No longer able to manage client passwords in v8**

[yggdrasil]

6 minutes ago, Manchester Web Hosting said:

Dont believe that will the case. DIdnt happen when cpanel itself was purchased and then moved to their new model and considering cpanel now technically owns whmcs...

Exactly how we feel, but the way the road is unfolding doesnt install any confidence tbh.

Yup tried the ones you mentioned. they got someway to go yet... big fan of opensouce but something thats comparable to whmcs... nada yet and nothing insight

Well not going to mention any names. Feature wise they have got a way to go yet...

That is not true. cPanel has lost a massive amount of customers. Me included. With their current pricing, bigger companies just finally decided to roll its own solution, others are using open source or their competitors that are not charging per domain. Companies that actually do make profit in massive numbers will never jump to those models that tax them based on amounts or profits. Its cost prohibitive. Those companies like cPanel think they can milk them and it works, for a year or two, then they leave once they found an alternative. The cPanel model will not last and cannot last, they will be the underdog soon, close or sell to someone that will revert things (will just buy the brand). They are probably already in deep financial troubles as most hosting companies are leaving them. The once preferred control panel of choice is no more. I don't even remember when was the last time someone asked for cPanel hosting. People don't even care anymore because cPanel was great 10 years back, now its just garbage. If you want to pay that model, Plesk is better in features and at least evolved a bit over the years to what people need to sell more. Or just go to Virtualmin that is open source and has way more features than both of them together.

I saw the writing on the wall 2 years before their prices changed and started to develop my own solution. It was the best thing I ever did. And now I see the writing with WHMCS as well. The future does not look bright here.

[yggdrasil]

6 minutes ago, bear said:

It applies to all owned licenses, which you could only sell once, and only if you bought directly. As for terms, most of those are not permanent, and can change over time. The new terms don't change your ownership, they just disallow selling it. At some point in the future,  I'd assume they could say the owned version will no longer be developed (look to Kayako for precedent) or supported or perhaps have a gigantic support price increase that most would say no to and that's that (again, Kayako is a good example). 
This may be a big worry over nothing, but with the pattern of things of late, no longer a sure thing not to happen. 

How does that legally work?

You come to WHMCS and ask them about the owned license, you are allowed to sell it or transfer. You purchase the software based on those conditions. Then 10 years later they update the terms and say you cannot sell it anymore? Law is not retroactive. You accepted a different purchase agreement.

I had an unlimited Kayako license. The thing is that nobody sued them. Legally you would win in court. Just because some companies pull this off it does not mean its legal or right.

[bear]

 

53 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

How does that legally work?

You come to WHMCS and ask them about the owned license, you are allowed to sell it or transfer. You purchase the software based on those conditions. Then 10 years later they update the terms and say you cannot sell it anymore? Law is not retroactive. You accepted a different purchase agreement.

I had an unlimited Kayako license. The thing is that nobody sued them. Legally you would win in court. Just because some companies pull this off it does not mean its legal or right.

They never *had* to allow reselling a license you owned, and I don't recall if it was in the terms or not. For a while they did, but now they decided that's no longer acceptable. Terms are not permanent, and are subject to change. Sure, they can't say that you now have to pay them $1 a minute to keep using it (even if added to the terms), but they do have the right to stop allowing resale. I don't like it, but it's allowed. Nearly every one I've read states that they reserve the right to make changes, and that it can and will at some point.

As for Kayako, I actually have three unlimited licenses, two paid, one given to me by the original creator long ago. 
What they did was try and kill the owned version in favor of SAAS. When users complained strongly, they kept it, but raised the price to absurd levels (over $11K *PER YEAR*), so no one wanted to buy. At the same time, they said you could pay monthly "support" for owned if you had it...but that was like $35/m per seat, where we have unlimited before. They wanted the owned to stop being a thing, and found a way to make it so unpalatable it came to be. 
Optimistically, that won't likely happen here. The pragmatist in me is watching the horizon.

[yggdrasil]

26 minutes ago, bear said:

 

They never *had* to allow reselling a license you owned, and I don't recall if it was in the terms or not. For a while they did, but now they decided that's no longer acceptable. Terms are not permanent, and are subject to change. Sure, they can't say that you now have to pay them $1 a minute to keep using it (even if added to the terms), but they do have the right to stop allowing resale. I don't like it, but it's allowed. Nearly every one I've read states that they reserve the right to make changes, and that it can and will at some point.

As for Kayako, I actually have three unlimited licenses, two paid, one given to me by the original creator long ago. 
What they did was try and kill the owned version in favor of SAAS. When users complained strongly, they kept it, but raised the price to absurd levels (over $11K *PER YEAR*), so no one wanted to buy. At the same time, they said you could pay monthly "support" for owned if you had it...but that was like $35/m per seat, where we have unlimited before. They wanted the owned to stop being a thing, and found a way to make it so unpalatable it came to be. 
Optimistically, that won't likely happen here. The pragmatist in me is watching the horizon.

It started that way and WHMCS is following similar steps. First removing owned license, then stopping people from reselling (to make it lose value) and try to bring people to their new subscription model.

Then they changed that model to per amount of customers you have.

Then they started to offer services directly with marketplace.

Then they stopped the selling of open modules.

Then they started to encoded things that previously you could modify.

Then they started to remove things from themes and templates files to put them behind encoded files.

Now they are in the phase of slowly removing features that only make sense in self-hosted servers.

The next guess is jacking prices up for owned licenses heavily. To the point its very expensive, they will then offer some discount to those owned license holders to move to their recurring leasing model, probably a big discount making it look how much cheaper it is, (that will not last forever either...)

Once that is done, they will completely stop supporting owned licenses supports and upgrades. Leasing only.

When that is done, they will launch their own hosted model SaaS that runs on their servers. It will be a disaster in security and stability but either way....

After sometime they will heavily raise the pricing for anyone that is self-hosted in the leasing model, either by charging more per customers or price, to try to move them to their SaaS solution, they will market how great their own solution is and how complicated and messy its to maintain your own billing.

When that is done, they will completely remove that option as well and it will be hosted in their services SaaS only. No more downloading WHMCS at all. No more your database. It will be on their systems and you will only get the web GUI and nothing else.

When that is done, they will start to raise the pricing again now charging per module used, per customers active, per number of domains, etc. They will nickel and dime for every module, every domain, every customer active...Or maybe even go to fixed fee based on your income.

They also allow forbid external developers at this point from selling modules directly since you will not be able to install them unless you use their official app store, you will not be able to download or upload files on their Saas of course, so no modules can be installed directly. They will charge a % to developers of course for every active module sold. Aka Apple style.

Eventually they will also kill the modules that allow people to resell stuff directly like domains or SSL, and they will force you to resell their products and services (like domains, or SSL) trough their reseller accounts.

Eventually they will also charge a % (aka merchant style) for payments you receive since they will partner with some major payment system and that will be the only option payment for customers. You will not be able to accept payments using your own merchant either, that will not even work in their SaaS module because third parties are not supposed to access that data. All this will be possible since its not your server anymore, you don't get access to the software or database. It will be just another service. Shopify for services. They somehow think hosting companies and developers will be on board with this, but they will not. They will just have a different type of customers that knows no better than just click and point to start their own business (or think they are starting one since they will all just be the same...)

I'm shocked people cannot see this. It will take some years and other competitors will take their place but its very obvious to what WHMCS is evolving. They don't care about hosting companies anymore. They took forever to even add a metered model in a cloud world. If you look their success story they have like 4 hosting companies on their website, not even known. There were far bigger brands using WHMCS in the past. Now I cannot name one.

It's very clear to me that WHMCS does not want to sell software anymore but services. This is nothing but fairy tales and speculation but aren't the small signs telling people anything? They want to be a sort of shopify.

I really want to be wrong. Very wrong. I hope so but the first moves they already finished.

Edited November 19, 2020 by yggdrasil

[brian!]

On 17/11/2020 at 22:53, yggdrasil said:

Readonly is an HTML field in the browser. Did you tried deleting that and changing to see if it works? Right click, inspect, remote the read only and try to change the data and see if it works.

it doesn't remove the question/answer.

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

I don't think we can mention the alternatives here.

if the thread gets locked, it's more likely due to  drifting into an owned license conversation rather than mentioning existing alternatives... now if a new alternative comes along, and it's viable and competitive, then I could see debate on that being stifled.

 

[yggdrasil]

2 minutes ago, brian! said:

it doesn't remove the question/answer.

if the thread gets locked, it's more likely due to  drifting into an owned license conversation rather than mentioning existing alternatives... now if a new alternative comes along, and it's viable and competitive, then I could see debate on that being stifled.

 

Maybe they changed  their policy but I remember years back they banned the words of competitors in the old forums and did not allow anyone to mention alternatives. I remember they even banned and kicked users for that as well. At least other people in another community complained about being banned. Maybe they realized it's not a good practice and open discussion is more healthy. I know I would like to know what my customers think, (good or bad) since it's valuable information for any business that does not know people in person.

[Tcalp]

Can we please steer away from complaining about the state of WHMCS and/or alternatives and focus on putting the attention on that it's an important feature for us to be able to issue/reset client passwords.

[yggdrasil]

6 minutes ago, Tcalp said:

Can we please steer away from complaining about the state of WHMCS and/or alternatives and focus on putting the attention on that it's an important feature for us to be able to issue/reset client passwords.

I don't remember WHMCS adding a feature or fixing something based on what people post here. You will have better luck opening a support ticket and reporting it as a bug. They maybe don't consider this a bug and tell you to add it as a feature request instead. 😅 Unless someone makes a custom code the state of this will not change until they launch a new release. And this is probably going to be fixed (if they do fix it) in version 8.1 which is months and months ahead. You can probably wait until the first quarter of 2021 to see 8.1 since it also comes with a new customer area redesign and it will take a while to be launched. 
 

There is nothing you can really do except delete them manually from the database or hope someone makes  PHP script or hook that does this. A temporary solution at the best. If you cannot wait your best option is to downgrade back to 7. I don't think v8 is ready for business or production. I see many, but many bugs.

Edited November 19, 2020 by yggdrasil

[brian!]

whether it's a bug, multiple bugs or just plain poor design, WHMCS are not going to do anything to resolve it until v8.1 (probably ~ Easter 2021 before it goes GA)... no matter what direction this thread heads in.

[Tcalp]

1 hour ago, yggdrasil said:

I don't remember WHMCS adding a feature or fixing something based on what people post here. You will have better luck opening a support ticket and reporting it as a bug. They maybe don't consider this a bug and tell you to add it as a feature request instead. 😅

I did originally create a ticket with WHMCS, they suggested that I create a feature request, and when I did so, the feature request got denied from posting publicly

[bear]

8 minutes ago, Tcalp said:

they suggested that I create a feature request, and when I did so, the feature request got denied from posting publicly

Doesn't sound like them (he said somewhat sarcastically). 😉

[brian!]

10 minutes ago, Tcalp said:

I did originally create a ticket with WHMCS, they suggested that I create a feature request, and when I did so, the feature request got denied from posting publicly

perhaps because the issue(s) already has multiple CORE numbers assigned to it and so should/might/will (delete as applicable) be addressed, to an unknown degree, in a future release.

[yggdrasil]

4 hours ago, brian! said:

whether it's a bug, multiple bugs or just plain poor design, WHMCS are not going to do anything to resolve it until v8.1 (probably ~ Easter 2021 before it goes GA)... no matter what direction this thread heads in.

Since they are introducing a new client area design, I expect 8.1 to again break many things or have many bugs and missing features that makes it non-upgradable for me. I will just play it safe and wait until 8.3 😁

[wsa]

Still no response from WHMCS  Staff I guess  they don't care 

[ManagedCloud-Hosting]

Who cares if they don't care  ❓ 😣

 

[Divi Space Hosting]

I felt compelled to register our company to post on this thread.  I'm sorry but, who was the idiot that thought this would be a "cool feature"?.   I have request to password reset a lot on our service and some customers do put emails that are not secured enough to receive emails or they end up in the spam folder and they contact us to request a reset because they can't access their accounts.  This is pretty normal in hosting,  now you're telling me I can't access a simply password reset so the customer can regain access to his/her account?.  What happens when the customer needs to change the email and password?.  I will have to change the email to the customer and then request a password reset, that could take several tickets.

You're increasing our pain and our customer pain for what?.  This is not increasing security, it is only hurting business AND their customers!!

[Divi Space Hosting]

I found a quick fix to this DISGRACE of  change in WHMCS 8.

 

• Prepare a private secure email for your company to retrieve passwords,  could be something like  private@yourcompanyemail.com
• Take note of the customer original email
• Go to users and change the email for the customer your wanting to reset your password into your private@yourcompany.com  mail
• Send a password reset
• Reset the password on the URL reset link
• Change the email for your customer back to the original email
• Send the customer the username and new password.

There you go.  See how easy is to bypass this "security important"  feature added?.  THIS removal is USELESS.  Bring back the old password reset feature.   You're just only adding us an extra level of complexity with ZERO improvements for hosting services or their customers.