Helpful information about
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
Sun Prairie Info Site
Don't use CoffeeCup Website Access Manager
DirectoryPass is much better And FREE!
For those of you that are considering purchasing the CoffeeCup Website Access Manager, do not make the same mistake as we did.
While this program may be fine if you have a small website that you want to protect, if you have a larger website, the program has a MAJOR FLAW. It will upload EVERY password protection .htacccess file EVERY TIME you make a change or add a new password protected person. This could amount to many hours of upload time and uncounted bandwidth usage just for updating one person. (This is something that most people would not understand is happening within a month of trial usage, but every month that would go by would add more and more upload time and bandwidth usage.)
When I brought this up to Scott A. Swedorski, VP of Product Development for CoffeeCup Software, he didn't understand that this was happening until I explained it to him. He then said that that is just the way it works.
See some documentation of our messages back and forth, below. I suspect that Scott will delete this posting as soon as he sees it posted to the user forum, (he did, within seconds) so we will be putting this documentation on our over one hundred websites so that others do not make the same mistake in thinking that this program was not still in Beta testing. You are paying for beta testing or for a program that is not ready for prime time. Of course they wouldn't be expected to reconfigure the program every time someone wanted a change but they would be expected to make it work right and not pretend a major flaw is "just the way it was designed."
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ED:
We had hoped that your product would work for us but it looks like we will be running into problems soon. The problem is that we have a website where we need to protect our customer's login session but instead of just uploading each new customer's login info, the program uploads ALL customers information files. While we only have entered 25 of our customers into the program, we can see that there is an upload lag already and we are eventually going to have thousands of our customers entered. If ALL of the info is uploaded when only one customer is added, this is going to run into big problems for us in the near future.
We did not realize that this was happening when we first tried out the product or until just recently.
It is not going to work for us unless you can change the program so that it just updates changes ONLY and keeps all the rest of the information on the webserver.
Please refund if you can't make that alteration in the program.
I really wanted this program to work.
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SCOTT:
Thank you for e-mailing us! Unfortunately, CoffeeCup does not offer refunds on any of the opened (downloaded) software. To learn about the refund policy, please visit https://www.coffeecup.com/store/refunds/. This information is also available on the purchase page http://www.coffeecup.com/store/ to "Try Before You Buy," so you know exactly what you are purchasing and if it will suit your needs.
We have this system in place because there is no way to prove that the downloaded programs have been removed from your system or have not been duplicated. Most software companies and major retailers do not offer any refunds on any software for this exact reason. We do offer free, fully functional trials of all our products to help eliminate customer dissatisfaction after purchase.
However, even though the software uploads all of the users each time, even if you had over 5000 users in your htpasswd file, that would be no more then 100k
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ED:
Unfortunately, while you cannot trust us to remove your software from our computer, you can trust that we have over 100 websites and we will be devoting a full page on each site to a critical review of your product and policy. If we can just show one potential customer that they should not purchase your product, then, I guess we are even.
There was no way for us to know that so much time and bandwidth would be eaten up by your crappy little program. There is just no way that it should have been designed as it is.
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Scott:
The trial version was fully functional, without any limitations so you would have seen this in that version as well. As I said, all of the passwords are in a single file and with even 5000 users, that would be no more then 100k. Even if you were on dial-up, that would be a very fast upload.
If you go to https://www.coffeecup.com/store/ at the top of our Website it says " All of our software is available as a Fully Functional Trial Version. Please, Try Before You Buy."
~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~_~
Scott A. Swedorski
VP of Product Development
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ED:
No. It uploads the .htaccess file for EVERY USER, every time there is an update even for one person. I have the super triple fast upload from Charter cable. The fastest they have. It takes your program 28 seconds to upload 26 .htaccess files for 26 people even when only one person is added.
If I would have the 5000++ that we are predicting, even if we just did our past customers, it would take me, figuring at 50 per minute, 100 minutes just to add one person to our album page.
That is crazy and unacceptable.
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Ed:
I guess you have no response to my last reply where I show that you seem to not understand how the product works?
Do you have any plans to fix the problem since I would like it to work?
All you have to do is NOT have it update every stinking user when just the latest updated files would do.
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Scott:
I am sorry but that is how the software works and we have no plans to change that. It is not a flaw or bug, it was done by design. As you said it took you 28 seconds to upload and that is perfectly acceptable.
I know it is not what you may want, but we cannot simply redesign software on the fly for every user request. This is why we specifically offer trial versions.
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Ed:
When this information was posted on the CoffeeCup Website Access Manager Forum, Scott deleted the posting and banned me from further postings.
If you are interested in a very good HTML directory protection system that is even FREE, we would recommend a little program calle DirectoryPass. It is so simple to set up and it is SO much better than CoffeeCup Website Access Manager . Don't waste your money on that useless program. We have no connection to DirectoryPass and take no responsibility for anything regarding it. All we know is that we spent about 24 hours looking for a program to replace the crappy Coffeecup Website Access Manager and this one works just beautifully and it is free. You can download it by clicking here.
