This note is written as a clarification. I'm not angry just need to let people know what is acceptable Aftersales support and whats not.

When you purchase a product you obviously assume that you will get a certain level of support and assistance for the product you purchase - that is right and proper. However, there is a line between what is aftersales support and what is not support. There is a difference between what is expected and what is blatantly custom development or excessive handholding. Our components are very mature and have been installed on over 8000 servers worldwide - we have total confidence in them and we are dedicated to ensuring you get the best out of them.

Over the last few months I have been monitoring my support systems and methods and it has proved very enlightening. Only 2% of emails for support are, what I would call, "Installation, Configuration and Bugfix Assistance", a huge 80% of support emails I get are Time Sinks (NOT what I call Aftersales support), here are a few examples of these emails (Yes these are real!):

"I know Phil-a-form doesnt do this, but please can you explain, in detail, how I can change the code to make it happen"

"I want to use Javscript onBlur, what is Javascript onBlur and what would I use it for?"

"How do I change X to Y, what file is it located in? what effects will this have on X, Y, and Z"

"Please change the styles in my template and mosKB to make them look better together - oh and I want this done today"

"Your component doesnt do X, I assumed it did when I bought it. Please make it do this for me, I need to have the project done next week and X is the reason I bought Y"

"When I install your component, I now see errors in other peoples components - please fix these"

"Due to security concerns we cannot at this time provide you with direct access to our site, But please can you tell me why my site is running slow and why every thursday the site falls over - we have some of your components installed"

"I modified your component files and now my site is offline - please fix it for me asap as I am loosing money"

"I suspected one of your components since I have a lot of them but I don't know what's wrong"
Note: After 3 hours invesitgation the issue was with the custom pollsXT component ! Grr!

"Dear Phil, {snip 50 lines of text} and {snip another 50 lines of text} Thanks... P.s. I am not using your components - yet"

Time Sink emails are unacceptable abuses of my dedication to making people happy, and these emails are taking 80% of the time I have available for supporting customers. Therefore with immediate effect I will limit my aftersales support to a generally accepted, which includes, and is limited to the following:

We will provide aftersales support, at no additional cost as assistance by Phone, email, skype and direct access in order to assist you to:

• Downloading of the component from our site
• Installation of the component to your Joomla Site
• Useage of configuration options within our components
• Linking our components to menu items or mambot useage
• Fixing of bugs reported in the Bug Tracker
• Assistance if your site is offline due to our components, with an error message generated about/by our components
• Answering on topic and specific questions about features within our products
• Repling to forum posts that are related to existing features of components
• Answering "How do I?" questions, where the relavance of the question relates directly to an existing feature.
• Telling you if a feature is not part of the component.
• Downloads of updated versions of components will be Free

We reserve the right to make additional charges to cover our time for any of the following (Our Fees are published publically, we will charge a minimum of GBP35.00 per incident):

• Investigation of a bug or issue where the problem is not caused by our components and the resolution is to modify other components or Joomla core.
• Researching how to make X do Y and giving instructions on how to do this
• Finding that one line of code that you need to change to make the component do exactly what you want
• Developing, or giving guidence on how to make our components do things that are not features of the components
• Developing new code to support X doing Y
• Making our components look different or act different then they are designed
• Tweaking hard coded settings
• Moving Joomla from one server to another
• Anything on the Fees page

We will also not entertain emails where the information is already publically available one our website or in our FAQ
(I just searched my sent emails and I have pointed people to an existing FAQ page 924 times in 6 months!
Lucky I now use the QuickText extension for Thunderbird - you will get a Standard Text Reply only) a lot of people should read this article on how to ask questions the smart way.

I'm sure that most of our customers understand my heart in tying this, but I am sure others will be upset and mad, however there has come a point where, to be more productive and to be able to spend time with family and to develop new and exciting solutions for Joomla we have to draw the line.

I hope this article clarifies the situation. (And saves me heaps of time!)

(published version 1.0)