Stivasoft Sucks, Stiva Soft Sucks, PHP scripts, event booking calendars for websites,
online calendars
for reservations, hotel booking calendars, php, cgi, custom scripts
This editorial document contains and includes
our opinions of and experiences with:
StivaSoft Ltd
aka
AvailabilityBookingCalendar.com PHPJabbers.com
We own and have owned dozens of online businesses. In that capacity we've needed many dozens of web-based scripts, from guestbooks to shopping carts to internal search engines to forms builders to calendars to games -- you name it. There are millions of scripts to choose from on the net. Most are junk. They won't install, they won't run, they corrupt their data files, they hang a website, confound a browser, frustrate a customer, don't include basic, required features, are hard to administrate, have bad docs..... They're not only not worth a dime, they're a damned liability. The job, then, of researching and buying a solid, useful, working script is gargantuan. It might take days, weeks, months or years. You'll OFTEN end up having someone write something from scratch, and we DARE you to deal effectively and smoothly with most code writers. We dare you. Some can write code well enough, but their business sense is right out of Nightmare on Elm Street. Unfortunately, many can't even write the code.
Recently we needed a simple booking calendar. We spent more time than we're willing to admit to, searching for one. Finally we settled on a simple script from StivaSoft (Stiva Soft). After looking at the demos of most or all of their scripts, we settled on one, and were just......about to buy it when something told us to hold off a day. A little bird, let's say. We figured it wouldn't hurt to sleep on it. We'd been burned many, many times before. A little caution couldn't hurt. Next day we bought it.
The script installed mostly without a glitch. That was refreshing. And it actually seemed to run. Hurray!
But very soon we found a number of shortcomings in the script -- things "we" would never have let go out the door had we written the script. We figured it would be no big deal to get these things taken care of by StivaSoft. We've bought scripts for decades from a particular guy (CGISCRIPTS), for instance, and there has NEVER been an issue of correcting a problem, or making small mods. We didn't think there would be here either. Oh, how stupid we were.
We're going to paste in our entire support-based conversation with StivaSoft. You can judge it for yourself:
May 10, 2010 06:12 PM
From Customer
This is pretty darned close to what we need. The only problem we can see right off is that we need to be able to schedule blocks of time throughout each day. We'll use this for scheduling classes; we might have one class on Monday, three classes on Tuesday, six classes on Friday, none on Sat., etc. As far as we can tell the script only handles a whole day at a time/ Are we missing something? Please reply as soon as possible because we're sick of searching for a calendar and we really need to know if this will work. Email is pushed to us every four minutes.
Thanks.
May 10, 2010 10:13 PM
by Kosta Todorov
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Did you check out this calendar?
http://www.availabilitybookingcalendar.com/event-booking/
You can schedule your own events, the time and the day you want them.
May 10, 2010 10:21 PM
From Customer
Yes! So that's one of the templates that are included, correct? One last item -- we need to be able to limit the number of sales for each event so they don't get oversold. Can't see a way to do that. Pls advise.
May 10, 2010 10:33 PM
by Sasho Valkanov
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When you create an event you can set the maximum number of bookings each event can take.
May 10, 2010 10:41 PM
From Customer
Perfect. This will probably work. We'll sleep on it (been stuck with bad scripts before and we're nervous). Thanks for your time in this.
May 10, 2010 10:45 PM
by Sasho Valkanov
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You are welcome. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions.
May 11, 2010 05:26 PM
From Customer
OK, we bought and installed the event booking calendar. Couple of problems:
(1) it allows a time slot to be booked without paying for it. This will allows kids to come along and book everything for fun, thereby preventing paying customers from booking. We saw this feature in another calendar and just assumed it would be part of every calendar [why wouldn't it be!?]. We need a version that does not actually reserve the appointment until payment has been made.
(2) When the customer is prompted to pay, a button comes up which says "Pay Deposit Now" or something like that. Since we aren't collecting a partial deposit, but are collecting the entire amount (100%), we will end up with customer confusion and it will take emails back and forth to straighten this out. We need the button to simply say PAY NOW if we're collecting 100%, or it can say Pay Deposit if we're collecting a partial deposit. But it can't prompt to pay a deposit when we're collecting the whole price. We were going to just modify the button gif in Photoshop, but we can't find the button image.
(3), we set up an event for 52 weeks in advance, then decided to delete it. Unfortunately there was no way to delete the entire event schedule. We had to go in and delete 52 instances of it individually. Very frustrating. That's not a deal breaker, but the problem with reserving events before the customer has paid is definitely a deal breaker. We'd lose all kinds of money when legitimate customers were unable to book the event, because some slimy kids had come along and booked them all for fun.
(4) We chose our free script while ordering, but could never find a way to download it. Please advise.
May 11, 2010 10:42 PM
by Kosta Todorov
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1. Only one of our calendars supports payment confirmation, with Paypal redirect, but this one doesn't. If you want we can add it, but will charge you for this. $40
2. We can change the button title, or remove the deposit completely. $15
3. Yes, deleting all recurring events is not possible. Adding it will be. $20
4. You can download the script under My Products page in your account.
May 11, 2010 11:29 PM
From Customer
Please fix all three items and charge the same card that was used to purchase. We have become extremely wary about buying scripts, and this is why. These problems are oversights/bugs that should have been taken care of before the script was offered for sale. We'll post a public accounting of this experience. We're sorry it turned out this way. We cannot take a chance on your products in the future.
The button file should be changed to: SUBMIT PAYMENT
May 11, 2010 11:36 PM
by Veselin Stoilov
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Did you check the script before buying it? There is a fully working demo showing how it works so I cannot agree that these are bugs.
1) many of our clients prefer to collect booking details if payment is not processed because sometimes people do not have enough money in their paypal accounts and just cannot complete the booking payment. But still they want to make a booking and just contact calendar owner to confirm it. [then offer a way to CONDITIONALLY book a slot]
2) are you saying that button title is a bug? I guess you can imagine that if we ask 1000 people what title to put for the button we will probably receive 500 different answers. [no, you'd hear from people who say they want a simple button that will work for either scenario]
3) when a booking is submitted an email notification is sent. Administrator can login and check if booking is real or some kid just played with it. I explained in 1) why this is made so. [right, and so with a high volume, we could get twenty kids an hour that want to play with our bookings. that would require one full-time employee to manually go through each booking andconfirm it as good or bogus. $20,000/year. How about just fix the script instead?]
4) You can download the script under My Products page in your account.
"We'll post a public accounting of this experience" - is this a threat?
May 11, 2010 11:58 PM
From Customer
No threats, just a statement describing our pending actions. A threat is something that says one thing will happen if another thing doesn't, or vice-versa. In this situation, the one thing will occur regardless of any other event or action. People can decide for themselves regarding these issues. Had we written the script, none of these issues would have existed. [we wonder how many more issues we'll find beyond this initial five minute look], We appreciate that the script installed properly, and appears to work correctly other than these issues, and does (or will do) exactly what we need it to do, so you do get credit for that, and that will be mentioned prominently in our review, but we still feel these items are oversights and we do not appreciate having to pay $75 over and above the cost of the script to make the script more universally useful.. And that apparently required, what -- 11 minutes of your time? We're not "angry" but, sorry, we're not happy either.
May 12, 2010 12:01 AM
by Veselin Stoilov
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can you please comment on the points above. Especially point 2.
And another question:
5) how did you calculate it will take us 11 minutes?
May 12, 2010 12:11 AM
From Customer
"4) You can download the script under My Products page in your account."
The above line was in your last reply. We assumed that meant the modified script was done. If not, what are you prompting us to download? The free script download was handled several messages back. Please advise when the calendar script has been modified. No communication beyond that is required or desired.
May 12, 2010 12:13 AM
by Veselin Stoilov
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We will not do the modifications and will refund the amount for the purchase.
Good luck.
May 12, 2010 12:16 AM
by Veselin Stoilov
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Payment refunded.
We prefer to work with people who understand how our products work, who respect our work and who stay behind their words by giving reasonable explanations.
NOTE: We were given a StarsRate script with this purchase (to allow voting on images, stories, etc.). We give it zero stars out of five. -Of absolutely no value that we can see. There are a thousand free scripts that will do much more than this one.
NOTE-2: We did finally receive a refund for this script. On the same day that the refund went through, the credit card we had used for this was maxed out with fraudulent charges from all around the world. Coincidence?