I came across the topic of someone asking about 123flashchat by TOPCMM and felt I should share with you what my experience is so that others don’t get caught.
Anyone considering any of TOPCMM software should spend a lot of time asking questions. I lost $1300.00 plus thousands of dollars in advertising, hardware and other software because TOPCMM was never able to make this software work right.
After only a few months of owning it, I started begging for a refund which never came. When they found my review, they said in public that they were happy to offer me a refund but in email, the keep telling me it’s not possible and that will not happen.
Support is almost nonexistent and they will make you nearly crazy with delays. No matter what ticket type you use, low priority or critical, you still will receive the same support no matter what. You might get lucky and someone will respond in a day, maybe two and often, a week. By then, you will have lost many customers and money if you are advertising as I was.
They also take countless holidays and leave you hanging during those and only sales is on staff during weekends. Their forums are useless and they never give any real answers other than ‘give us your login details and we’ll fix it’. This means you’ll never learn about your server and will always be dependent on them, just how they like it.
From what I can tell, they are on their knees after abusing countless customers and their future is unsure. Be very careful!
I could go on and on and would be happy to share more horrors if anyone is considering this software. Just PM me.
I give up on this nonsense software, going back to Joomla where there are countless REAL social networking capabilities instead of just one that never helps it’s users.
When one uploads a video on a site which handles media, a preview image is always shown of the video. In BP-Media, only a black image shows and I am looking for a plugin or means by which to fix this so that I can use my own ffmpeg tools on the server as well.
Useless answer. I didn’t ask anything about integration, I asked only about functionality. If you don’t have anything constructive to offer, why bother saying any of the above.
I’ve been using and pushing open source since the early 90’s. It is frustrating to use software where it’s community isn’t more actively helping others with replies in the forums and so on.
It certainly appears to me that open source is on the decline, mostly because of replies like yours. Everything that’s worth anything, we’ve bought and paid for.
This might help better explain. I’m sorry if my question is not coming out as it should.
Rather than buy yet more plugins to do things my servers can already do, I would prefer to use the conversion and compression tools which I already have on the server. I realize that BP only allows certain file types to be uploaded but my servers can covert to what ever is needed, so in this case, MP4.
So the information I am looking for is how to go about using my own tools instead of buying another plugin to accomplish what I need.
I found ‘WP Video Posts’ which I’ve just now posted in their support asking if it does what I’m looking for and that was my question here. Since I already have the capability to do these things on the servers, I’d like to know how I can do this.
I did mention it, the BuddyPress Media addon called BPM-FFMPEG.
What I am trying to find out is how I can use the tools I already have on my servers to convert/compress any format I already support to be uploaded by BuddyPress users.
I guess it really boils down to how someone wants to use their system and arrange the plugins as needed for your setup.
While plugin details does most often mention if the plugin is network or not, it’s not always clear what the benefits are or how they could cause problems with your desired type of setup.
Since I’ve not seen BPGallery in use yet, I don’t know if I should enable it sitewide or not since this doesn’t tell me if folks would be sharing each others pics for their blogs or something else.
I’ll do more testing.
Thanks for so much information, however, it doesn’t answer my question :).
I understand that some plugins are single site, some are network and that network plugins can be used on individual sites on an MU installation.
Your advise to network activate plugins on an MU site is not correct because there are many times when you want a plugin on the main site or one or two sites but not all sites on the network. A good example is statistics plugins that could use up tons of resources if all sites were running their instant all out. That could bring a system to it’s knees if admins aren’t aware and so on. Just an example of course.
Perhaps you were talking about a sub-domain install? I am asking about a sub-directory install.
However, what I have been trying to find out about specifically, is about BP related plugins and not the main BP plugin itself.
I went ahead and network enabled all of the BP related plugins then tested by trying things out, going to various sub-directory sites, etc. I didn’t really notice anything different and in the end, it seemed that the only BP plugin which had any value being run in network mode was the main BP plugin itself. This allows me to show new posts site wide in the activity walls but that’s about it.
So, at this point, even after testing, which may not have shown me everything that could be done, I am still where I started.
I simply do not understand why this is such a tough question considering all of the BP pro’s on this site.
Hard to help others using BP when I can’t even get answers.
Yes, I am saying that it seems to be working fine with only BP activated as network.
Meaning, does anyone know if I really need to enable the rest of the BP plugins as network?
So making BP alone network activated did allow for posts to show in the main activity stream.
Only question I have left is what about the rest of the BP plugins, other than those which are specifically network, should I also enable the rest as network or keep them on the main site only as I have them now?
I’ve been searching since reading your reply.
Most articles say that BP should be network activated however, I’ve come across nothing saying if the rest of the BP plugins need to be network enabled as well or only on the main BP site.
Are you saying that the main BP plugin can be run in network mode which in turn kind of aggregates all of the blogs?
Right now, my setup is WPMU with all of the BP plugins running only on the main site. I wanted one single community area which blog owners can take part in when they aren’t working on their own blogs.
