just got a newsletter from Content Paradise that they are changing their store.
There will be NO MORE FORUMS ! they kinda sucked anyway.

YOur old purchase history is going away, as will your downloads....
here's a paste of those words:
**May 30th:
** The product catalog is changing. This is the last day to make purchases in the current store. Please complete any purchases for the current catalog prior to this date. You will be able to access your downloads, order history, and wish list on the old site through July 1st, 2009. Due to the changes in the catalog, your order history and wish list will not be transferred to the new store. We will provide a long term method for looking at past order history (without download access). You will want to copy your old wish list and get the new one going before July 1, however, as that information will not be available after that date.

if I were you, I would make sure to download all your stuff.

Could some please explain to me how any store's marketing plan calling for:

1. No Gift Certificates
2. No Weekly Freebies
3. No Forums
4. No PMs
5. No Past Order History
6. No Wish List

Will make me want to shop even more at a store than I have been shopping at for several years?
I have most certainly  missed Marketing 101 classes. Soon enough I will need a hand held calculator to Add and Subtract. I am fearful that I can no longer do square roots with pencil and paper.

Oh Well, such is life.

TKS

I hope they make their site more user friendly!  I can't find anything when I go there looking, so mostly I just don't go!  I only manged to find "Puppetmaster" there because I asked someone to help me find the link!

Quote - Could some please explain to me how any store's marketing plan calling for:

1. No Gift Certificates
2. No Weekly Freebies
3. No Forums
4. No PMs
5. No Past Order History
6. No Wish List

Will make me want to shop even more at a store than I have been shopping at for several years?
I have most certainly  missed Marketing 101 classes. Soon enough I will need a hand held calculator to Add and Subtract. I am fearful that I can no longer do square roots with pencil and paper.

Oh Well, such is life.

TKS

I'm afraid there'll be another addition to that list before long, if this  keeps up.

1. No Customers

:-(

well I now have zero faith in 'em.
no forums? streamlining the store? no contact?

sorry. sounds like a company being cut back.

Thanks for the notice. I can't believe CP/SM is giving such a short notice, that's pretty bad business pratice. But in all honesty what else could we expect from them? They simply love their customer.... NOT!

My downloads and order history will not be moved to the new store? That's the way to make customers happy! Keep on going Smith Micro, why not close the store completely?

I'd already expected the close of the forums, the staff is really absent lately, they never liked their own forums anyway and hardly ever interacted with their customers.

The big question is..... why do I even want to buy at their new store? Do I want to buy Poser 8 (if ever released) knowing I can not really interact with them anymore? Smith Micro isn't doing a too well job in tech support for me anyway, at least the CP forums were some kind of a help when it came to Poser questions. Now that it will be gone, do I want to take the risk buying the next version of Poser?

Will there be even Poser content at the new store or did they drive away all the vedors as well?

Quote - Could some please explain to me how any store's marketing plan calling for:

1. No Gift Certificates
2. No Weekly Freebies
3. No Forums
4. No PMs
5. No Past Order History
6. No Wish List

You will have access to your past download history forever, just without download access - currently your downloads are only guaranteed for 30 days or the first download as stated on CP.  You will be able to see what you've ordered and view your invoices after that though, so you can reference.  You will also have a new account and order history in the new store.   The ability to keep an order history is not being removed.

Also - you will be able to make a new wish list in the new store, and have a month to reference it, copy it down and start your new one.  The new store has some amazing new things that made us unable to port the information to the new products.

Whichever way you look at this, this could have done a lot more customer friendly, instead of dumping it on people 8 days before it's going to happen. Smith Micro needs to learn an awefull lot in customer communication and the only thing they've done lately is distancing themself even further away from the customers as they already are. While a lot of businesses follow the trend to get more familiar with their customers, they're going the opposite direction. It's a shame that the distance between us and the now sellers of Poser is getting larger and larger.

It's a real shame to see products lost because of this unfriendly move, I just wished this would have been better thought through then it has been done. That would have saved the customers and vendors a lot of trouble.

I may or may not see you in the new store, at least I won't bother CP at their forums anymore. I loved to buy at CP and I love Poser, but I'm starting to dislike Smith Micro more and more, up to the point where I do want to create an even larger distance between me and them then they've created already.

Enough said, good luck with setting up the new store, hope you will do better then RDNA, that took a long time.

Last comment..... you may want to look into the color scheme of the new store, that's going to give people a headache, again not really customer friendly and sure not inviting.

well, these are the same folks who handed out free copies of Poser 5, then required posession of Poser 6 to keep getting things...;)

considering how times are, you'd think they'd be more solicitous in customer service. No one ever starved to death by not buying Poser items...;)

Off to check; I had 4 and ahalf pages of goodies, but they should all be downloaded. Still, thanks for the warning.

Yeah, I saw the newsletter and was pretty surprised. I guess they have no knowledge of web-communities and how they affect sales. Would you spend money here at renderosity if you hadn't started coming here for either the freebies or the forums? I suspect the number of folks that can answer yes to that are few and far between.

I think the real goal is to streamline their poser related product stuff, which is probably not too bad an idea, but they should have just dumped the store entirely. Now, it's likely to just be a waste of development money. I mean, who wants to go to a shop where they encourage people to pull up stuff that they didn't think was worth selling originally (that was one of their comments in the newsletter). If it fills up with junk, it will be hard to find anything of quality that might be hiding there....

I do think it's interesting that all the sites are sort of headed toward a renderosity style marketplace. DAZ has their forums and the side store, RuntimeDNA pretty much switched to a very 'rosity like policy on products, I think....interesting times!

Times like this make me glad that when I purchase an item from CP (or any vendor site, even), I create a new folder for the ZIP file with the item's name, and put every promo picture for the item in that folder, so that if the item ever gets deleted, I'll still know what it is when I look at it on my hard drive (I have a tendency to buy things and not install them right away...)

Really crummy decision on the whole thing about the download history. Yeah, I know it says that they only guarantee 30 days of download history, but that doesn't change the fact that currently all of my past purchases are showing as available, even those made last year and prior.

I wasn't aware that the ability to download my previous purchases was something I was supposed to be taking for granted. I'm glad I have my catalog of downloaded things, but still. Terrible move on CP's part.

23 pages to slog through just in case.
Good thing I have the HDD Space.

I've only bought a couple of things from there & nothing for at least a year has taken my fancy, I think I'll just remove them from my bookmarks & forget the place ever existed. 

Quote - > Quote - Could some please explain to me how any store's marketing plan calling for:

1. No Gift Certificates
2. No Weekly Freebies
3. No Forums
4. No PMs
5. No Past Order History
6. No Wish List

You will have access to your past download history forever, just without download access - currently your downloads are only guaranteed for 30 days or the first download as stated on CP.  You will be able to see what you've ordered and view your invoices after that though, so you can reference.  You will also have a new account and order history in the new store.   The ability to keep an order history is not being removed.

Also - you will be able to make a new wish list in the new store, and have a month to reference it, copy it down and start your new one.  The new store has some amazing new things that made us unable to port the information to the new products.

Ok you can spout that "policy" till you are blue in the face, that is not going to make people like it or think that it is right. I don't know of any other place that sells software online that  says ok you get to download it one time and then if you lose it to a HD crash all you get to do is look at the fact that you bought it but your SOL (thats shit outa luck for those that dont know)

One thing I find strange is that my Poser 7 download is listed as expired but my poser 5 download is active and downloadable.

Yours too huh, seems the 'policy' is very selective.

Guys are you really not backing up your purchases? Or are you just complaining, because you always wanted to? ;-)

Quote - well, these are the same folks who handed out free copies of Poser 5, then required posession of Poser 6 to keep getting things...;)

I think Smith Micro gave Poser 6 away. Poser 5 was e-frontier... ;-)

I think for many it isn't an issue of having not made at least one back up of purchases, the problem is, new OS, reinstall, equipment failure, reinstall, heaven forbid some kind of home disaster and if lucky eventually, reinstall, need to format, reinstall... back up to external drives, they fail, burn to discs, they have a limited life span, damage to your home, back up is gone.

That extra security of a downloadable account history can be pretty important when a lot of money is spent on either content or software.

Content Paradise never stated that the downloads would stay up forever. As EFStarlet stated, they always guaranteed only 30 days. 

For people who did not backup the original  ZIPs, there is still time to re-download everything and put it a safe place. 

I'm afraid I have to agree: if you havent backed up your downloads, now's not the time to blame CP. I dont especially like some of the changes, but I'm willing to give them a shot and see what it's all about.

I certainly wont miss the forums: some of the moderators there appear to have graduated from the Dick Cheney School of Good Customer Relations. About the only forum that seemed to have anything worthwhile was the one for Anime Pro, but considering how quiet it's become of late, it looks like folks have moved the dicussions elsewhere anyway.

CP's store has some great stuff in it, but they just never quite figured out how to make it all look "glamorous" ike DAZ. They expected that you would look at the product and buy it on its own merits, which is murder for impulse buying like the Poserverse. Maybe this time they'll get it right.

Edit to add: if nothing else, thank God CP never went the "installer" route. Here's hoping the new store maintains that policy...

stick up fo them, but its about the poorist marketing and customer service move I have ever seen, not just in the Poserverse.
Backed up or not, deleting your downloads is plainly stupid and shows the fact they don't much give a rats ass about their customers. Even the 30 day limit thing was anti consumer.

Quote - Whichever way you look at this, this could have done a lot more customer friendly, instead of dumping it on people 8 days before it's going to happen. 

This response is NOT in defense of anything, Other than Its about 1 Month and 8 days.
We still have to get thru June :)

OP stated JULY 1st, 2009

 Yeah, but it WAS their policy. They can't help if you didn't know or understand that. Hey, I bought stuff from Poser Pros that I can't get now either. Not much, but that didn't make me want to boycott DAZ for shutting PP down.

I like CP. I'll continue to shop there when the new store goes online. And I'll continue my practice of backing up my downloads, because you just never know.

The way I see it, the Poser Pros shutdown due to the DAZ buyout isn't quite a proper comparison. See, this is more like RDNA's site revamp, because nothing is actually getting shut down. Just converted. Despite all of the changing that RNDA made to their site, I took the liberty of going to look at my account, and found my purchase history still intact, and am also able to re-download things.

Maybe it is just "business as usual" to say that CP guarantees their downloads for 30 days only. If their form of customer service is that, that's fine. It would be "above and beyond" customer service if they had that as their policy and yet continued to keep the downloads available.

So I am brought to wonder, however. Say if I were to need to re-download one of my items due to some catastrophic system failure failure. The purchase history (albeit without download access) would be supporting my claim that I did purchase the item. Would a temporary download link be given to re-acquire the item, or would I be out of luck to the point of having to plunk down more money for said item?

"Would a temporary download link be given to re-acquire the item"

That's probably the idea, since they are giving you your buying history. Otherwise, what would be the point of that?

As for the whole downloads-on-demand thing, I probably take a more pragmatic POV. My local store isnt going to stock my favourite CDs in perpetuity, and I doubt I'd find many of them online. Even for online stores, look at DAZ and how it trimmed its inventory just recently. Much as we like to believe otherwise, online is not replete with infinite space.

Quote -  Yeah, but it WAS their policy. They can't help if you didn't know or understand that. Hey, I bought stuff from Poser Pros that I can't get now either. Not much, but that didn't make me want to boycott DAZ for shutting PP down.

You should be able to get you Poser Pros DLs reset.  It should be a matter of getting in touch with Guarie.  You can send him a Private Message or Site Mail at Poser Pros, DAZ or here at Renderosity. At DAZ his user name is Daz_Guarie and here at Renderosity it is Guarie.  He said that he should receive messages from all three sites.

Quote - > Quote -  Yeah, but it WAS their policy. They can't help if you didn't know or understand that. Hey, I bought stuff from Poser Pros that I can't get now either. Not much, but that didn't make me want to boycott DAZ for shutting PP down.

You should be able to get you Poser Pros DLs reset.  It should be a matter of getting in touch with Guarie.  You can send him a Private Message or Site Mail at Poser Pros, DAZ or here at Renderosity. At DAZ his user name is Daz_Guarie and here at Renderosity it is Guarie.  He said that he should receive messages from all three sites.

I probably could if I knew my order history there, which I don't. I didn't find out about the Poser pro shut down until well after they had shut down. I didn't buy much there though.

Quote -   Hey, I bought stuff from Poser Pros that I can't get now either.

You can still ask for download resets in the Poser Pros forums (i did a couple weeks ago)

This is a REAL crock of crap! I've worked retail for years and helped some stores develop websites. Deleting the forum at CP is a face-slap to every customer that visits that site and interacts with OTHER customers THERE!  In a REAL store, other satisfied customers get talked into buying OTHER PRODUCTS by other customers!

If someone I recognize there recommends something, I might well buy it. Same goes for most everyone else around there. Rave word of mouth costs nothing and sells items, as is demonstrated in the DAZ forums.

Eliminating word of mouth sales and customer interaction is SUICIDE for Smith-Micro's Contentparadise store! I've seen it before. This is a death-knell for that entire place.

This level of stupidity is monumental and will cost them valuable sales.

If the economy was as robust as it was two years ago, they might treat people like crap and new people might make up the difference. NOT in this modern state of near depression where people are making every penny count..

After SM goes bankrupt, I hope DAZ buys poser for a song.:laugh: That would suit them. It'd screw us, but maybe not.:blink:

Quote - I probably could if I knew my order history there, which I don't. I didn't find out about the Poser pro shut down until well after they had shut down. I didn't buy much there though.

Your order history should still be there, at least mine was.  I just go into the store and click on the "My Purchases" link.

I'm not much at activism, but I'll post the same info here I did at DAZ. If what CP is doing really frost your cookies, Posting here, while cathartic, isn't really doing anything. Let SM know how you feel. Not going to shop at CP again? Tell them that!

Customer Service Center Hours:

Monday through Friday 8AM - 5PM Pacific Time except Tuesday - 8AM to 3PM Pacific Time.

Phone: 831-768-3615

Email: sales (at) smithmicro.com OR cs (at) smithmicro.com
Fax: 831-761-6206 (send ATTN: Customer Service)

E-Mail Customer Service:

Send your emails to cs (at) smithmicro.com

"After SM goes bankrupt"

erm look their NASDAQ report up on google. they ain't going bust anytime soon. their gross profits for the last year were $100 million.

Excuse me, but what about our purchases of Poser? We can't burn those to disk. So what you buy it once get one download and thats it?

What the hell do they think we are going to do if our system or HD crash and we lose our copy?

Just go and buy it again.

Yeah that'll happen. NOT.

Yeah, you can, Brian.  And, Poser 7, IIRC, requires it to be burnt to a DVD before even installing.

Quite true, JenX. The Terms & Conditions state that due to the 30 days of content being available after purchase or initial download, it is up to the user to download or backup the content.

I didn't figure that my anal method of organization of downloaded Poser content would ever become quite so useful.. :>

Quote - Yeah, you can, Brian.  And, Poser 7, IIRC, requires it to be burnt to a DVD before even installing.

No it doesn't! I installed Poser 7 directly from the download on my hard drive. When you say it's required, do you mean they strongly suggested it maybe because I know the installer doesn't check to see if it's being installed from a CD or DVD drive!

That being said though, I backed up all my CP purchases back when they cut ties with Rendo and just stopped buying from them except for Poser 7 Pro, which I guess I should make sure I have a back up of now.

Really, LIS?   Mine wouldn't even install or unpack until I burned int onto a DVD.  All I got was a DVD image, not an installer.

when I downloaded P7 I got a zip file that unzipped as an installer, with autorun file, etc, just like what you get on the DVD, but I didn't have to burn it onto a DVD

FYI, your CP Order History can be exported as and Excel file

Quote - Really, LIS?   Mine wouldn't even install or unpack until I burned int onto a DVD.  All I got was a DVD image, not an installer.

Mine also installed without being burned onto a DVD. I've even uninstalled and reinstalled since I first bought it (twice!), with no problems, as far as that is concerned.

Quote - Really, LIS?   Mine wouldn't even install or unpack until I burned int onto a DVD.  All I got was a DVD image, not an installer.

You should be able to run MSI image file directly from your hard drive. They might have changed things though because for Poser 7 I got an EXE installer. Same for Poser 7 Pro, I got EXE installers.

Huh.  Mine wouldn't install, lol.  Oh, well.  Regardless, backing up on media is HIGHLY recommended for any purchases, regardless of where you got them.  One tip, though, MAKE SURE before you back up, that you got a COMPLETE download.  Sometimes, your internet hiccups, and your .zip file or .exe, or whatever isn't complete, and backing up an incomplete file, only to years later find that the vendor has passed or refuses to deal with past orders really sucks.  sigh

Update:

After 2 days and 23 pages not all able to be downloaded.
Some stuff from Mythic Legends Statues I-III plus bonus, The Poser Science Planet Earth Gift Bag, and some Rendo stuff purchased at CP didnt make the backup download.

Almost 5 GB of stuff backed up though. Whew!

I wonder what will happen to people like me who purchased the Extended Download Service for Poser 7 Pro.

I know one of the ML statues was the subject of a copywrite problem, because I got an email from the creator asking to delete it awhile back, so perhaps the others were, too?

I'd try contacting the creator and asking to be sure.
-D

EDIT: I can spell, really!

 This sound like the Federal Government got involved again, Maybe they accepted a bailout!! :)

I'm almost afraid to ask.....how hard is it to get a request for a reset from them?

i hope that they will do it. I started downloading all my stuff, and so far , there are 5 items that will not allow a download. It just happens these were all things I paid for. The free stuff has all been there so far.

For real Jen?

Damn I was just getting read to buy P7. Well thats that. I can't burn anything to DVD. Don't even have a DVD player for my puter. Let alone a burner.

Damn it I am so out of date on my system I am seriously getting behind on the tech end of things. I mean I thought it was bad enough I need to update to xp to use certain proggies.

Thanks for the heads up though Jen. I'll burn my copy of P6 to disk now that I know we are allowed too. I didn't think we were though cause of the Eula's wording.

D.

" Damn I was just getting read to buy P7."

Why not buy the box version? Frankly, I prefer that anyway -- a manual I can hold, a disk I can duplicate at my leisure.

Quote - I'm almost afraid to ask.....how hard is it to get a request for a reset from them?

Contact Support with your Order Number and they should be able to let you know what is what.

(I say it that way because it depends on the Product/Vendor in some cases)

For installing the Download of Poser 7 or Poser Pro (Poser 6 or Poser 5 for that matter), you should not have needed to burn it to a Disk to install the Download, just unpack it (extract it)

With that said, it is always advisable to Back Up Downloaded Installers to Disks. I have a Fireproof Safe just for my Software (Back up Disks of Downloads and original Disks of Box Copies)

I also have added a Harddrive to the mix as another Backup that is stored in the Safe.

It'd be useful if P7 was broke up in CD sized segments for burning to disk when you don't have a DVD drive!:laugh: