Please don't think that I'm being a difficult customer, but this needs clarifying.

**maisoui** · 01-02-2012 07:23 PM

My old Latin teacher would be so pleased! I've finally found a use for the phrase caveat emptor that he taught us with so much dogged persistence. (And I still remembered how to spell it correctly; you can check on Wikipedia.)

It means let the buyer beware as in this case where x10 is offering to take an exact amount of money from us, but being rather vague about what we will get in return.

After a few members of the public finally visited my websites, and after ill health made me worry about being unable to visit the forum each 31 days (a difficult thing in hospital), I decided that Prime Membership might be an option.

What will this bring me? "A really cool forum badge", it says on the page. But apparently this has been abolished. That has probably lost x10 thousands of dollars in Prime Memberships that were not renewed. Some people take forum membership very seriously, and the loss of a badge (that they paid for) leaves them feeling disgruntled. Even more serious for x10, is the fact that prospective payers will wonder what other promises x10 will not keep.

(Please don't think that I'm being a difficult customer. I've had customers of my own who will happily pay hundreds of dollars if they think that they are getting value for money, but who will scream blue murder if they think that I am cheating them out of so much as a single cent!)

What will Prime Membership give me "doubles" on? For example, on the comparisons page it says that x10 gives 2 addon domains, although my cPanel says I can have 3. Will Prime Membership let me have 4 or 6? (That might be important in the future!)

Naturally, when I look at the Subscriptions Page for Prime Membership, there is an "upsell" for the Illuminated Package. This is said to bring "a ton of additional features"! (Seeing that software is weightless, I don't think that "a ton" may be literally accurate.) It is rather like me saying, "Corey, give me a VPS, and I will give you lots of money". What would Corey answer? Probably along the lines of, "Please quantify the phrase 'lots of money' because to you that might mean 10 cents!" So, could somebody tell us what Illuminated really brings? (If it brings a superior Illuminati forum badge, there are some dedicated forum members who might buy it for that alone!)

Being more practical, now that some of the public are visiting my websites, I have tested out an email response from the website to enquiries. The website does send back email responses to visitor enquiries, but they are not reliably received. Response emails to gmail accounts are received in the inbox as intended. Emails to mail.com addresses end up in their spam folders. Emails to yahoo and aol addresses end up either in their inbox or in their spam folders, depending upon the whim of their spam filters. Emails to hotmail addresses are never received at all. This might suggest that x10 free hosting has been abused by spammers in the past, and the servers are not trusted. We are told that Illuminated customers are moved to different servers. Would this cure the problem of the lost emails?

Please don't think that I'm being a difficult customer. For every member who writes a lengthy post to quibble about details before paying money, there may be a hundred who simply get confused, lose interest, and forget about the idea of buying anything. So please view any adverse remarks in this post as "constructive criticism".

**maisoui** · 01-03-2012 01:39 PM

Well, I'd hardly submitted the previous post, before another thread in this subforum I keep forgetting corrects me by happenstance on one point!

It seems that the old forum-login once a month system has been changed to portal-login. Ah! The young keep changing things just to confuse the old! I was an old ex-tenner even before the traumatic change of servers in 2007.

The point still remains that the inactivity erasure is to be feared. I fell so ill some years ago that I was incapable of visiting x10, and x10 deleted my sites. I moved to another free host without login requirements, but that has proved to be not quite so reliable as x10.

Now that some visitors are coming to my sites, I would like to return to x10. But first I would like to know exactly what I will get for my money with Prime or Illuminated membership.

**Skizzerz** · 01-03-2012 06:55 PM

I notified some other people of this thread, but I don't know when they'll respond so I'll just tell you what I know. Please note that some of what is below is my own personal viewpoint based on years of being with x10, these sections will be clearly marked and are not to be interpreted as an official reply to your questions.

I'll attempt to answer in the order you asked:

1. (personal opinion) I wouldn't say that the badges have been abolished per se, I would just say that our developers have yet to add them back in, as it requires hacking the vBulletin templates. When we updated vBulletin to 4.1.7, all template edits were lost, and there have been events since then more important (to us) than adding the forum badges back in. I'm personally in favor of getting these badges back, so I'll see what I can do to persuade the developers to get this onto their list of things to do in the near future.

2. The comparisons page you linked does not include Prime Membership, but you can find a comparison page with that included on our wiki. The numbers listed for the addon domains, parked domains, etc. are accurate. The reason why this isn't "double" of what you have is due to an error when we upgraded the account portal in which new accounts were being created with our old ad-free package (circa 2009ish, back when we had the "double everything" and "inactivity timer" promotions), which contained slightly higher numbers on those things than our new one.

3. There is no special forum badge for Illuminated members, but they will get the same badge as Prime members (or rather, they would when badges were implemented -- see point 1). However, the comparison page on our wiki linked in point 2 contains some of the other advantages Illuminated offers (automated backups and a 99% uptime guarantee, among other things), and something that isn't listed there is that our Illuminated plan places you on a new server that hosts only Illuminated members, meaning that there are a lot less accounts and therefore a lot less load on the server, meaning faster response times and increased available resources.

4. Unfortunately, there is little we can do if you are experiencing issues with email service providers blocking our emails. I suggest you try contacting them and/or using an actual domain instead of a free x10hosting subdomain. We can assist you further in figuring out if the issue is entirely with them or partially with us if you open a support ticket via the account portal with more information (the From: and To: addresses of various emails you have tried sending to, so we can look them up in our logs).

5. Prime membership (and anything above it) removes the login requirement to keep your account active. Everything else is detailed on the plan comparison page I linked to or the actual descriptions for those memberships.

**maisoui** · 01-04-2012 08:37 PM