I was on the phone today with a client who had an older version of aeWebworks (now called Boonex) dating software, which is now called Dolphin. I went over to Boonex and checked out the live demo and thought, what the heck, lets’ see how difficult it is to install.
Disclaimer: Now before people get all worked up, remember, this is an unscientific undertaking and I am not an IT guru, although I am quite familiar with blog software. Nobody paid me to write about this, I was simply curious, as the Boonex posts here get tons of comments from people either very happy with the software, or totally pissed off at the lack of custmer support. I got some grief today about an affiliate link to Webscribble, another popular dating-site-in-a-box. I had forgotten all about that link. Long time readers will also notice the ads in the sidebar. The ads are affiliate links, mostly for clients. They exist for several reasons, I am curious about which get the most clicks, and they provide me with beer money. Maybe sometime I’ll set up sites with other systems, it’s not on my radar at present. End disclaimer.
Initial setup was a breeze, nothing to it. I immediately digressed into reading manual pages of unix commands, which probably doubled the setup time. I could have done everything from my FTP client but sometimes you just like to fire up the command line and get under the hood and I like to exercise my inner sysadmin from time to time.
Step 1: download software
Step 2: upload to web host
Step 3: create database.
Step 4: fiddle with file permissions,
Step 5: log into new dating site.
Time spent: 42 minutes.
Time customizing theme and getting ready for real traffic: Unknown. I couldn’t figure out how to tweak the CSS that drives the themes from within the admin interface, which led me to the Expertzzz forums and Wiki, which worked for a few minutes, then promptly broke:
Cannot complete query (query):
DELETE FROM `boon_sessions` WHERE `time` < 1174515947
Incorrect key file for table ‘boon_sessions’; try to repair it
Oops. Talk about bad timing. If they can’t get links to the support database working, what other problems are lurking just around the corner?
Notes from the install process
Make sure your host has all of the necessary programs and features to run Dolphin. If they don’t, you’re out of luck. It appears that a lot of people b0rk the initial install because they are not paying attention, and then complain loudly in the forums. This is not the case for all install-related issues though.
Read the Dolphin Wiki to get started and have the forum in another browser tab for easy reference.
Permissions instructions are not clear and need to be redone. For latest version 5.6, told to change permissions on directories that don’t exist.
They need to add an alert to change default password. Hint, it’s under Global settings menu.
this should show up in control panel at first login.
Dive into Global Settings menu:view all. Review and make changes. Pretty straightforward.
Fix: “Bread cramp divider” should be “bread crumb” in main Admin panel. There are a lot of spllelling mitsakes in the documentation and administration interface. This can make certain tasks challenging, but not as much as the lack of links to help and documentation from within the admin interface. That’s just plain lazy on the part of Boonex. They don’t understand that the more help you give people right in the page they are working on, the less cluttered their support forums will be with newbie questions.
Some of the admin settings are real head-scratchers and you end up burning a lot of time trying to figure out what certain terms mean.
CSS templates are not writable by default, so you have to manually change permissions, but that info is not readily available. A system that makes it difficult to apply your design to it’s templates is not fun. Witholding judgement until I can read the manual.
Sumitting an event for the event listing page did not go well. After clearing all the errors pop-ups, I submit the event, page reloads back to main manage events page with error:
Wrong date format for wrong
What does that mean? Back to the forums to figure it out, wait, they are broken, so I’m spinning my wheels trying to get the event posted. Why are events listed down to the second? Not all events require tickets or max # of people. Didn’t like my initial password. Decide to move on and add some news items into various custom categories, which goes smoothly.
When I created my profile, the link from confirmation email didn’t work.
Height is in ranges, should be inches or cm.
No default IM? Need to upgrade? Over to Userplane (advertiser on this blog). Will integrate that later. Userplane still references Boonex as AE Webworks, need to change the email templates.
Adding new questions to profile. This is super important for any dating site, and was problematic for me. Changing the search type of the new question refreshes the page and your new question is not saved. No clear description of search type, match type or match field. What does all that mean? Where is the link to the description of these fields?
Orca Forum. Never loaded, the cool new AJAX features are broken, kept trying to reload the page. Perhaps it was because I was using Safari on Mac to load the live site. Maybe it’s great, who knows. I prefer phpBB.
New questions, rearranging modules and theming are probably the most important to new dating site owners, or people moving over from another platform. I may add more to this later when I embed Userplane and tweak the CSS.
So far so good, not bad for a few hours work, but a long way to go to make it look unique and get all functionality rolling the way I want it to.
ModMySite is an active forum for Dolphin administrators.
That’s as far as I got, go check it out.
Still here? Type Boonex or aewebworks in the search box here and see what comes up. Lot’s more insight from people with a lot more experience than me with Dolphin.
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{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }
I initally had set my site up using the latest
version of the open source Astrospaces ( http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=182291&package_id=211368)
and while the author is dilligently working on it.. it didn’t provide enough power.
I then switched to the latest version of Dolphin. As you stated, setup was a breeze and since I had no desire to mess with Unx commands, I was up and running in 15 minutes.
SInce I’m a graphic designer, I modified the “hip hop” template with the look I wanted easily…
the problems started when I wanted to use the “rewrite_mod” and couldn’t get it to work correctly so that my users could enter http://www.mysite.com/username instead of some cryptic url.
Posting to the forums was absolutely no help at all as I waited for days and never recieved any type of support.
While I like all of the options of Dolphin.. i’ve deleted it and am using PHPiazbi
but I’m experiencing the same problem with support though one of the ex-partners has created a forum site to help with software issues (thanks).
Post-install support remains a major problem with dating scripts. That’s frustrating to hear about the problem with mod_rewrite. Should be able to fix in the codebase or with a file called htaccess, pretty straightforward.
This is what a good wiki is for. By publishing common changes to core functionality that have been vetted by the community, it saves people a lot of time, effort and frustration trying to do what many people have already accomplished. I’ve spent hundreds of hours poking around blog forums, which tend to be a similar set of issues, restated by hundreds of people with minor variations.
I just visited GPLDate, another option, but the forum states:
Downloads are suspended until March 16th – we are doing some code cleanup until then.
I will be in Korea from the 12th until the 15th, and have a couple of days then to work on the GPLdate code (nothing else to do) – when I return, I will re-post the code and re-open the downloads.
If I were someone evaluating their software, this is not the message I would want to be greeted with.
wow… thats’s just crazy. I guess with free, we get what we pay for, huh?
Well – you are always welcome on http://www.modmysite.com – we have been supporting aeDating aeWebWorks and BoonEx Dolphin Dating and Community scripts since 2003.
There is 2500+ site admins on ModMySite, and the forums are active and helpful.
Check us out and see for yourself – membership is free.
http://www.modmysite.com
For expert technical and useful FREE Dolphin Information without all the hype and hassle, check out allaboutdatingsites.com particularly the Boonex Dolphin forum. It has a huge amount. I don’t have 2500+ site admins (but neither does Rob 8-) but I do have a lot of good stuff for site admins to save some headaches with technical support. Serious Answers for your Dolphin problems. Registration is always completely free as is most of the services you will find there. Got a serious problem, check us out!
http://allaboutdatingsites.com
Fuck Boonex!Don´t buy this software…I got a lot of sql errors and there are no unlimited modification options because the important scripts are encoded. This script is not usuable for an commercial portal.
Whilst the software is very good, the customer service is extremely poor. I asked various questions when first purchasing this software and they were all answered to my satisfaction. One of them was that the code was 99% open source. However, after purchasing (and you cannot get a demo), it appears that 40% of the files are encoded using zend encoder, therefore if you want to do anything apart from changing the themes, you are pretty stuck without requesting certain files to be decoded for you as and when you need to. But how do you know which files you will need to change if you cant even view them in the first place. Also, documentation is non existent. If you want an off the shelf script that just works, I would try something else. There were sql errors all over the place and I could not even go into the files to fix them.
This product is not worth the PAIN of installation and debugging. They don’t provide ANY support. If you open a support ticket they will give you a generic answer or blame the problem on your hosting company. I’ve disproved them a number of times. When I sent them a colorful email about their crappy support they threatened to cut me off. If your looking for community software, look somewhere else because boonex is a TERRIBLE company!!!
I have a bunch of errors talking about undefined variable and stuff. Also I had a problem with the admin panel but I got that fixed. The script has potential but it has some bugs that shouldn’t be there in the first place. I doubt it’s scalable in the future but I’ll give it a shot for now.
HORRIBLE HORRIBLE!!! They have many fraud claims and are in many lawsuits with the Attorney General!!!! SAVE YOUR MONEY AND DO NOT BUY FROM THIS COMPANY!!!
This script is very like to my first dating software. Spent about one week skinning this script. Extremely hard work. I don’t know why do you call that ‘templates’ – it would be easier to skin pure PHP files without templates. Actually skinning that script is a bit easier than making a dating software from scratch. It is not worth $700, it worth $100 maximum. You can use this script if you need very basic site. If you want advanced dating site, find someone who can make it.
I wouldn’t wish aewebworks on my worst enemy. They have the best marketing story in the universe! Even better than Enron.
Nightmares start when the money clears. YOU WILL GET ZERO SUPPORT even in forums which are censored more than you can ever imaging. If you have $690 to throw away, you are better off flushing it down the drain – like somebody here mentioned, a team honest users have gotten together at ModMySite dot com to work out the bugs in aedating. If only I knew about modmysite before I purchased aedating!
We work with a few social networking scripts (Dolphin included).
Not sure where people are getting the $700 from. Dolphin is $78/year for the SNS+forums. There are other add-on modules (Ray), but most of our clients are only interested in the core features.
IMO Dolphin compares decently to other scripts, better in some ways, worse in others. It *is* a little trickier to skin, that is true, but it’s pretty attractive already.
We often tell clients to go with a script that is closest to what they’re looking for to keep implementation costs to a minimum. For some, that’s Dolphin.
Folks interested in more information are welcome to ping me. And of course if you need SNS consulting, we’re here to help. :)
This is a crap script. Buyer BEWARE and It is free but plugins are expensive.
There is no stable release, beta releise of the software, no bug report area, no customer input, you will be provided with “the version of the day” which might include more or less bugs than the version of the previous or next day.
DON’T EVEN TRY TO BUY Boonex Dolphin!This software is rubbish
The Boonex “revolution†was created, IMHO, to get out of the “lifetime†support agreement that thousands of customers like myself bought into and got trashed after the sham announcement that aeDating was purchased by Boonex. If this were a company in the US, the Feds probably would gotten involved and shut them down on a Consummer Scam Warrant. Having said that, I had to “painfully†learn the product to survive and protect my original investment. Although I have been in the Software Business for more than 2 decades, I didn’t know anything about dating software until I bought it. I have since become an expert at support the aeDating product versions and offer an alternative to the Boonex scammers, including Skadate which was based on the 3.2 version of aeDating. I created a site to support all the aeDating people who chose not to go with the Boonex fiasco which is STILL a huge amount of 4.1 code being passed off as revolutionary. Need support, come talk to me,
dolphin is hell!!
I am searching for a quality and honest Dating Friendfinder community software and someone to put it together for me. I have been looking at boonex. Please help me and contact me by phone at 1-970-259-3998 in Colorado
Thanks,
Barry
I’m shocked no one has designed a WordPress theme worthy of the billion dollar online dating industry.
Well, I’m using dolphin right now for a different purpose(not dating site) and it is OK. I don’t say it’s totally bad as well as can’t say that it’s perfect. But as soon as you get used to it u are unlimited. Those who don’t know how to create a website from sketch, better not modify dolphin as well as it’s kind of complicated system. But it’s worth of itself.
Oh yeas forgot to say, there is also software called ELGG, but that is really crappy piece of software. I tried to install it and stacked on the installation because of crappy sql file. after going through it and fixing all that crap I just gave up and decided never consider it as a software anymore.
This thread is old.
Dolphin has come a long long way.
There are something like 2500 mods for it and an enormous community.
I have installed it and so far I am very impressed.
dolphin is free..licenses are free.
where they make there money is offering a media server addon–Ray which is for live chat, live cam and has some other interesting widgets.
Small adds are displayed in the Ray interface and the forum addon in return for using there bandwidth for these functions.
A 33 dollars a year License remove any adds in dolphin footer
Another 33 dollars a year License remove any adds in RaY
Another 33 dollars a year License remove any adds in Orca Forum software.
If you want to the remove adds, it´s till cheap compared to other software out there.
42 minutes?
wow. dude i did it in 10.
dolphin v6 rocks, its better than SE, PHPfox……..
BOONEX DOLPHIN ARE FRIENDS OF SKADATE ALSO KNOWN AS SCAMDATE AND KYRGIZ SCAMMERS!!! Andrey Sivtsov is a famous Kyrgiz scammer. Boonex states that it is a US-based company, which is A TOTAL LIE! (If you are a man who somehow still haven’t heard anything about Scamdate, read http://www.topix.com/forum/who/scam/TCS27T4P67FRVPBB9 just to be in the picture).
Let us look at the whois info, to start with: http://whois.domaintools.com/aedating.com (it is one of the Boonex major sites).
Registrant:
Yulia Sivtsova
mikroraion Asanbay d.2 kv.54
Bishkek 720060
Kyrgyzstan
Nice, is not it? :-) (Cowards usually use the name of their wives to register domains by the way). If you go to http://www.aedating.com you will be redirected to Boonex.com, the main scam site of the scammer Andrey Sivtsov who now has changed the name to Andrew Boon, you can see it here: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/boonex , after registering an offshore in Australia :-)
You may ask, well, the script is “free”, how does he scam people? It is very simple: to have the copyright removed, mods added, bugs (which are numerous) removed, you will have to PAY, PAY, PAY, and pay for a very long time. You will pay a lot of money. You will also frequently see such messages:
Product is available for contributors only
And so you become a contributor how? Thought you’d never ask!
“You can become a contributor by donating $40 a month to ExpertZZZ. Nice scheme, eh? :-) There is a lot to learn from Kyrgiz scammers Boonex Dolphin.
If you did not know the script Boonex Dolphin has bugs, you can check this link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&newwindow=1&q=boonex+vulnerability&btnG=Search
It will show you the real state of things.
Please be warned, Boonex Dolphin is a buggy product made by a Kyrgiz scam company. Do not repeat my mistakes.
Agree with boonex being a total scam, ive never seem anything like it in my life. The way Its leader “Andrew treats its members is terrible, even to the point now that he has turned nasty and insulting against the very many members complaints that are now in the blogs, which are very censored to hide the truth about Boonex. VictorT who is his running mate, sends out very nasty emails to members who dare complain and things are really very uncomfortable for all. Andrew lies all the time in the blogs to string people along with this new dolphin 7, which is now in its 8th Beta, and still no sign of it ever working, but of course Andrew says the RC is imminent, then comes up with some excuse to why it hasn’t been released yet again,some member has recently called him out on this, and the reply was, “No promises were made,(which is a lie) officially dolphin 7 doesn’t exist and it will be ready when its ready” to the shock of most people, and now long standing members are leaving Boonex because experienced users can see there is something really wrong with the software, and company ethics. We can smell a rat when we see one, and Andrew is the biggest rat of them all.
This is not good software, and its an even worse company to be involved with. My advice to anyone thinking of using this software is simply dont, it doesn’t work, and to get anything good out of it you have to mod it out and recode everything,all of which of course means spending money,and some of the main basic mods are being written and sold by boonex staff themselves. This is a very clever scam which is catching a lot of people. Dont you be one of them.
I agree that earlier versions were buggy. That’s no different to any other software. If you have a programming background like me, you will understand this. Even MS have produced buggy stuff, and they have billions of dollars behind them. The latest version Dolphin7 RC3 is pretty flashy and works well for me. For the price they are asking for a full license, its very very cheap compared to other specialized commercial software. The company i work for charges a minimum of $5000- for software that’s also buggy and it’s NOT open source, no free versions, and also charges on-going fees.
I believe Boonex is trying hard. I chose my hosting service very carefully, paid a bit more, and not had any insolvable problems.
Dolphin if free, free licenses, open-source and hugely better than any other low price or free dating software around.
I find Boonex quite straight forward – but I wonder how it does up against packages like socialengine and phpfox. Boonex received a good review on below site: http://www.TopCommunitySoftware.com , but if anyone has any experience with packages like phpfox, please post it!
Joe, that must be your review site. Recommend you read up on how to do a software review, what I read was a feature list, there is a big difference.
I just want my fucking money back. I read all the claims above and I can say that most of them are true from my brief time trying to get the software working. The whole thing is a scam to collect $$$$ I had to pay to access their forums and pay to remove ads from the software (which never worked by the way). I sent numerous emails to support staff…contacted their “Agents” and only received a reply back when I left a nasty comment on one agents page. But the reply didn’t address my issues – it was totally unprofessional and irrelevant.
Their premium members are full of shit. They will screw with you and call you newb trying to make you feel stupid which I guess makes most people sign up for “Premium” membership so then they will have that “Premium” tag on their forum avatar. They have special hidden forums for Premium members apparently.
Don’t be fooled and sucked in. You’ll be paying and paying and paying. Luckily I got out at $45 and just called it a loss. PayPal will NOT refund your money. I REPEAT:
PAYPAL WILL NOT REFUND YOUR MONEY!
So do NOT buy unless maybe you have lots of $$$ and can buy their $999 plan which bumps you up to premium status immediately and *MAY* give you some response from their staff.
If you are scammed, you need to file a report with the Australian authorities,
http://www.acma.gov.au/interforms/australian_spam_act_advice.asp
If you were scammed out of a large amount, I suggest contacting the FBI as well even though this company is in Australia, their web host is in the U.S.
https://support.hostforweb.com/i
File an abuse complaint with them as well and let them know you will be filing a complaint on their hosting company with the BBB and the Illinois Attorney Generals Office -Consumer Fraud Complaints Department for hosting fraudulent websites and allowing abuse on their networks that break their own TOS:
http://www.illinoisattorneygeneral.gov/consumers/filecomplaint.html
Host Info:
HostForWeb Inc, 7061 N. Kedzie
Room 302, Chicago IL 60645
This hosts TOS can be found at
http://hostforweb.com/terms.php
Where you will see a long list of forbidden activities. One being “Fraudulent Sites of any kind”
REPORT! REPORT! REPORT!
I have been using Boonex for last 1 year and I can say D7 is the best available and complete software for making a community or dating site out there in the market. I agree that you need to have advanced skills to make it work but if you want a full fledged website with live video cam recordings, video uploads, music uploads etc then ofcourse you need to know your bit. I am a pro and I have worked with major CMS platforms like Joomla, Phpfox, SE, VBulletin etc and believe me they don’t stand close to D7. I am not trying to sell D7 but I am surprised that some ppl are complaining about it. There’s a full-featured free version on their site, download it, try it and then buy it….they are not forcing you to buy it without trying it…so please stop your bullshit.
Cheers
John
download wonderful free dolphin templates from here http://orxzentemplates.com/index.php/download_free/templates/2
http://orxzentemplates.com/index.php/template/CMS_TEMPLATES/Boonex_Dolphin_Templates
Features: Free installation and 15 days free support
F*ck Boonex! Dolphin sucks – period. Do not buy this software and support these scammers!
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