My initial impression was I liked the component and it was better looking and laid out than the competitors, I was a fan. However, when I tried adding events, there was no option for them to be “private” unless I was logged in as a site administrator. All events added by regular users were public and required approval by an administrator. I went through the instructions multiple times and still couldn’t get it working.

So on September 20 I posted a message on the JCal support forums requesting help. After a day or so I got a response from the developers, Anything Digital, that they were looking in to it and then a follow up saying they’ve confirmed it was a bug and I could expect a fix in 24-48 hrs. So far so good, bugs happen, I can accept that, I was still a fan. But then things started to go downhill …

I waited 48hrs for the fix … nothing. So I posted a “bump” reminder message on the forums to get an update.

I waited another 48hrs … still nothing. No communication at all. I posted another message on their forums asking for a response and letting them know I was starting to think about asking for a refund and that so far I’d have little option to write a not very positive review on the Joomla Extensions catalogue.

I waited another 48hrs … still nothing. So I posted again, requesting a refund. Their official policy says “no refunds”, but I pointed out that a credit card chargeback would cost them more than a refund, so they may want to reconsider, and that continuing to advertise it as offering “private calendars” was false advertising. On September 28 I also wrote a review on Joomla.org describing my experience.

Another 24hrs went by and finally a response – more than a week after I was told I could expect a fix within 24-48 hrs. I was told that the fix was with beta testers and they also issued me with a refund and closed my account with them. September 29.

This was more than a little confusing. What I wanted was private calendars. I only asked for a refund after it seemed apparent they couldn’t provide them anytime soon and had poor support. If they had a fix and it would soon be available, I was more than willing to wait – all they had to do was tell me what was going on!

I was annoyed, but left it at that until today. Why? Well, yesterday my review on Joomla Extensions had now been approved by the Joomla.org site admins and was posted along with a response by Anything Digital claiming the issue was resolved with a link back to the forums (update: the review has mysteriously been removed). I thought, great, I still don’t have a solution maybe I’ll buy it again! So I went to the forums and got this response -

Sorry david_steadson, you are banned from using this forum!
Gave a bad JED review even though we refunded his money

This was completely false! I gave the bad review only after I’d waited a week for a response, and a day before I was issued the refund. Furthermore, when I went to the forums without logging in, there was nothing new in the thread except the acknowledgment it had been sent to testing. After looking around the site some more I found something even more irritating … they have indeed finally publicly issued the fix!

I still need a private calendar solution. What do I do? Give them the money again despite the bad experience with their support, including being outright dishonest in the statement above? Right now I don’t know what I should do. Their software is licenced under GPL which means anyone who has it is free to share it around, so I could just wait until somebody does that, but it could be weeks or months.

I like the software. I want to use it. I would have been a fan and written positively about them, but instead because of their lack of communication they’ve turned me into a foe, with a post like this on the internet for googlers to find for years to come.

UPDATE 2010-01-01: I now have the latest version of JCalPro version 2.2.7.441 and the Private Calendars functional still does not work, with users additions requiring administrator approval even for their own private activities.

Alas, our experience with ZipCodeShop (ZCS), despite starting well, has not been a good one. I contacted them and told them I was looking at buying both components, and they were more than helpful. I purchased the ZCS Community Builder component, for US$99, and started trying to implement it in my site. I sort of got it working, and for 2 days ZCS support via email were extremely fast, and extremely helpful – though they did continue to ignore requests to be given access to their support forums. The component itself was encoded and hardcoded with a licence linked to my domain name. This concerned me as we had plans to change the domain name, but they assured me it would be no problem to do so. After a couple of days I was still having a few problems, and they informed me a new version was coming the following week, and that prices would be increasing - so I should buy the Moset’s tree version straight away. I elected not to do so.

That was in February. Since then I have lodged more than a dozen support ticket requests and followups through their online ticketing system. I have sent numerous emails directly. I have left messages with their Live Online Support. I’ve even tried several international phone calls. Nothing. I would be concerned they had gone of business, or the principles had some serious health issues or similar, but at the end of April a message appeared on their site stating they were upgrading their site and the new one would be up at the end of the week. At the end of the week, the message disappeared but nothing else changed. Thus, I’m left with an encoded component who’s bugs I cannot fix, and which I cannot easily customised for my purposes, as I was assured I could.

Sadly, posts on Joomlapolis indicate my experience is not unique. I left further messages last week advising ZipCodeShop I would be doing this blog post, but there has been no response.

In the meantime I’ve developed a replacement component to the ZipCodeShop radius search component using the excellent Fabrik development framework, available at www.fabrikar.com. For those who have been left wanting by ZCS I’ll try to blog about my solution in the next week.

I thought perhaps that despite these credentials he perhaps didn’t actually realise that “pyramidspel” (literally “pyramid game”) are illegal and he was doing the all-to-common mistake of using the word to describe companies that use multi-level marketing. Alas, he wasn’t, as was evidenced in the rest of his post where he claimed “only the people who get in early make money” and that you “make money by recruiting people” – two other myths about multi-level marketing.

So here we have a (supposed) business historian and TV personality publicly stating that a 50 yr old global company operating in 90+ countries in territories was an illegal business! I wonder what his lawyer would think about that?

I should have known better but I couldn’t help but to try to set him straight with a rather lengthy comment (in english) complete with links to numerous sources talking about Amway and the various awards and recognitions Amway had received around the world.

To his credit he posted a response withdrawing the claim against Amway, but he then continued with the myth-building, complete with linking to a 10yr old swedish anonymous anti-amway site that does little more than report other myths – including doing price comparisons that are completely wrong! (he for example compares the price of a concentrate that when mixed with water make 4 bottles of cleaner to the price of one bottle of a competitor).

That post of course answered the question of why he got his first post so wrong in the first place – he’s getting his education about Amway from the Internet. Once upon a time research involved reading reports and studies by respected authors in the field, in particular peer-reviewed research and reports. Even newspapers had editors who would fact check articles before they were published, a form of peer-review. Today however the lazy journalist and researcher does little more than hop onto google to see what they’ll find. I suspect Edward Blom linked to the article he did for little more reason than it appeared highly in a google.se search for Amway. A decade old, anonymous site, published on a free web hosting service – and Edward Blom, a published author in the field of business decided that was a good enough place for him to learn about Amway.

How sad. In the “old” days he might have had to go to a library. Then he would have found and read books like The Direct Selling Revolution: Understanding the Growth of the Amway Corporation by Professor Dominique Xardel. Professor Xardel is a former head of ESSEC, one of the most prestigous business schools in Europe, and a former editor of the Harvard Business Review. He spent 2 years researching Amway. Who do you think has the most accurate opinion? Some anonymous blogger who went to one meeting then surfed the net, or a respected business academic who spent 2 years researching the topic?

Alas, today it doesn’t matter. For the google generation, PR (google Page Rank) is more important than PR (Peer Review) when it comes to PR (Public Relations) on the Internet. What Edward Blom did is all too common, not just for journalists and supposed professionals, but also the public at large.

Is this the final death throes of professional journalism? Are amateur blogs of dubious quality going to rule the information highway?

On the former issue I’m firmly in the evolution camp. Evolution as a concept is incredibly logical and to my mind, incredibly elegant. I truly have no problem imagining that the immense diversity of life on earth today began from something as simply as, say the crystalline structures inherent in clay. With regards Jesus and the bible, I’m a firm believer in most of the core principles taught by the world’s major religions. Love thy neighbour, respect for life etc etc. I don’t however believe in the existence of any “gods”. I see no evidence for them and find no need for them, either personally or as an explanation for as yet unexplained phenomena. If I was to categorise my beliefs, then secular humanist is close enough. With regards Jesus, in the past few years I’ve moved from believing the historical Jesus existed (as a man) to now leaning towards the idea he never existed at all. There is no contemporary historical record of Jesus having existed, and those writings we do have (both biblical and otherwise) have all been dated to many many decades and even centuries after the time he supposedly lived. Furthermore, most of the stories about Jesus bare remarkable similarities to various other myths that existed earlier in the same region of the world. It seems entirely possible to me that the historical Jesus is a myth much like that of Zeus or Thor or any other supernatural being.

But back to the point of the post. In the discussion about evolution, my “opponents” provided me with lists of “evidence” that evolution was wrong and had an enormous amount of flaws, claiming for example that there is a lack of supporting “transitional fossils” or that various dating methods are highly unreliable. They also pointed me towards Ben Stein’s move Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The problem I have isn’t with other folks disagreeing with my beliefs, or even disputing well established facts such as Evolution – it’s that they outright lie when doing it! Even in the brief trailer for Expelled I encountered numerous outright false or misleading claims. I tried watching the full movie, but simply couldn’t get more than half way through it – repelled by it’s intellectual dishonesty. I recommend reading Expelled Exposed for a demonstration of how truly dishonest it’s producers were.

Now, to be fair, the folk who were presenting these arguments to me did not originate them, and likely believed them themselves, so they weren’t lying – they were just wrong. However, someone clearly created these false lists for propoganda purposes, and I find it hard to believe that they do not know that what they are claiming is false. This wasn’t isolated issues either – it was false claim after false claim after false claim.

How am I supposed to respond to people who promote their “beliefs” to me through such blatantly dishonest means? It’s obviously not going to convince me of anything – and all it really does is destroy my respect for the people professing these beliefs.

The second debate was regarding the historicity of Jesus and the historical accuracy of the Bible. Now, with regard the first issue, I’m still open minded on the topic. I don’t know if Jesus really existed or not, I’m just leaning towards “not”. This, by the way, makes no judgement about the teachings attributed to Jesus. I wholeheartedly agree with much of what he is reported to have said! Similarly with much of the Bible. Furthermore, while I don’t think it’s what one could call “accurate”, it’s my belief that most mythical stories have their origin somewhere in a true story. I believe for example that the story of Atlantis probably had it’s origins in the destuction of Thera (now Santorini) and the devastation of the Minoan empire. The Biblical flood could have easily had it’s origins in any number of real floods. Many once believed mythical places are being found to have had some historical truth – take the discovery of Troy for example or the likelihood of hallucenogenic gases in the cave of the Oracle of Delphi.

But, again, my “opponents” tried to convince me of their position with a dishonest document – in this case a supposed “true story” by Josh McDowell called The Skeptic’s Quest. McDowell purports to outline his journey from non-believer to stauch Christian and the story is clearly designed to influence others to make the same journey. It might work for some. Me, I get turned off by dishonesty – who would want to associate with people when you know they are willing to lie to you? The absolute dealbreaker for me was this claim of McDowell’s -

Have you heard of Dr. Simon Greenleaf, who held the Royal Professorship of Law at Harvard? He was a skeptic, often mocking the Christians in his classes. One day they challenged him to take the three volumes he had written on the laws of legal evidence and apply them to the resurrection. After much persuasion he did that. In the process he became a Christian and went on to write a book about his search. Greenleaf came to the conclusion that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the best established events in history according to the laws of legal evidence.

That seems interesting, I thought, so I went to research further. What I discovered was that Dr. Simon Greenleaf was indeed a leading mind of the legal world. Even accounting for the fact this was 150yrs ago it would still seem impressive. Greenleaf reportedly put his legal brain to work analysing the story of the resurrection of Jesus. According to McDowell he was trying to prove the resurrection false, and instead “proved” it true and became a Christian convert. I researched and discovered that the story, like any good story, does have some elements of truth to it. Greenleaf wrote a treatise called Testimony of the Evangelist where he “analysed” the  four Gospels and comes to the conclusion the accounts were accurate. Now, without going into the flaws in that analysis (and in my opinion there are many), my issue is really with McDowell – again, he states about Greenleaf -

He was a skeptic, often mocking the Christians in his classes

and that his analysis converted him -

In the process he became a Christian

Unfortunately for McDowell I’m a trained research scientist, and I know how important it is to read the original sources whenever possible. So I did. It quickly became clear that McDowell had not been entirely honest. In the third paragraph, Greenleaf says (my emphasis) -

The foundation of our religion is a basis of fact

“Our” religion? I thought he was a skeptic who made fun of Christian beliefs? Well … perhaps he wrote this “after” his conversion. But no … he was writing as a lawyer, developing his argument. And what does he say as part of his lead-in (again, my emphasis) :

The proof that God has revealed himself to man by special and express communications, and that Christianity constitutes that revelation, is no part of these inquiries.  This has already been shown, in the most satisfactory manner by others, who have written expressly upon this subject. Referring therefore to their writings for the arguments and proofs, the fact will here be assumed as true.

He begins his argument by stating that the existence of God is already proven, and that Christianity is that revelation! And McDowell wants us to believe this man was a skeptic who made fun of Christian beliefs!?!?!?!

This isn’t about whether the Bible is true or not, or whether Evolution is correct or whether Jesus existed or not. This is simply a matter of integrity. My integrity matters to me, and people and groups that so blatantly lie in their attempts to convert others to their beliefs simply have no attraction for me. Indeed, they repel me.

What do they expect?

Save with this Amazon credit card!*
*but only if you’re in the US, which we know you’re not

Free Super Shipping availabe!*
*but only if you’re in the US, which we know you’re not

Shipping $3.99!*
*but only if you’re in the US, which we know you’re not. Hahahahahahha!!!

It’s not exactly hard to program a site to adjust these things. If I sign into EBay it quite happily lists the shipping costs to Sweden for eligible items.

What’s even more irritating with Amazon is the process to find out how much something will cost me. Because I’m in Sweden and usually ordering from the UK or US, the shipping fees are normally significantly greater than the cost of the books, especially when ordering second hand books. The problem is Amazon refuses to tell me the shipping costs until after I have gone through the entire ordering process – including confirming my shipping address and credit card details. Most of the time I’m not going to confirm because shipping becomes exorbitant – an order I’m looking at this morning for about $12.00 worth of books is going to cost me over $70.00 in shipping.

So now I want to keep looking  – but does Amazon give me the option? Not easily – only hidden down at the bottom of the page away from the screen is the link -

Go to the Amazon.com home page (without completing your order)

The really don’t want me to do anything but “Confirm Order” do they?

Now, the way to save money on shipping is to order multiple books from the same seller, so I like to look and see which seller I’m ordering the most books from, and then search their store to see if they have other books I want.

Well …. that’s what I’d like to do. 9 times out of 10, no matter what the store, I get something like this -

This is my usual experience with Amazon, and frankly it sucks! These things are not technically difficult issues to fix, why don’t they fix them? If there is a better alternative, particularly for second hand books, please, please, someone let me know.

So that’s a few minutes … time to check back … sigh ……