Comments on: The costs of Free

By: Harry

Harry — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 03:36:36 +0000

Hehe Xen. In my personal experience, 60-70% (at least, significantly more than half) of beta testers are young, enthusiast guys and gals. Often high school students, which simply love a piece of software or love to be “part” of it. This happened in a lot of communities I worked for and that were launching new features; and I am speaking of communities that were completely different from each other in topic and in “spirit”.

Anyhow, another consistent part of beta testers is made of mature people that actually want to use bleeding edge technology before anybody else. Beta testing a product about SEO could give you some advantage against your competitors, if the developer is doing a clean enough job also in beta phase.

Sadly, there is also a small group of people that join beta testing phase because they are working on a possible competitor to the project; I have seen this happening a few times, also recently in communities surrounding smartphone application development.

By: Xen

Xen — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 03:44:02 +0000

I think being in the position to help with beta-testing is a rare ‘freedom’. You need to have the mental room and capacity to spend time away from your own personal interests and joys. Me personally, I would only go and beta-test if I were already involved with the software beyond the case of simple use (for example if I had modified it or communicated with the developer). I’ve been a computer user and hobby programmer for almost 20 years now but beta-testing I’ve never done.

But then, I also don’t read newspapers .

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:04:19 +0000

Ben, I took a while before I responded as I honestly try not to inflame or escalate an argument. I was pretty confrontational in the comments to your post. It is not you personally whom I aimed to criticize, it was the approach. For you to have called it “extremely dangerous,” while well within your rights, was not what I would call helpful. I’ve said this in your comments, same here.

First, whatever “damage” the change in the no-index issues would have been fixed on the next spidering. Second, it was human error, not an act of malice. Third, more than a few didn’t actually go through the upgrade process properly and panicked over their SEO settings, and a post like what you wrote merely threw gas unto a fire.

I don’t disagree that there was a need for it to be publicized. I just disagree with your style.

By: Ben Cook

Ben Cook — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:29:03 +0000

I’m glad you though my lost was historic.
I agree there are hidden costs of “free” both for the developer and the uses. Developers deserve to be supported and rewarded for their contributions. Users should realize that it’s unreasonable to make demands on someone already providing something for free. And they should expect some downtime, problems, or delays. That’s the hidden cost.

You’ll notice I didn’t demand a fix from Michael and I also supported his placement of an ad in the plugin dashboard.

However, there are several points I disagree with. First of all the problems with the AIOSEO update NEEDED to be publicized. Michael had known about the issue for at least two days before my post and yet only a select few end users were aware a problem existed.

Alerting Michael to the issue doesn’t help the thousands that had already upgraded. And, as I mentioned earlier and found out later, he already knew there was an issue.

I realize you said this post isn’t a condemnation of current attitudes but both in this post and in the comments on my post you did criticize me so I hope this comment isn’t too far off topic.

By: CGHill

CGHill — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:52:44 +0000

You’re quite right, and I’d go so far to say that it extends to products/services that are technically not free but don’t cost a lot either. My own Web host has a status page for each current system problem/issue, and where there’s a problem, there’s someone complaining that this outage is costing him his livelihood – whether or not his particular account is even affected by that outage. The obvious question – if your sole source of income is a Web site, why are you settling for a cheap $7 shared-hosting account? – is not so obvious to them. And, in fact, it’s now become shtick: folks come in specifically to mock the woe-is-me posters.