I have several website ideas that I am working on these days. One that may be facilitated by a community builder type app. I’m not looking to build a dating website, although I think that market is under served, (more on that later).
So I’m going through the software that is available via Softaculous, the app installer available on the hosting service. I find one called Dolphin. It looks good and may be usable for my purposes but there is a disclaimer within Softaculous that says that it hasn’t been updated in over two years and may be on the way out, or words to that affect.
Further investigating to the creators website reveals that in fact it is going away in favor of a new app (about eight years old) called UNA. So I install UNA on my website. It also installs a Cron Job that is an automatic app updater, this was disclosed in advance and described as necessary. Problem is that the stable version 12 is the installed version and the updater upgrades to the unstable V13. This crashes the site and makes it impossible to login to the admin area.
Since I have access to file manager I’m thinking that there is a way to correct the error and move forward. I go to there support page and find no information on that problem. I also find that there are several bugs with the app and a few that are months old and unresolved. Well, I’m not looking to become a beta tester for these folks so I delete the app and move forward with finding an app that will work for me.
The next day the app is back, and broken. I had forgotten about the Cron Job that is installed to cPanel and has reloaded the V13 to the site. I delete the app again and and delete the Cron Job from cPanel.
I did give some consideration to running the app without the Cron Job but it just bothered me that they are pushing software out that has glitches and they are getting complaints from their paying customers. If the paying customers are finding their issues unresolved, the folks using the free version are probably way down the list.
I don’t usually leave a bad review but this time I did. I had lost two days investigating the problems only to discard it. I know, people are saying, “What do you expect for free?” I expect it to work.