Very disappointed by upgrade policy

[SchweinDeBurg]

Hello everyone!

I am a WeBuilder user since version 2008 (order #206595415) and I like this great tool very much. On October 15, 2009 I've purchased WeBuilder 2010 Personal Upgrade 3-year via Avangate (order reference #4821858). Next, on Apr 27, 2011 I've joined WeBuilder 2011 beta program and got betas 1 and 3. On Jun 17, 2011 I've noticed by this forum that the version 2011 is released to the public and asked Gatis via e-mail about my upgrade information (download link and new activation key). Gatis answered that I "should receive the upgrade info in a short time". OK, I was patient but today, on Jun 23 I still not received this info and I am ever not notified that the new major version of WeBuilder is out. I think that the attitude to long-standing and legitimate customers must be very different! And this point of view is confirmed by all the rest software vendors - they sending me e-mails on every update of product that I've purchased.

BTW, I wish to say many-many thanks to Gatis for its support. Because another annoying policy of Blumentals Software is to not allow to download their products from Russian IPs - even for registered users too. I am the same software developer but I am robber by default - because I'm living my life in the Russian Federation. So I always need to ask Gatis for help to download legal software.

- Elijah Zarezky,
software developer from SPB Software

[davenz]

Elijah , welcome to the forum.

I too have been using WeBuilder about the same length of time as you and I too note that they never tell me when a new version is out; I have to monitor the forums to see what is happening. However, I don't think this is a particular attitude Blumentals adopt, it is just they way they run their company. Microsoft have never emailed me and told me about a new copy of Windows, or Office for that matter; vendors of several of the apps I use do not notify either, I have to manually check for a new version. It is true that many software makers do keep in touch with their clients, I certainly don't 'expect' it in this day and age.

I agree with you about the support from the developers; any issues I have had have been quickly and professionally resolved by either Gatis or Karlis; I can't recall Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer emailing me to help out with a Windows problem I was having. The last web editor I used was not a bad program, but the support was that terrible I had to walk away from it. If you think these guys don't look after their clients, you should try Namo. Regardless, like software, vendors have their quirks and we all just work around them because the software is wroth the wait. In a perfect world everything we ever wanted would happen, but it isn't and it doesn't. It is a shame they have a policy about Russian IPs. I did not know about that, though I am sure there is a very good political or practical reason for that policy to be in place. It may be a case of a few bad people ruining things for everyone else, which happens everywhere in the world.

I often think I'm at the arse end of the world here in New Zealand (especially as I live in a broken and now worthless house in Christchurch, where we have suffered several huge earthquakes recently - almost 8000 since September 2010) and rue the fact we miss out on lots of things like rock concerts, big Broadway shows and other travelling acts because they think we are too small to matter or not profitable enough to make the effort. I've just learned to live with it. It isn't fair, but if I want anything different I'll have to move somewhere else. We all have to take the good with the bad; just be glad you have access to WeBuilder at all - many don't.

Dave
davethompson.co.nz

[Karlis]

There must have been some confusion as we have clearly stated how to get your free upgrade - both on our forums:

http://forums.blumentals.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5107

and also on our knowledge base:

http://kb.blumentals.net/kb/index.php?V ... ntryID=126
AND
http://kb.blumentals.net/kb/index.php?V ... EntryID=16
AND
http://kb.blumentals.net/kb/index.php?V ... ntryID=132

and it is not difficult to find this info either, you just open support->knowledge base and type "upgrade" in search. Why many of us do not read knowledge bases when all the most common problems are usually addressed there?

It seems that maybe Gatis has made a mistake by telling you to wait, users can retrieve their license keys themselves from our system and it is available within few days after the release, so you could have retrieved it long time ago automatically.

[SchweinDeBurg]

Dear Karlis,

Thanks for your answer. Right now I've tried to follow download location from received e-mail - and as always got "403: Forbidden" from your Apache/2.0.51 (Fedora) Server at download.blumentals.net Port 80. So Russian IPs are still blocked.

- Elijah

[Karlis]

Then there must be some error still, thanks for pointing this out, and sorry for this, however, you should be able to download version 2011 from our website (just like you can download trial version).

Here: http://www.blumentals.net/download/

[SchweinDeBurg]

Here: http://www.blumentals.net/download/

Here is only trial version of WeBuilder 2011 is available for download - and yes, I can download it. But right now I've successfully downloaded, installed and activated version from link specified in the "Your WeBuilder 2011 Personal full version info" e-mail, thank you.

[SchweinDeBurg]

Forgot to say... since the first beta of WeBuilder 2011 there is no more crashes at start-up for projects which are under Subversion control - many thanks for it Karlis and all the team. But the long-standing bug with Cyrillic syntax coloring (I've reported it two times) is still here:

webuilder-cyrillic-m.png

webuilder-cyrillic-t.png

As you may see Cyrillic small "m" and capital "T" inside the quoted strings are highlighted incorrectly. Environment: Windows XP Pro SP3 Eng, font "DejaVu Sans Mono" 10pt, text encoding is UTF-8 w/o BOM.