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Text-Link-Ads tech support lacks interest in WordPress
This began as a casual note, a reminder, if you will, to techsupport (at) text-link-ads.com. It escalated to where I wondered just how Text-Link-Ads (a MediaWhiz Holdings, Inc. Company) developed it’s hiring practices…
Having signed up I was directed to download a plugin for WordPress. I noticed it was a raw PHP file (rarely done because of character filtering/translating going between file systems), but I figured they must know what they’re doing (isn’t there a Murphy’s Law about that?). But once activated, their plugin spewed an error and deactivated (thank you WordPress, several months ago it would have killed my blog as their wasn’t any such ‘safety’ feature then). I took a look and realized they were making the common mistake of calling upgrade-functions.php (which has been on it’s way out since the 2.0 branch started and has only been included for backward compatibility).
I’m running 2.3b3 but I thought I should drop a note to Text-Link-Ads support and remind them. Shortly after I emailed them, I received this one-line response from Jonathan Dingman (Product Manager):
InLinks only works on WordPress 2.0 or higher.
Obviously I mis-communicated. So I wrote back that 2.3 > 2.0 and “If you’re not even going to check this, please pass it on to someone who will?” I got another quick response with two lines this time:
2.3 is not officially out and we do not support it yet.
It’s still in beta until the 24th of September.
Now, that last email from Jonathan Dingman was dated Sep 13, 2007, at 2:04 PM, 11 days before the ETA for 2.3. So I gather Text-Link-Ads has no concern over people already using their plugin who will upgrade to 2.3, but only those who may download the plugin after Sep 13, 2007.
Like Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg said in The Fifth Element: “I know this music…”
PS: Received this from Jonathan Dingman about a half hour later:”After speaking to the lead developer, we are going to work on a fix for this and we will have it available before 2.3 is released.” Glad to hear somebody over there is on the ball. Or willing to play the ball. Or accept the ball.
4 Users Commented on " Text-Link-Ads tech support lacks interest in WordPress "
Right on! It would also be nice if they could stop messing around with their affiliate links and provide us with some that will paste nicely into a WordPress blog post rather than the JavaScript concoctions they’ve (not exactly) introduced.
Frankly, I’d much rather have external JS code (ala Google AdSense) for my text link ads. I’ve always been afraid their PHP code could be slowing down my blog (especially when on Digg’s home page)
I get the feeling that the WordPress community doesn’t matter much to Text Link Ads. At least your exchange with Jonathan was much better than my poor experience with TLA Tech Support.
Is this a comment on ADS Tech Support? I bought the ADS DVD Xpress 2 and I have been having a lot of trouble installing it and getting compatible Vista drivers. It is supposedly compatible with Vista, but the CD with software that comes with the product is not compatible with Vista, so you have to uninstall all the software it comes with and download the “Beta version with limited support for Vista” and the Vista drivers are over a year old and not compatible with Vista. I spent an hour at Radio Shack and they couldn’t get it to work either. I tried calling the ADS Tech support last weekend and was not able to speak with anyone. I am still trying to find out how to install it and get Vista drivers that work. Why does ADS sell products that are so out of date and only a computer tech can install on Vista and get it to work after hours trying to figure out how to get it to work?
