Hi Buzzy Dandelion,

I'm so sorry for this delayed replies.

I have checked and tried to replicate your issue by using our demo sites, but I can't replicate the issue as per image you shared previously.

Below is my step procedure:
1. Go to our dedicated demo site for EasySocial: http://easysocial.stackideas.com. Noted that from your screenshot, you're using our old demo sites: http://demo.stackideas.com
2. Sign in as Darius, and go to Edit Profile view
3. Click the Friend's request notification, applied the zoom-out to replicate your issue, but failed to.

Here is my screenshots for my inspection, please let me know if I missed out on any steps from above to replicate your issue.

We will do our best to fix this and personally on behalf on Stackideas team, I would like to thank you for reporting this issue and your detailed of attentions to our software.

Please advice.

Thanks for your reply. I can see now why I was using a different demo website. From the front end demo page (http://easysocial.stackideas.com/) I clicked the button marked "Administration demo" and this takes you to http://demo.stackideas.com/administrator/

I wonder why you even have this old demo site running since it does have bugs in it? Certainly changing the button link should be a very important first step for you but then close behind surely would be to put a redirect on the old URL so it takes you to correct demo pages as a Google search for "EasySocial" has this "old and broken" demo page listed but not the "correct one".

When I do use the "proper" demo pages I do indeed find that the bug I reported is indeed fixed. It's a shame that when I was evaluating your product 3-4 weeks ago it looked like the bug was there and the replies I got were almost accusing me of "being stupid" but it may just have been I was using the "wrong" demo site :-(

That said, I still do find the overall layout of your product very unappealing and when I asked about this I was told that was the only template / layout you had. To me personally it looks like someone has really messed up the brightness and contrast setting on my screen (i.e. it looks so "washed out" - very light grey text on a whit background is not good but the alternative of solid black everywhere is no better!)

Anyway I had to make a choice and at the time I could not pick your product as no one was able to show me that it worked. I will continue to monitor your product and evaluate if at any point switching my site and users would give me any advantages, compared to the time and money I would need to invest and the potential re-learning involved for my users. I do also still have concerns about your support. I was looking through your forum to see if there were any posts around ways the layout could be changed and I came across posts where questions were asked and weeks even months later they show with no replies and not as even being assigned to anyone, which doesn't fill me with confidence (my experience with your company up to now has been with EasyBlog which I ended up stopping my paid subscription to as you did absolutely no development work on it for my entire subscription period, because at that time you had everyone working on EasySocial. I do have this concern you have more products to support and develop than you have staff available to do the job.)

Hi Buzzy,

Thank you for your response. I'm Justin, one of the marketing members of Stack Ideas.

I'm sorry as I am not entirely clear on your inquiry/comments pertaining to our demo site. The "Administrator demo" button in http://easysocial.stackideas.com does points towards the right URL; which is http://easysocial.stackideas.com/administrator (and not http://demo.stackideas.com/administrator/). Kindly refer to the attachment named "es-demo-1.png".

As for the Google's search results, we'll work on the SEO of the new demo site. There's also the issue with Google cache which we have no choice but to sit and wait patiently for Google to re-indexing back our site.

I'm sorry if our previous replies gave you such impression; as far as I remember we acknowledge your concern and were trying to replicate the issue from our end (we can't fix it if we can't produce the problem first). However, our web admins and designers were unable to replicate it. We thank you for your opinion on EasySocial's default template; EasySocial Pro comes with other few templates plus the codes can be modified by you and/or your team. You can personalize your own EasySocial template, actually.

As for this :

Buzzy Dandelion wrote:

Anyway I had to make a choice and at the time I could not pick your product as no one was able to show me that it worked. I will continue to monitor your product and evaluate if at any point switching my site and users would give me any advantages, compared to the time and money I would need to invest and the potential re-learning involved for my users. I do also still have concerns about your support. I was looking through your forum to see if there were any posts around ways the layout could be changed and I came across posts where questions were asked and weeks even months later they show with no replies and not as even being assigned to anyone, which doesn't fill me with confidence (my experience with your company up to now has been with EasyBlog which I ended up stopping my paid subscription to as you did absolutely no development work on it for my entire subscription period, because at that time you had everyone working on EasySocial. I do have this concern you have more products to support and develop than you have staff available to do the job.)

Would you be kind enough to point to us the URL of this posts? We take our support VERY seriously and an unanswered post for more than one day itself is something which Mark (and the team) hates. Please, do share with us the URL so that we can investigate this issue further.

As for the EasyBlog development, we're currently in the midst of EasyBlog 5. If you notice, we actually skipped one version (currently it's EasyBlog 3, next version will be 5). I know that it might be a tad bit "unethical", but the long time of silence were actually used to build EasyBlog 4, but there were so many changes that were made that we've skipped it entirely and jumped to EasyBlog 5. Trust me, if you look at how EasyBlog 5 looks like, you wouldn't believe that it started off with a humble blogging component named "EasyBlog".

Well, I hope my post helps to shed some light. I look forward to the URL posts where questions in our forum goes unanswered for weeks/months.

Thanks and yes that link is now working, however up until quite recently it WAS pointing to the old site, so guess it got sorted in the last few days.

For the old site, I understand about Google takes time to update and it has caches etc and that was why I was wondering why you don't simply put a URL re-direct in place so anyone going to demo.stackideas.com is sent to stackideas.com/demo (basic web admin stuff!) The fact that the old broken demo site was live meant that the bug I reported was very easy to reproduce for me, yet of course you could not, since we were both using different sites. I understand that you can not fix something you can't reproduce, but I also am sure you must understand my frustration at being told almost that you thought I was making it up. Perhaps one could argue that a good bug hunter would look into one person can easily see a bug and another not. I did not feel you acknowledged the issue but were dismissive as you couldn't find it.

For the templates, this really is the only thing stopping me going with your product now, but I really would like to see that there are significantly different (and hopefully nicer!) templates available than the ones on your demo site. Are there more than the three on the demo site? I did try switching between "wireframe" and "frosty" but they look identical to me on the front end though (see attached screen shots, one of the front end for both templates being set as default - perhaps I'm missing something?)

I see that there appears to be quite a comprehensive system for making modifications to templates, and I did find some documentation but it is in your "developers" section and I'm not a developer. I'm happy making the odd "tweak" to code but I'm sure you can imagine no one really want to pay for a product and then effectively have to re-write huge chunks of it if they are a system admin rather than a product developer.

Hello,

The http://demo.stackideas.com site is still being used because Komento and EasyDiscuss is still demonstrated there Once we fully migrate all our demo's to their respective demo's we'll perform the redirect of the demo.stackideas.com domain

Well, to be honest with you there are several designs "in the making" as Justin mentioned earlier but what we have now is just wireframe and frosty You can of course customize this using css to your own desired styles of course.

Thanks for info re demo sites. I understand now about why you don't have a re-direct, that makes sense, but I feel my original point is still valid that having a "broken" demo version of EasySocial on there is risking you sales (if I hadn't been using that site quite likely I may have purchased EasySocial instead of JomSocial although I have to confess I have now discovered anyway that JS has some design ethos around privacy that means their product is not suitable for me.)

If I'm being honest, I think you are doing an amazing job bringing EasySocial to where it is in just one year and in terms of technical ability I feel you understand things about making a good product compared to JS, but the one thing they really do win at is the UI design (perhaps you could tempt their UI desgner over to your team ;-) )

Thanks for the heads up on this Andrew, we'll be adding the 2 new demo sites over the weekend so that we can get rid of demo.stackideas.com altogether