Social Bookmarks Demon - Broken Product, Horrible Customer Service

Previously I worked in Aerospace as an engineer. I was repeatedly getting screwed in one way or another by my employers. I assumed it was bad luck or somehow I was doing something that setup the right conditions to get hosed. Then after my last layoff in Oct. 2009 I found that almost everyone felt that they'd been screwed by either their current or a previous employer and many were glad to be leaving the company for another position.

Then I started working in Internet Marketing and bought a number of garbage ebooks, software programs that promised automated this and that but weren't automated at all, and in general getting junk or bad customer service when I paid good money for a product or service. It's easy for your business to fail when you get screwed too often since we are all on a very limited budget when we first start.

Many people won't file complaints or nasty reviews because they feel they may need a vendor again later or may eventually want to partner with them. Well I've decided that it's time to start calling it like I see it. If everyone did the same the bad actors would feel the pain of their misdeeds in days not years and we would all get treated better for it.

Just my 2 cents... On to the rant...

Don't believe anything in the Social Bookmarks Demon sales page. Especially when it comes to customer service/tech support. They screwed me and they won't hesitate to screw you.

Social Bookmarks Demon is a fairly simple program written in PHP that theoretically runs on any web server with the right version PHP and MySQL.

The basic premise of the software is that through social bookmarking you build backlinks to your site on dozens of bookmarking (Digg like) sites. Primarily this is done through leveraging Pligg style bookmarking sites.

Basic Operation

1. Enter URLs to bookmark
2. Enter account names and valid email addresses to associate with those names
3. Run the post_engine.php script to post bookmarks to the sites

Flaws

1. The account names are not spinnable and it has been suggested on some forums that Google can track the account names under which the bookmarking is done. Therefore you could get dinged for having a hundred backlinks point to your site from the same account name. In other words it could hurt your site rather than help it.
2. The reporting is laughable. The reporting essentially states that such and such a URL was bookmarked at such and such a time under a specified account name. However, when I manually checked for the bookmarks many of those reported as being posted were missing. There is no site by site report telling you how many succeeded and how many failed. So you could be running this program and getting absolutely no results but without manually checking for the bookmarks you'd never know.
3. The reporting is misleading. I had a license error (a problem with the license server not my web server) which was preventing the post_engine.php script from ever completing yet the reporting kept telling me that URLs were being bookmarked. The reporting eventually got fixed but the license error remained a problem for 3 months (that's not a typo).
4. It doesn't work with Proxies. The software states that it will work with Proxies and the admin panel has a place for you to enter the proxies. However, the software warns against it because for speed reasons. Well I use proxies in my custom PHP SEO tools and they work fine. When I use those same, relatively quick, proxies with Social Bookmarks Demon the post_engine.php fails to complete more often than not. This is probably related to the next flaw.
5. The software doesn't use multi-threading. The software attempts to post to a large number of sites but it does so 1 at a time in serial fashion meaning that it posts to 1 site and when complete it posts to the next site. So the total time it takes is the sum of all those sites and if a couple are slow it may never finish. On my AMD quad-core, Ubuntu 9.10 server with 8 GB of RAM and broadband connection it took 45 minutes to complete 1 bookmark posting. During that time it left the MySQL connection open and tied up significant memory resources. I quickly ran into problems as I attempted to run several instances of the software from different servers off of a single database. With all those connections left open MySQL quickly ran out of connections and crashed the server hosting the DB.

For Social Bookmarks Demon you will need a web server running PHP, MySQL, and Zend Optimizer - all free. Typically if you are running a standard hosting server you have PHP and MySQL already so that you can run WordPress and other programs on your site.

Because the creator wishes to protect their product (understandable) they have encrypted the files and you will require Zend Optimizer on the server in order to run the software. By far getting Zend Optimizer to work was the hardest part of installation and prevented me from installing Social Bookmarking Demon on servers that I didn't have full admin control over. And it prevented me from install it on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) servers that I did have full admin control over.

Once all the required supporting software packages are installed you will need to create database in MySQL for the program to use.  Social Bookmarks Demon will then populate the DB with the proper tables, generate a random password for you, and tell you to log into the admin panel.

I didn't run into a lot of bugs but the bugs I ran into were fatal.  They prevented the program from completing it's most basic functions - registering new accounts and posting bookmarks.  Here are the bugs I ran into:

1. Support Contract Expired: When you purchase the software the initial support contract is for 1 year.  After a few months my software began reporting that Support Contract Expired and I couldn't get into the admin panel because this message wouldn't go away.  This was mostly fixed in release 2.1 but not entirely I still get it on occasion.
2. License Server Error: This error prevented the software from posting bookmarks or registering accounts for me for approx. 3 months.  It took me more than 2 weeks to convince tech support that it was on their end not mine.  Then once they admitted it was on their end they promised a program update in a week.  Over the course of 2 months I repeatedly (every 2 weeks or so) ask when the update would arrive.  Then I asked for a refund on the product.  Then things began to happen and apologies flowed for ignoring me for so long.  An update was released, license server error went away, but the program still did not post any bookmarks or register any new accounts.  Social Bookmarks Demon's admin panel reported that it created accounts and posted bookmarks.  However, I never received any confirmation emails and I couldn't log into any of the new accounts.  And my manual checks of the bookmarks reportedly posted showed that only a small percentage were actually posted to old accounts.

Look Social Bookmarks Demon attempts to interact with dozens of websites. These sites will change on a fairly regular basis. So, I could have lived with the bugs as long as customer service/tech support was prompt about fixing them. However, they were not.

The Social Bookmarks Demon license server error took 2 weeks to get tech support to admit it was their problem not mine. Then they promised an update in 1 week. After 2 months of waiting for said update I asked for a refund and was denied but promised an update in 1 week yet again. After 3 more weeks went by without an update I demanded that they release what they had done since the old version couldn't do anything - no new accounts, no bookmarks being posted. They got mad called me a scammer and said they would release an update when they felt like it. A week later the update was released.

The update was broken as well. I politely let them know what was broken and they said they would look into it. Within a few days they had removed me from their system so I could no longer post support tickets, download updates, etc. According to their sales page I am guaranteed updates for the life of the product. Apparently I wasn't patient enough in waiting 2 months before requesting a refund. Apparently I was the one trying to scam them. And apparently their word isn't worth anything.

Don't believe anything in the Social Bookmarks Demon sales page.  Especially when it comes to customer service/tech support.  They screwed me and they won't hesitate to screw you.