tickets with email content

[Bigol'tastynuggets]

41 minutes ago, snake said:

 

I do not have any other support modules available besides the built in one.

You must have to install their whmcs module to see that.
 

I remember Kayako used to be in here, but selecting that never did anything, so was never sure what the point was.

Yeah you're correct, you'd need to install that to see it! What would have been good for whmcs is integration with a live chat and help desk software - I've thought for years they should ask for some VC investment into something that helps them take a modular approach and closely integrate (for some extra cash ofc) into more modular systems - I presumed they'd want to diversify income in that regard so I thought that'd be a path to explore one day 

Whmcs is a dinosaur in terms of developing their software - as they appear to be in the market for upsells, they should have done something that'd tie customers into an eco system more 

[yggdrasil]

14 minutes ago, Bigol'tastynuggets said:

Yeah you're correct, you'd need to install that to see it! What would have been good for whmcs is integration with a live chat and help desk software - I've thought for years they should ask for some VC investment into something that helps them take a modular approach and closely integrate (for some extra cash ofc) into more modular systems - I presumed they'd want to diversify income in that regard so I thought that'd be a path to explore one day 

Whmcs is a dinosaur in terms of developing their software - as they appear to be in the market for upsells, they should have done something that'd tie customers into an eco system more 

It wasn't always like this. It's just that developing software got more complex over the simple PHP script WHMCS was a few years ago. Even PHP is far more complex now than it was years ago. WHMCS was really simple back then; but worked well for that time and had a massive amount of users. Other products just evolved faster and they got stuck. The market also changed drastically as hosting companies are closing down and major cloud providers from big tech are taking most of the cake.

Edited April 10, 2022 by yggdrasil

[snake]

2 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Last time I was with Hostbill I remember their initial price does not cover updates. So that initial purchase might look like an investment but once you need an update for a module, you need to buy it again since they consider it a new version, they like to launch a new version of their modules once a year which means the old one is left to die without updates. Ouch...

I don't think any large companies use WHMCS. At least I'm not aware of a single known brand that is using the software.

Almost every hosting company I have ever used uses WHMCS and non hosts too. I have never used any company that uses Hostbill or Blesta.

[snake]

2 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

It wasn't always like this. It's just that developing software got more complex over the simple PHP script WHMCS was a few years ago. Even PHP is far more complex now than it was years ago. WHMCS really simple but worked well for that time. Other products just evolved fast and they got stuck. The market also changed drastically as hosting companies are closing down and major cloud providers from big tech are taking most of the cake.

I have been using WHMCS for 15 years now, across multiple companies. Nothing has really changed in that time. They still don't fix bugs that have existed for years or implement features that have been requested by many people over many years.
They only seem to add things tat will benefit them not the user and getting them to accept bugs is always painful.

[yggdrasil]

4 minutes ago, snake said:

I have been using WHMCS for 15 years now, across multiple companies. Nothing has really changed in that time. They still don't fix bugs that have existed for years or implement features that have been requested by many people over many years.
They only seem to add things tat will benefit them not the user and getting them to accept bugs is always painful.

I'm curious what companies are the ones that use WHMCS. Most hosts I used don't use any of the products you mentioned, probably something custom made. If you look at host bill pages their custom list is on their website. Some brands are fairly known.

Edited April 10, 2022 by yggdrasil

[snake]

9 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

I'm curious what companies are the ones that use WHMCS. Most hosts I used don't use any of the products you mentioned, probably something custom made. If you look at host bill pages their custom list is on their website. Some brands are fairly known.

I cannot possibly remember every provider I have ever used that uses WHMCS, I have come across  literally dozens.

According to WHMCS themselves, there are in excess of 50k companies using their product.


 

[yggdrasil]

16 minutes ago, snake said:

I cannot possibly remember every provider I have ever used that uses WHMCS, I have come across  literally dozens.

According to WHMCS themselves, there are in excess of 50k companies using their product.


 

Sure, I did was well but in the past. Not as recently in the past 3 or more years. The last known brand I remember used WHMCS was Hostdime but they don't anymore. I think they use something in house now. Knownhost which was also widely popular at some point in the VPS market, moved from WHMCS to Blesta. Those 2 I can remember out of the top of my head. Host bill has a list on their website, at least some of those brands are popular or someone might have come across them at some point. As for the really bigger budget host brands like Hostgator, Site5, etc, while all of them still use cPanel, I don't think they ever used WHMCS but I'm not 100% sure.

Edited April 10, 2022 by yggdrasil

[Bigol'tastynuggets]

There's a fair few big hosts with their own in-house solutions, it's probably cheaper long term to invest in building something specific to your needs at a large scale 

But I agree with the sentiment!

[snake]

20 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Sure, I did was well but in the past. Not as recently in the past 3 or more years. The last known brand I remember used WHMCS was Hostdime but they don't anymore. I think they use something in house now. Knownhost which was also widely popular at some point in the VPS market, moved from WHMCS to Blesta. Those 2 I can remember out of the top of my head. Host bill has a list on their website, at least some of those brands are popular or someone might have come across them at some point. As for the really bigger budget host brands like Hostgator, Site5, etc, while all of them still use cPanel, I don't think they ever used WHMCS but I'm not 100% sure.

i'm sure they lost a lot of customers with the massive price hike of both whmcs and cpanel.

however all my existing suppliers who used it are still using it.

I do website maintenance and migration work, which means I am always logging into different hosting providers, and most of them use WHMCS still.
 

[snake]

20 hours ago, Bigol'tastynuggets said:

There's a fair few big hosts with their own in-house solutions, it's probably cheaper long term to invest in building something specific to your needs at a large scale 

But I agree with the sentiment!

I use hostek.com, who have their own control panel, but still use WHMCS.
I have yet to come across anyone using Blesta strangely.

[Bigol'tastynuggets]

1 minute ago, snake said:

I use hostek.com, who have their own control panel, but still use WHMCS.
I have yet to come across anyone using Blesta strangely.

There's quite a few out there, Personally I see it more with MSPs and people with a bit more technical ability than the average cpanel summerhost, some of the best mid range companies are still using whmcs.

There's quite a lot of large companies using their own software which was my point though? I wouldn't expect a small company to have the time and resources to develop their own, I have seen one smallish local company attempting it though and from what I've seen it looks great - I'm not confident they'll finish anytime soon though lol 

At the end of the day, you do what's best for your business if that's using whmcs then you absolutely should 

[snake]

1 hour ago, Bigol'tastynuggets said:

There's quite a few out there, Personally I see it more with MSPs and people with a bit more technical ability than the average cpanel summerhost, some of the best mid range companies are still using whmcs.

There's quite a lot of large companies using their own software which was my point though? I wouldn't expect a small company to have the time and resources to develop their own, I have seen one smallish local company attempting it though and from what I've seen it looks great - I'm not confident they'll finish anytime soon though lol 

At the end of the day, you do what's best for your business if that's using whmcs then you absolutely should 

I did give Blesta a try years ago, but it had missing features I needed and I found the attitude of the support and community to be rather negative  and unhelpful. I was constantly being told I had to resort to customising code to do the most simple things, which was just messy.

[yggdrasil]

4 hours ago, snake said:

I did give Blesta a try years ago, but it had missing features I needed and I found the attitude of the support and community to be rather negative  and unhelpful. I was constantly being told I had to resort to customising code to do the most simple things, which was just messy.

Its very rough if you compare it out of the box to WHMCS. I would argue its probably lacking basic stuff, as such tends to attract a rather developer public that is comfortable building things on top of it. But I agree, Blesta is probably bare bones for most users here, this is more true in the domain part which is almost entirely lacking. But it does seem a good value in terms of money. I would say its very affordable but so is WHMCS for most people unless they need a massive amount of users.

[Bigol'tastynuggets]

On 4/12/2022 at 3:27 AM, yggdrasil said:

Its very rough if you compare it out of the box to WHMCS. I would argue its probably lacking basic stuff, as such tends to attract a rather developer public that is comfortable building things on top of it. But I agree, Blesta is probably bare bones for most users here, this is more true in the domain part which is almost entirely lacking. But it does seem a good value in terms of money. I would say its very affordable but so is WHMCS for most people unless they need a massive amount of users.

Yeah, I don't think it's aimed at the market connect crowd or the cpanel reseller - that being said I find the level of control and flexibility to be a perfect fit for us and I'm enjoying it - I would imagine that any software targeting the lower ability users would probably be inundated with support requests and bogged down. 

 

Also not seeing posts about pirate services using nulled software is a nice change of pace! 

[snake]

6 hours ago, Bigol'tastynuggets said:

Yeah, I don't think it's aimed at the market connect crowd or the cpanel reseller - that being said I find the level of control and flexibility to be a perfect fit for us and I'm enjoying it - I would imagine that any software targeting the lower ability users would probably be inundated with support requests and bogged down. 

 

Also not seeing posts about pirate services using nulled software is a nice change of pace! 

I would call myself lower ability.
I have a lot of technical skills, but I am not a PHP developer, which seems to be a requirement.

[Bigol'tastynuggets]

50 minutes ago, snake said:

I would call myself lower ability.
I have a lot of technical skills, but I am not a PHP developer, which seems to be a requirement.

I wouldn't agree, I'm not a php dev but I understand enough to make the changes I desire - I used to come here and search hoping brian had already posted the answers when using whmcs to be honest

A basic understanding of code is enough for most, the few questions I've asked have been answered publicly by the developers and I have truly taken to the entire eco system! I had my mind made up to leave though so my decision was "which software will best suit my needs for at least 5 years" rather than "can I sell things on behalf of whmcs with x software" 😜

Again, as I say you need to evaluate your needs, join the communities and ask questions about the different software available! Like this place used to be, many of them have cool communities with nice folks! What me and you need for our business can be world's apart even in the same industry! There's no right or wrong answer in that decision though 🙂

 

[snake]

6 hours ago, Bigol'tastynuggets said:

I wouldn't agree, I'm not a php dev but I understand enough to make the changes I desire - I used to come here and search hoping brian had already posted the answers when using whmcs to be honest

A basic understanding of code is enough for most, the few questions I've asked have been answered publicly by the developers and I have truly taken to the entire eco system! I had my mind made up to leave though so my decision was "which software will best suit my needs for at least 5 years" rather than "can I sell things on behalf of whmcs with x software" 😜

Again, as I say you need to evaluate your needs, join the communities and ask questions about the different software available! Like this place used to be, many of them have cool communities with nice folks! What me and you need for our business can be world's apart even in the same industry! There's no right or wrong answer in that decision though 🙂

 

that was meant to say "wouldn't" not would 🙂
I do have a background in programming. 6502 machine code/assembler, a bit of Fortran, cobol, basic on various systems and ColdFusion.
Which is sufficient  knowledge for me to do a bit of debugging in php, use other peoples scripts and modules etc.

But it wasn't enough for me to do the things that Blesta support and the community were telling me to do, which really did require someone to be a php developer.  And the attitude I got was that if your not a developer and cannot do these things, we don't want you here.

 

 

[bear]

32 minutes ago, snake said:

the attitude I got was that if your not a developer and cannot do these things, we don't want you here.

It's not just you, and not only about coding ability. I personally won't go near it. 

[snake]

4 minutes ago, bear said:

It's not just you, and not only about coding ability. I personally won't go near it. 

not too long along I made a post on twitter having a bit of a rant about WHMCS, and one of their fanboys recommending I use Blesta.
When I said I prefered WHMCS as didn;t get on with Blesta, you should have been the abuse I got... sheesh

[Bigol'tastynuggets]

5 hours ago, snake said:

not too long along I made a post on twitter having a bit of a rant about WHMCS, and one of their fanboys recommending I use Blesta.
When I said I prefered WHMCS as didn;t get on with Blesta, you should have been the abuse I got... sheesh

There's fanboys for all software, I feel like we've had a civil conversation though:) 

Well, again I disagree as you've got a hell of a lot transferable skill to manage but to each their own! As I've said multiple times it's what suits you best! 

[HancoEuropa]

Agreed @snake and @yggdrasil, just got out of a meeting where subcontractor admins could not fathom how or why they couldn't paste an HTML table into a reply to the client.

So -- I am using support department custom fields and then a hook to pick those up from the ticket, take a predefined reply template (with <h2>, <table> html in it), str_replace the [CUSTOMFIELD1] in the template with the custom field values, and spit out the mail in pretty html format from there. 

Ridiculous effort.   

[anderson.deda]

The big problem of forums is still the same.
Great conversations about something that has nothing to do with the purpose that was started here.

Everyone is right, everyone has unique views and needs.
The truth for one is not the truth for another.

The only point that everyone is right at the same time is, whmcs does not meet the need for html layout for emails.
Apparently this is not a demand from them at this time!

Nobody has come up with a solution to this problem?