My apologies for a rant you just received from a former contractor

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Dave Hilditch

Founder at WP Intense

Author of the WPI performance guides and creator and coder of the plugins sold by WP Intense.

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A former contractor who I trusted decided to write an article saying that WP Intense is a scam.

Thank you Gary for bringing it my quick attention, but you all will have received an email from a former contractor who is disgruntled that I’m refusing to pay his last invoice. (I dispute his hours as well as hours he claimed on 3 prior invoices, although I offered to not dispute the previous 3 and settle his last invoice which he actually agreed to!)

I trusted this individual with an account on my site, and I trusted him to code some work for Price Comparison Pro.

Those of you who use Price Comparison Pro will remember a painful period of time when two consecutive updates caused the plugin to stop working – that was when he was hired to code the updates to try and alleviate time pressures on myself. You might also remember the constantly crashing Scraping Service – that was him too. Now fixed and stable and has been up permanently for the past 40 days or more.

As it turns out, hiring him was a false economy – I ended up having to undo and recode most of the work he’d done, and that I’d paid for – e.g. for scraping images from the affiliate url to bring more quality images into your shop – which now works thankfully, because I coded it properly.

The fact is, hiring him took up far more of my time than it saved and I had to pay him into the bargain. Some of you might enjoy the juicy details, so he’d overbilled me by £200 across 3 invoices, and issued another £240 invoice for 12 hours where all he did was change firewall settings on a server and refused to give me a list of the commands he’d used to change the firewall settings.

So obviously I disputed. He’s now promising to tarnish my name all over the internet which is lovely. I can’t believe I trusted him. I’m not going to name his last name, but if you received the email of the article he just issued you’ll know it. Here’s his chat:

As you can see above, he’s threatening to write more of the same on other sites saying that WP Intense is a scam. Obviously, we’re not a scam – if you want to know my background – been coding since I was 6, graduated from Strathclyde University with a Computer Science specialism in Software Engineering, helped Skyscanner build their awesome tech, including solving the performance for their browse views, building their database architecture and team and helping them through 2 funding rounds. Now I focus on WordPress performance. I coded ALL of the plugins that are listed on my site myself. One of his claims that the Rocket Stack is based on free software is partially true – it’s a combination of nginx, php7, mariadb, varnish and redis – all free – the point is that with the rocket stack they come pre-tuned and pre-configured. In any case, there will be a free guide to installing this yourself out soon, as soon as I finish it, just like I released a free guide for building the Mercury stack.

Anyway, after stopping his work 2 months ago I’ve completed thorough code inspections of the Scraping service and Price Comparison Pro and fixed all bugs he introduced. He still had an article to complete that I’d already paid for, hence why he still had privileges. I obviously shouldn’t have trusted him with that.

Anyway – enough of that.

Currently I’m working on an upgrade to the free Faster Datafeedr Product Sets plugin – I have some more speed boosts for it, and I’m introducing the recent code changes from Eric too. It also includes a boost to Bulk Image import, as well as an option to bulk import images at the same time as processing the product sets.

An option I hope to add too is to eliminate the creation of all the non-shop related image sizes that ultimately go unused and just consume your server CPU and disk.

Thank you for all being loyal customers and if you see him defaming me or my business out there in the wild, please let me know as soon as you can.

And please accept my apologies again – hiring him has put me way behind in my plans, but it’s just me coding now and for the foreseeable future so at least work will be predictable, if a little overwhelming.