Deleting Customer Posts About Licensing?

[TrinitiComm]

Derek et al,

You have a lot of nerve to delete customers' posts who have valid arguments. And since you decided to take it there and lock the topic because paying customers are pissed, I have decided to take it there also and will start legal action on Monday morning. And we have a presence in both the US and Canada. Vancouver to be more specific. I have already forwarded on an email to our corporate counsel. I was very satisfied with the company until this licensing situation but the handling of the situation by you and your staff have taken things to an entirely different level.
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THIS POST WAS DELETED TWICE
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CounterPath needs to switch to another licensing strategy and we mean fast. We are getting complaints up the wazoo via email and trouble tickets and we are paying people to answer phones who can't. We can't use X-Lite because we have several extensions tied to each Bria.

Since Vancouver is allegedly the issue, then it probably has something to do with the Olympics. Tell them to tune out and get back to making sure the licensing servers stay running at all costs. This is completely unacceptable when all of our phone communications have went down because of licensing issues for paid software which is properly licensed. As another poster stated, you obviously are more concerned with your own revenue losses than your customers and that is not a good thing. Even Microsoft and the other giants aren't that self-centered and short sighted when it comes to their software and especially software so critical to normal business function.

[Derek Jacobs]

If you're really comfortable with your comments... I'll leave them.
I'm sorry that you feel that I have not tried my best for the past 12 hours to get this resolved.

[TrinitiComm]

If you're really comfortable with your comments... I'll leave them.
I'm sorry that you feel that I have not tried my best for the past 12 hours to get this resolved.

That is beside the point and I fully understand when technical situations arise that are out of your control. As CEO of a rapidly growing digital communications company, with over 160,000 customers, I fully understand this. But at the same time, this is your wake up call to switch to Plan B as far as licensing goes. If our digital phone service, internet, IPTV or mobile phone service go down for even 5 minutes it is unacceptable. We only have a few Brias right now but if it were a couple of hundred then this would be an absolute nightmare. Ironically, we were going straight Bria Professional on all phones in the next few months and were going to resell them exclusively with our software-based PBX/IVR solution due out later this year. From what I have seen tonight we will now seriously reconsider this path.

And on top of this, a forum is supposed to be just that a "forum". A place where both customers and prospects, thrilled or furious, should be able to come and say what they have to say without posts being censored and sneakily deleted when you feel the coast is clear for you to do so. Or without locking the threads because things are getting uncomfortable for you. I would have fired on the spot anyone who did this on one of our forums and I caught wind of it. And most likely the manager too because I caught wind of it and it and he/she wasn't handled. Especially when the complaint is solid and justified. Without your customers you don't have a business and you need to take this into serious consideration the next time you entertain the thought of doing something like that in the future. Service and Support are far more important than sales. Get the licensing fixed and make sure it doesn't go down again for any reason. The last thing you want is a story like this following you all over the Internet, damaging your reputation when you develop sound and effective software.

[Sylvain Marcotte]

Hi Darin,

We apologize for the inconvenience and also for deleting your posts. Our standard policy is to remove posts which are defaming in their nature and Derek was simply following our policies. I have not seen your posts so I unfortunately cannot comment about their nature but I assure you we will review our policies and adjust as needed so that it doesn't happen again.

Regarding the issue with licensing, we've been working at resolving the issue non stop all day; however, it is proven more difficult than anticipated. We believe we have it sorted out and it should be resolved shortly.
If you can no longer wait, I have taken the liberty to send you a copy of Bria 3.0 which is unaffected by this issue. Check the e-mail which you have used to purchase your products with.

Finally, this issue has nothing to do with the Olympics being hosted in Vancouver or a real technical flaw in our system. Mostly a logistics problem.

Again please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

[Mancha]

Hi

i have one question

By now, what is the status of the situation? is solved?

[Derek Jacobs]

It is still being worked on as of 8:00am Eastern time.

[beebware]

From my investigations, the CounterPath X509 certificate used to digitally sign and secure the responses from the licensing server expired on the 12th Feb 2010 (initially valid from the 11th of Jan 2008) and issued by Verisign. Counterpath failed to renew (and/or install) the new certificate in time...

How can we work around it? Well, Counterpath could issue a "emergency patch release" for Bria et al which tells it to, upon license validation, to accept the old license for a few extra weeks - they could try and get a new certificate from Verisign as a "rush job" (I've got no idea how long this normally takes) or we could roll back our computer clocks to pre-12th Feb, get Bria to reapprove the license and then roll the clock back forward (which I've just performed now and it works - if Counterpath had said what the problem was, then somebody might have been able to suggest this before instead of us having to manually investigate the communications between Counterpath and Bria).

[bricardo1]

Hi Derek,

I appreciate that you guys are working with all resources to get the issue solved asap. I'm wondering if there is a backup plan in case you guys are not able to get the issue fixed before my (UTC+1) Monday morning?

Tomorrow I'll have 35 users, who are solely depending on the soft-phone, ringing my bell when they are not able to use Bria and I like to be ahead of that scenario..

Cheers,

Ricardo.

[Derek Jacobs]

Hi Ricardo

We are preared to send trials of Bria 3 to anyone requesting it to get around the issue.

[Derek Jacobs]

Server is back up and running.

[beebware]

Glad to hear it's fixed Derek!

Don't forget to remind them the standard SSL/HTTPS certificate for https://secure.counterpath.com is due to expire on the 23rd of March so renewing it now may be beneficial

[Derek Jacobs]

You are a good man.

[jjulius50]

I still cannot use my products (2.5 and Professional). When I start the application and it attempts to register I get the following message:

Sorry the service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

Any idea when this will be resolved?

[Derek Jacobs]

That is not our error.
Please contact your VOIP provider for assistance.
It is their server that is unavailable.