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| SNAP: Sorry, No Auto Posting |
So let’s say you have a WordPress site with content that you’d like to automatically post to all of your social networks. There are plenty of plugins that will auto post to one or another of the networks, but few that will post to several at once. So far I’ve only found one that posts to Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Google+ and that is NextScript’s Social Network Auto Poster (SNAP) Pro. The free version doesn’t include Google+ or a few other important features, which I’ll get to later.
Right off the top: SNAP is not a “snap” to setup. It takes quite a bit of effort to connect all of your social media accounts and some testing to get them posting just as you’d like, but after a few hours of hard work you should be able to get your newly created content to auto-post as desired.
I didn’t have any serious issues with SNAP until I tried to use the auto-repost feature. This option allows you to re-post content that already exists on your WordPress site. That’s very useful for sites that have hundreds or thousands of posts which have never been sent to your social media networks and I was very excited to give it a try.
I ran through the configuration on a few of my social media networks and nothing happened. I didn’t even have errors in the log. I found the single piece of documentation they provide for the feature and made sure I had everything setup as they did. No dice. I opened a support ticket and continued to try different settings and troubleshoot. Eventually I determined that I had to create a manual CRON job in order to get the auto-reposting to work (as outlined here) and I had to comment out the wget line in my htaccess file that my security plugin had created, but that seems to have broken the plugins ability to auto-post newly created content. Nor does auto-reposting work for any network other than Facebook. Now I’m stuck with just being able to post new content or auto-repost to Facebook. A big piece of the functionality I’m paying for just isn’t working.
It’s been over six weeks since I opened my first ticket. Since then I’ve received no useful support whatsoever. At one point my support ticket was ignored for over a month. Here is a brief timeline:
- I opened a ticket on 11/25/13. It’s still open more than six weeks later. In that time the ticket was ignored for an entire month and not a single useful response has been posted. The few responses that have been added by support have not taken into account my comments and have not at all addressed the issue I’m having.
- On 12/9/13 I opened another ticket asking what the progress on my first ticket was and it was ignored as well and mysteriously no longer exists.
- On 12/26/13 I sent a message via their Contact Us page and got the confirmation Email. That was ignored.
- More than a week ago I created this post in the WordPress forum which finally generated a response to the ticket. The respondent clearly didn’t read my previous posts in the ticket because they posted links to things I’d already done.
- On 1/9/14 I sent an Email to several company Email addresses and to Ludwig Van Normainen, who seems to be the only real person attached to the company. There has been no reply.