WHMCS advertising third party vendors on my installation

[yggdrasil]

Can someone please explain me why I have email templates for SiteLock, SpamExperts, Weebly and other stuff when I never enabled the Market Store?

This is unacceptable. Not only from the email template section but every time I go to a product and have to pick an email for manual communication, I now have a longer list because of extra options that I will NEVER use. So in the future we are going to get 100 brands here as WHMCS partners with more companies and pushes their products into our installations? 😠

This is just spamvertising. What is next? WHMCS putting ads on the admin side from other companies so I sign up? I have never registered with those companies or entered any partnership except with WHMCS. I have never used or signed up for the Market Store either. Can someone from WHMCS explain me why are those companies advertising their products on my installation to my staff?

I might remind WHMCS that I paid for the software. Its not free. Its running on my installation. I entered an agreement with WHMCS, none of those companies. I want those brands gone from my installation. This is not what I signed up for when I purchased the software. I also find it unacceptable because I happen to sell similar things as they do.

Just like WHMCS does not allow us to mention their competitors here on the forums they have no legal or moral right to push my competitors into my server or administration section. I hope they see the irony because I'm not trying to advertise competitors and take WHMCS customers away from them. But they are surely doing this now to me and other WHMCS customers. If I want to sign up with one of those companies, no problem. Its my choice. But I should not be forced to do so or even see their name anywhere. 

This ended very bad for cPanel the last time they tried this. It also ended bad for Parallels (back then SW Soft) when they started to put banners for Virtuozzo on their Plesk software, people migrated to cPanel in mass back then.

Edited September 5, 2018 by yggdrasil

[bear]

Goes without saying that things like the marketplace should be completely opt in, and only installed on demand; not there by default and disable if you don't want (but still on the installation and kept updated and installed).

Anyone remember Cpanel and that Attracta fiasco? Feels a lot like that, apart from the auto-enabled thing on CP. 

[yggdrasil]

Apparently its not opt-in. I have never enabled this and yet WHMCS decided to install those templates into my database and installation. In fact, NO market place files should be installed unless you decide to do so like with any other module.

So if they have 50 partners in some future, you will see 50 new templates in the email selection....

I do remember the Attracta Fiasco. That is precisely why I mentioned cPanel. WHMCS is now trying the same thing on WHMCS. Surprised because they talk with cPanel and surely could just ask them and how that worked for them.

[bear]

6 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Apparently its not opt-in.

I'd mentioned that. :)
It should be a case of letting us know it exists, and we decide to install it. It should not be a built in thing, as it's unrelated to the billing system we'd paid for; it's an addon that you can choose to sell from and WHMCS gets a cut. 

[brian!]

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Can someone please explain me why I have email templates for SiteLock, SpamExperts, Weebly and other stuff when I never enabled the Market Store?

because WHMCS want you to sell those products to your customers, and by having those email templates enabled, it's another gentle push into you doing that...

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

This is unacceptable.

some of us said that when it was launched too... sadly it was probably said in a now deleted beta community thread.

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Not only from the email template section but every time I go to a product and have to pick an email for manual communication, I now have a longer list because of extra options that I will NEVER use.

technically, you could delete them from the tblemailtemplates database table, but whether the auto-updater would put them back in, I wouldn't like to to say... though I know removing them is not what you're complaining about - you don't want them there in the first place unless enabled.

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

So in the future we are going to get 100 brands here as WHMCS partners with more companies and pushes their products into our installations? 😠

absolutely yes - that's their direction of travel... it won't be a hundred (as that dilutes the opportunities for brands), but you can bet they'd love to make it more than the current four.

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Can someone from WHMCS explain me why are those companies advertising their products on my installation to my staff?

do you genuinely think they will? if they do, they'll give oxygen to the debate... but if they don't, then this thread will just wither away peacefully... besides, only one person could realistically argue their case, and he won't get involved in this thread.

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Just like WHMCS does not allow us to mention their competitors here on the forums

I assume we can mention them... we just couldn't encourage users to buy/use their software - which is fair enough as that's just common politeness... so it's not against the rules specifically, and doing a search I can see plenty of mentions of the product I think we're all secretly thinking of.

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

But I should not be forced to do so or even see their name anywhere. 

totally agree and I said this when it was launched 18 months ago...  but because there's no need for manual installation, WHMCS can go to the providers and say X number of users will have access to your products installed automatically, therefore more WHMCS users will offer the products, which means WHMCS getting their cut from sales.

the *only* way you can stop MarketConnect now or even just get it removed as a auto-installed feature, would be to not sell their products... if enough users did that, then the providers would walk away - but that's not going to happen now... for every user who is not going to sell these products (you & I), there will likely be more that will... certainly for the newbie users who will think 'I can quickly sell ssl certs using MarketConnect with all the products already added, or I can install a third-party addon manually, create products manually etc'... given those two options, unless they already have an existing relationship with an alternate supplier, they will choose MarketConnect...

personally, I prefer to have a direct relationship with a supplier rather than be a subreseller for WHMCS - but others can make their own business choices.

it's a terrible option too for non-English speaking WHMCS users because all the templates are hardcoded in English - which after 18 months is just insane... they should have been multilingual at launch, but after a year and a half they can't find the time to make them multilingual ?? in v7.6, they made the Weebly templates partially multilingual, but sadly forgot to do the same with the arrays used on those pages - so you end up with a bizarre mix of some text being in the chosen language, and others in English... to use an old expression, it's neither use nor ornament and they'd have been better off either doing nothing and leaving it to others, or to do it properly themselves in one go...

I spent an hour yesterday writing a hook to make the SiteLock page translatable - yes you can edit the templates to make the text in them multilingual, but not the arrays - they would need a hook (or horrendous complex Smarty) to fix... but the hook translates everything correctly, though i'm not inclined to publish it as there's no knowing if/when WHMCS are going to update them properly, and there are too many unknowns about the core code, and different methods used throughout the various products... and more importantly, I don't really want to encourage users to use MC otherwise we'll never get rid of it.

[yggdrasil]

Would WHMCS be ok if I create a module that promotes migrating your data to a competitor?

I ask this seriously. Will WHMCS allow me to advertise and sell a module on their website and market place that basically takes all the SQL from a WHMCS installation and migrates it to a WHMCS competitor on the fly? They are doing this to me. Trying to push competitors down into my customers.

Read again. My customers. Not WHMCS customers. I invested years of my life to get them, both in time and money. They seriously think they can pull this off and expect I will not fight back?

😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠

Edited September 6, 2018 by yggdrasil

[Kian]

Lot of years ago I was a Provider therefore I understand your frustration.

Probably WHMCS could add sort of Wizard configuration that allows their customers to have a 100% white label installation of they want to. It would be nice... cleaner interface and no more never ending dropdowns.

[yggdrasil]

9 hours ago, Kian said:

Lot of years ago I was a Provider therefore I understand your frustration.

Probably WHMCS could add sort of Wizard configuration that allows their customers to have a 100% white label installation of they want to. It would be nice... cleaner interface and no more never ending dropdowns.

Its just wrong to alienate your customers by trying to jump over.

Imagine the following. You provide a reselling service for what ever you offer. This is white label and suddenly you decide to contact your customers end customers directly. How do you think this would work out? Those resellers will not be happy.

I have no problem with WHMCS trying to make a quick buck by reselling something from a company. But I don’t have to sell for them. I'm not their sales, I don't work for them. I don't don marketing or invested money so WHMCS can get more customers, that is their job. I didn’t purchased WHMCS to resell products for them.