Shoutbox

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take a couple of minutes of your time to express my feelings regarding some matters that I’ve seen getting amplified in the past couple of months. Last year, I swore to myself not to take all this too personal when so many people were complaining about the first appearance of a sponsor program but I’ve been accumulating a lot and I feel that I should now “give it back” at least a little.

This message doesn’t only target comments about the sponsor program, after all, I kinda got used to it in the past 15 months. No, the primary reason I’m writing those lines is the comments I get from some people about my own work. You know, when you spend 3 1/2 years of your life working on a project as I worked on Messenger Plus! and some guy come at you saying that you’ve stolen the code from others, that you didn’t invent anything, or that the important parts were written by somebody else, it can really be depressing.

Bad-mouthing the sponsor is something I can understand: you install too quickly, you reply yes to the sponsor’s license agreement and you post a couple of “I hate you” messages on the forum to express your frustration. That’s completely understandable and the helpers on the forum generally deal nicely with that kind of situation. I’ve read many times, on many sites, that the sponsor installed even if you selected no on the agreement, that the choice was not offered in Automatic Mode (wondered why it got removed in Messenger Plus! 3 ? ), that nothing could uninstall it ever from your computer… at first, I was very concerned by these allegations, especially after all the work I’ve put with C2Media (my sponsor) to make sure that the package I distribute was clean and easily removable. I know for a fact that most of the times, the sponsor can’t get uninstalled because a program like Adaware destroyed its backup data but I still live with all the complaints, everyday on the forums I visit and you know what help me do it? your very own support. In the first couple of months the sponsor was added, it felt like the entire community was against me however, as the time passed, I saw more and more supportive replies on every forums, even on the ones I would never have expected it. It’s very comforting to know you got so much people willing to take your defence, especially on the web where lies circulate at the speed of light and becomes instant truth as soon as they’re posted on enough different pages. So everyday, when I browse the newsgroups and I find someone insulting my entire family tree because he got a popup, I reassure myself reading the replies some people already made telling the sponsor is optional and can be easily uninstalled. You may not realise it but I would probably have stopped the development of Plus! a long time ago if it was not for this support, and this has nothing to do with the money that my sponsor is generating. I never had any problem finding a company to work for but I take a lot of pride in my little plugin and what you’ve all done for its success and I intend to continue the journey for as long as possible.

Which brings me back to the beginning of this message: all of you can install the sponsor and try to uninstall it to verify that what I say is true. However, when someone comes and say “Patchou is just using the code of other people to make Messenger Plus! work”, there’s not much you can do except wondering if it’s true or not. This is what I’m facing these days, and let me tell you that it’s particularly bad for the morale. Despite all the features Messenger Plus! has, it’s still a plugin for a little instant messaging application. I know it doesn’t looks like much but let me tell you that it takes my days and my nights to ensure it stays alive and keeps evolving. After all, why else would Messenger Plus! have no other “serious” competitor? I’m not diminishing the other plugins available for MSN Messenger, for what I’ve heard, some of them are a great peace of work, but you still can’t deny the fact that Messenger Plus! is the first name that comes in every web site, article or news post talking about enhancing Messenger, and it has been so for a long time (since Messenger 3.6 for those who remember it ).The fact is that maintaining this kind of plugin is time consuming and not many people are  willing to put all the necessary time in this kind of thing. I’m a computer geek, my life is based around creating software (successful or not ) so I never had any problem patching Messenger Plus! at 4:00am in the morning while watching some reruns of Star Trek. I have no merit for it; it’s just the way I chose to live my life. Other plugins that are released by other developers are sometimes promising but are sadly too often forgotten due to the lack of update.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m proud of every single line of code that forms the Messenger Plus! core engine and nothing hurts me more than someone saying that I’m not the one who created this code. It’s surprising how much some people can argue on this matter, despite the fact that there’s no way for them to know whether it’s true or not. I have no problem saying that Will helped me do an assembly patch for accessing the API of Messenger more easily in Windows XP, that Ginge gave me an encryption routine that I use to store emails in the registry and that, obviously, I didn’t write the png/zip library I use in Messenger Plus! to extract files from the setup or display pictures on the screen (big thanks to the CxImage class by the way, couldn’t live without it anymore ). However, this is where the list ends. Everything I just mentioned count for maybe 500 lines of code (excluding the png/zip libraries of course… everybody uses the same ones) and as Messenger Plus! is constituted by more than 50,000 lines of code, I can safely say that I’m the creator of the program and that I didn’t steal anything from anybody. In fact, I’ve always made a point not to install any competitive product. That way, I’m sure that I don’t get ideas (indirect or not) from others. It’s true that sometimes, ideas collide. I remember being notified that someone had a grudge on me because he thought I had stolen his code for sending more than 400 characters in each message. After reading his code, I tried to tell him that mine was at least half different but I don’t think he ever believed me. That kind of thing happens, it’s sad but there’s nothing I can really do about it except showing good faith. However, things are different when people attack the very core of the project. For example, one thing I get from time to time is that I stole the code published on Code Project demonstrating how to hook the rich edit control of Messenger. The fact is (and this can be very easily verified by checking web archives) that I had coded a similar feature and released it part of Messenger Plus! 2.00 at least 6 months before this code was ever published. Even more than that, I reviewed the code published on Code Project a year ago and even if  it’s a fine piece of work, this code can crash Messenger depending on people’s configuration and that’s why Messenger Plus! couldn’t never have relied on it. As you can imagine, a 6 month delay can be easily checked but it doesn’t prvent people from throwing this kind of allegations. The same thing happens when I mention the help Will gave to me. It is true that his patch saved me a lot of time at some point, but some people tend to exaggerate, as always, and try to claim that Will is the one who coded the whole hooking code for MSN Messenger 6, which is of course, entirely wrong and puts me, and Will, in an embarrassing situation.

Messenger Plus! is my product, my baby, the best software I’ve ever created and I’m not afraid to say that I’m proud of it. Please, if you have something to say about it, don’t forget that its creator is human. I find it amusing when people accuse me of being greedy with my optional toolbar when so many software now distribute forced adwares that do much worse things than my sponsor will ever do. Why haldof the complains about Messenger Plus! I see on the web talk more about me than the software itself? I mean, if you read some of those posts, it's like these people had known me personally for years. Reviewing a software doesn't mean reviewing its author. Being greedy and not caring about my users would mean that I wouldn’t be writing this message and I wouldn’t be upgrading Messenger Plus! so often. I would buy a pool, a big plasma TV, put it in my backyard and watch anime all day long in a swimsuit. I would also not spend so much time answering to people’s suggestions, bug reports and concerns on the Messenger forums (not just my own). On all the software you use every day, how many of them did you buy and how much support did you get in return? Messenger Plus! now counts more than 6 million of active users and I still find it necessary to show some personal support instead of relying on the help of the people on the Messenger Plus! forum (thank you to all of you). I even got some remarks saying that if I wanted to earn money, I should get a job: since when software developing stopped being a job? It’s not because I don’t make advertisements on TV or in computer stores that my software is any different from the other ones you use, except that there’s no crack available for mine as I chose it to be 100% freeware, with optional support. I’m still happy with this choice, I think everybody is a winner in this situation and I can just hope that other software would chose this method instead of dying from no-sale-we-got-cracked syndrome.

Thank you for reading such a long post, I hope I didn’t bother you too much with it, I just really needed to say all of this. I’m didn’t become the devil the day I considered earning my life with my creation and if you thought that 10 minutes ago,  I hope this post helped you change your mind a little. User’s support is what Messenger Plus! needs to live, I’m the one who needs the money. Without user’s support, Messenger Plus! would die in a matter of days so thanks again to all of you!

Best wishes,
Patchou