[Boonex Dolphin 7 Modules Nulled
Amancio Mccrae
If you read other posts on this forum you will see that several members including myself are trying to reverse this situation. As you say, it's not just the script, but it's also the modules you've paid for and the people who created them. Then there's the hundreds, if not thousands of site owners who never visit this forum, but rely on people like Geek_Girl and others to keep their sites running for them. These people will also suffer heavily as Dolphin is finally phased out. Many owners have sites with thousands of members and the entire thing is an embarrassment and a shambles.
Sadly, the reclusive owner of Dolphin really couldn't care less. He's hell-bent on producing UNA and expects everyone to abandon their modules and switch over. Just how he expects us to do that is as unclear. People like Modzzz with some 200 modules are not going to supply us replacement UNA modules for nothing. They will expect to be paid and pay you will. The alternative is to strip your new site back to bare bones and tell all your faithful members to go jump, just as Boonex is telling us!
The best thing Boonex can do, is place Dolphin in the public domain with few, if any restrictions. I'm happy to leave The Boonex copyright notices in file headers, but no links pointing back to Boonex.
In reference to your last comment, Boonex hasn't shown much respect for its customers for a few years now. This isn't a business operating out of a suite of offices in Sydney. It's run by one person who seems to live in a remote location and never patronises his own forum to promote the script.
Not all developers has shown an interest in porting their modules over to UNA; and as John has pointed out, those that do will require you to purchase the UNA module even if they do produce an import tool to get your content from Dolphin to UNA. There are enough differences between Dolphin and UNA that will require some work to port a module over.
I have seen Andrew waffle around with UNA. UNA was suppose to be a platform that did not require a sys admin on board until they started adding it lots of things that required one to shell in and perform root level installs. Then Andrew started moaning about the headaches of having all the third party platform stuff.
Don't worry, Dolphin won't go away even if Andrew balks on opening it to open source; from what I have been studying on the Creative Commons, we can use Dolphin as long as the current Dophin copyright notices stay in the code. We simply add our own below the Boonex ones. The bug can be legally ripped out, right Andrew
For those members who don't know about Sourceforge, it's a highly respected repository for open source software, much of which is still under development. Programmers willing to assist with software development use Sourceforge to to locate suitable projects. People in the know, use it to download genuine free stuff, although they also have a commercial section.
The high download count for pH7 Social Dating can possibly be attributed to its excellent - easy to navigate web site, a bit of aggressive marketing and a respectable price tag. Maybe it's a better script, but judging from comments on this site, maybe not. I understand it's buggy at this stage. It does however run on PHP7 which is a huge bonus.
With UNA touting a price tag of thousands a month (see links above and pricing on the UNA site) and Dolphin, also with a massive price tag and being phased out in a few years as well, it's obvious that people will shun away from these products, regardless of how good they are.
UNA probably has zero hope of taking a large chunk of the social networking market due to it's perceived cost and poor timing by being released so late in an over-saturated market, whereas Dolphin with its existing huge following and massive 3rd party support, could easily climb back when it's fully supported, realistically priced and marketed with a degree of skill and confidence.
@travelnotes: Some of that 'huge' was tongue in cheek, but there a licence holders working trough people like Geek_Girl et-al. I have a couple who have never visited the forums, also two people in the last couple of days say they have 17 licences between them. As far as social networking sites go, 200 licences may be a lot, but who knows?
I looked at Nathan's servers before they went down the gurgle. I found two if I recall and one had about 60 dolphin sites, the other a few more. Many may well be free (unlicenced) sites, but only Boonex is to blame for that. Who on earth would have paid almost AU$1,000 for a licence when there was no documentation and almost no support.
If you're familiar and happy with Dolphin, why not stick with it? Boonex plans to upgrade it to PHP7 soon so it should have a good few years usefulness. All we need to do is encourage the 3rd party module developers to bring out a few much needed modules.
@johnk42, I am already working on Dolphin, "playing" a bit with UNA too. The truth is that with all this uncertainty for the future of Dolphin, and the "war" (in brackets!) between UNA and Dolphin and at the same time the continuous % lost of the market pie as mentioned above and the lost of faith in Boonex by a few users (especially "virtuoso" ones), it is absolutely normal to be in doubt in choosing this or that. One thing for sure is that I would like to see Boonex united and not divided and all users happy under one umbrella. This would give hope for the future and vanish this uncertainty...
I spend 1000 buying dolphin and have spent about the same on modules and put in a lot of work so unless everything can be upgraded as is I would never use una. It looks kinda bland to me. I'm trying to build a site and brand so don't want it to look like una looks at all.
Over the past couple of years I have had the same thing occur with other scripts and modules as well as software. Seems like a way to get more money out of existing customers. But that's like prodding me with a stick.
Its unscrupulous. Not saying that Andrew is but its the image I am getting of the company in general. Hopefully by that time (2023) I will be able to afford a developers fees to update dolphin where needs be?
OK but my concern is the backend. Seriously, the backend of UNA is not good. I am sure at the time it was created; some five years ago or was it six, that the coder thought it was cool. It isn't. It is very convoluted and difficult to actually administer a site. The current Dolphin backend is 1000% better. Also, sliding buttons, eye candy, is not needed by sys admins, we just want a very clean functional control panel. Studio is not that, not even in the least amount. You should put your coders to work porting the Dolphin backend to UNA and remove that; well, crap is the only way to describe Studio. I am not going to use UNA as long as the crap Studio is the means to administer the site and if that becomes what is the backend for Dolphin then it is forking time.
PHP 7 support is pretty much done. They have been pounding out some bugs recently as well as adding export ability for most data dolphin stores.
The sliders in the page builders do kinda suck. But here is a tip for that in case your not aware of it. Use the slider to get it close to where you want, then use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to fine tune it.
I am hoping they will be releasing it under the MIT license before they stop supporting it. I plan to fork it when they do.
There is a community building around Dolphin. John is wanting to build a community site. I am thinking that module developers can sell directly from their sites but can list their modules on the community site with links to their site; that will remove us from having to support a Marketplace for developers.
Deano, have you given more thought on at least posting the Deano's tools in the Market? I have a few of your modules but understand your reluctance on working on them. You said that you had a advert supported Deano's Tools and a paid version that was about ready to go.
Dolphin will not be disappearing; I think we can legally fork under the CC license but would want a lawyer to verify that. To be honest, a lot of us are losing faith in Andrew since he keeps changing things around. We are losing trust and it is not good when customers lose trust in a company.
Looks like they are close to the first beta. The version number was changed today in the github repo to 7.4.0-Beta1
@geek_girl - Yea, i will be releasing it at some point. I recently had 3 weeks off from work due to the restaurant closing for cleanup and repairs during the slow time of the year. So i decided i would add more goodies in deanos tools. Well, i did not quite finish all my changes within the 3 weeks, so i am still finishing that up.
HOLY CRAP!!! I've been out of commission for almost a year developing new content, now I'm ready to reinstall & upgrade Dolphin and I find it's being DROPPED?!?!?! WTF?!?! ... This is the same thing the guy from (Prochatrooms) did - get thousands - maybe TENS OF THOUSANDS of people to invest in their programs, then take the money, drop the program and RUN!! ... WOW!! I never thought I'd see this from Boonex though, it had SO MUCH SUPPORT, and SO MANY PEOPLE developing mods. smh..
@rcbiz5000 as you've been outside the loop for some time, it may pay you to read through other threads on this subject. They're a bit of "all over the place" but search for my name and posts and you you'll quickly get the drift.
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