Posts by sevenspark

Lebensform said
Do we have any update here?

This covers it all

Hey guys,

The ability to switch through forum thread pages using the keyboard arrow keys is cool But I think it’d be great if it were disabled when the reply textarea is in focus – otherwise you can’t move your cursor left or right without moving forward and back on a multi-page thread, which is kind of annoying.

Not a huge deal, but something that could be honed Thanks!

Chris

Locking a year old thread to avoid confusion.

@texxs, if you have a concern about a removed item, you can contact Envato Support

I also agree that these files shouldn’t be removed, simply for customer convenience; however, Envato is not “where you store your purchases” – you are encouraged throughout the process to download and backup the files you purchased immediately.

If you haven’t downloaded your item, you can get a refund (just contact support). If you have downloaded it, you should have a copy you can use

Yes, this problem exists. It’s frustrating and happens very frequently.

If we could find a solution, that’d be great, but I wouldn’t worry too much.

This is something that happens to all online marketplaces with ratings. Almost any product takes a certain amount of expertise to use (or understand) – from themes to lawnmowers to electronics equipment – and you’ll always have customers that buy something they aren’t qualified to use. Just read through some one star ratings on Amazon, they are frequently unwarranted, or entirely unrelated to the product, or user error, or make it clear that the customer didn’t read the product description and expected something unreasonable. ThemeForest is no different in this regard; every business has a small percentage of customers that will give them trouble. It’s a fact of doing business with humans

[Of course, any time you encounter a customer like this, you should review your product description, promotion materials, and documentation to see if you’re causing confusion and if there is something you could be doing better – these can often be opportunities for improvement]

That being said, one of the most important steps we can take is to allow reviews (comments) to accompany ratings. MOST customers are awesome, savvy, and understanding – when they review an item and see that the 1 star rating is because the item didn’t provide a feature that was never offered in the first place, they will disregard it. We need to give them this opportunity (the devs are working toward that).

Try not to worry too much; if you create an awesome product, a few bad ratings isn’t going to affect you

CodingJack said
Just wanted to chime in about the placement of content (shown in mockup a few times in this thread).

The most important part for any item is branding. Authors work hard to build a reputation, and we want customers to recognize our brand the moment they land on one of our items. Because of this, the first piece of content shown should always be the avatar box.

Showing the number of sales is the second most important part of selling an item. When customers see the total sales number, they’re instantly shown how popular the product is.

Next up: RATINGS This information is much more relevant now that the customer already knows the total number of sales.

Comments are important as customers can click the button and view support quality. If they’re grouped with total sales then there’s no need to separate them. But for the sake of this list, they’re second to last in the order of importance.

Last up, social buttons. Sharing is caring, but when it comes to selling items, all the above items take priority.

Exactly. Great breakdown of the sidebar elements and their relative utility/importance. I’d also add that the Average Rating and the Ratings Breakdown have separate priorities. The actual ratings breakdown is less of a priority than the overall rating, which is why in my opinion it should be hidden on page load and then revealed with a click, as others have suggested. (Though I agree that the order is more important than the hide/reveal functionality).

To those who are suggesting that their sales have declined due to the half-star ratings… my top selling item went from 5 stars to 4.5 stars. Sales have actually increased over the past week and a half, and I highly doubt these more detailed ratings have anything to do with that. I don’t think your sales decrease is any more related to the half-star change than my increase is; sales simply fluctuate over time, and at any given time, some authors’ sales are increasing and some are decreasing, and those events will often coincide with some sort of change in the marketplace (bundles, UI changes, ratings, etc). But coincidence of two events does not imply causality, and certainly can’t be inferred with any certainty from a sample of 1.

Try to relax and work on some new products; your sales will likely go back up again in the normal course of marketplace fluctuations

When I click the Save button, I get a 405 not allowed from nginx, and the save doesn’t process

Did I miss something?

There seem to be a lot of different threads of thought running through this topic. So I thought I’d try to respond to a few of them with my own opinions/insight:

1. Items removed from the marketplace

1a. Sometimes files need to be discontinued. They may be no longer viable, they may be dated, they may not make sense to continue selling for any number of reasons. Products are sold as-is and that means it’s understood that they may not be changed/updated/available in the future. This is a trade-off of getting quality work for incredibly cheap prices – there’s no “lifetime” contract as you might have with custom work.

1b. I completely agree with some other users here that after an item is purchased, the item should always be available for download to those who have purchased it (the latest version). Even if that item is discontinued, it should still be able to be downloaded by those who have purchased it. I believe Envato’s reasoning behind removing the files is that they can’t legally host these files after the author withdraws them; but I think this is just something we (authors) should have to agree to as authors when uploading. (Alternatively, the final version of the file could be sent to the existing customers when the file is deleted – or an alert allowing customers the chance to download the file before it is removed).

1c. If you purchased a file but never downloaded it and it was deleted, I suspect Envato will do what they can to assist – likely with marketplace credit (I can’t promise that of course, but I know they always do their best to be fair). If you already downloaded the files, of course, you can use your existing copy. [edit: this confirms that you can get a refund if you didn’t download the file or if it was removed within 5 days of purchase]

2. Item upgrades and future compatibility. I think this is one of the toughest issues we deal with as a stock marketplace. As someone pointed out, clearly files cannot be updated forever (that’s unreasonable), so how long should they be updated for? That’s not an easy question to answer. With that, I think there are two important things to keep in mind:

2a. When purchasing a file, understand you’re buying a stock product, and don’t assume it’ll be updated. I know, this is unfortunate, but there is simply no guarantee. (That being said, the majority of authors do update their items regularly – you just can’t assume this). The reality is that only files that continue to sell well are generally viable to continue developing. If this is a dealbreaker, that’s understandable, but you should probably be seeking a custom solution.

2b. Understand that you don’t HAVE to upgrade WordPress. Yes, it is good practice, and I would always encourage you to upgrade when possible. However, just because a file that worked with WordPress 3.5 doesn’t work with WordPress 3.6, doesn’t mean the file is worthless; it just means you have to use WordPress 3.5 if you want to continue using it. Clearly this is not ideal, but it’s important to realize. The point is, a site/theme/plugin that works today isn’t going to mysteriously stop working tomorrow just because WordPress released a new update. And hiring someone to update the theme is still probably cheaper than a full custom solution.

Everything is a trade-off in life

Also, I’d like to add that even though I am an author, I have also bought several items over the years that have been removed. Yes, it’s frustrating! But I don’t feel like I have much to complain about, given the price I paid for a stock product.

Well, you kinda have two choices:

1. Deal with spam filtering manually (FREE solution )

2. Pay to have Akismet handle it

Automatic spam filtering works by collectively monitoring all sites using the filtering software – since they have to pay for all the server bandwidth and processing that it takes to effectively filter spam for you, it makes sense that this is a paid service – it’s not just a standalone plugin that runs solely on your server – it’s the network of sites that makes it valuable, and centralizing that information and processing is expensive.

If you don’t want to deal with spam, paying Akismet is worth it.

Depending on the CAPTCHA plugin, it may not be blocking direct hits to the comment submission URL. I’ve been using Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress, and found that it cut down on about 95% of the spam comments I was getting. Maybe try that one.

Another option would be to use something like Disqus.

Good luck!

Yes, Akismet is the standard and comes included in every WordPress install.

You can also block comments with X number of links and force them to require review before being posted via the WordPress admin.

That’s true.