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SocialBee

Jim Walker
  • Edited

I had a chance to look at the SocialBee setup on cPanel.

At the end of the process, I'm presented with a trial that will expire in 13 days and a $300 to $1000 plan offer.

What the heck? This is not mentioned anywhere on the site or in my WHM. Who's getting the money?

This is about as shady as it gets...

  1. Soft installing an app, without notice to your partners.
    (Did I miss the annoucement to partners?)
  2. Enabling the feature "on" by default in my WHM's.
    (I did not know about this app until I stumbled on it in a cPanel)
  3. Taking money from a web host's clients without the host's permission or notice of doing so.
    (If my business is promoting a 3rd party and putting my reputation on the line, I would expect a commission for doing so)
  4. If clients whose paying us $20/mo. are unsatisfied with SocialBee after paying $1000 to them, it would not surprise me that they demand a refund from "us" since we are promoting it in our company's cPanel. Are we expected to give the client 50 months of free web hosting revenue?
    (this could easily become a catastrophic customer service problem)

What's your take on this, please?

Comments

6 comments

Date Votes
  • cPRex Jurassic Moderator

    Hey there!  I posted some thoughts related to the SEO tools over at https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/30278904679191/comments/30318714061463 that would apply here as well, with some specific details about the Partner situation.

    If you are a cPanel Partner I would *strongly* recommend that you reach out to your account manager about these concerns.

    1
  • TVCNet Website Hosting and Security Services
    1
  • ffeingol

    The fun with this one is that it's on a "slow rollout".  Even though the plugin may be installed at the OS level, it's not going to show up in feature manager until it's rolled out to your server.

    0
  • Metro2

    The fun with this one is that it's on a "slow rollout".  Even though the plugin may be installed at the OS level, it's not going to show up in feature manager until it's rolled out to your server.

    Yep. Had no warning / no idea this had been enabled on my servers until a customer submitted a ticket to me asking about it. Not happy with this approach at all.

     

    0
  • Metro2

    Another fun thing about this one - disabling it in the "default" feature list also disables it in all other feature lists, such as the one I have purposely set up to show all features in my "justforme" , which I use for inspecting and testing features that I don't want/need my customers to see. WTH?

    0
  • TVCNet Website Hosting and Security Services
    • Edited

    Feeling it. Levels of unfairness and possible unscrupulousness from cPanel feelings here...

    0

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