-inc.php to see if it does what you want with user free ads

Content visible to verified customers only.

I don't understand. What is it that I want to do that this addresses?

[Chuck S]

You said you had some issues with free ads not registering right or something. I merely stated try removing that code in pp-inc.php and test again. Maybe an issue with trying to figure out the best possible scenerio for multiple groups.