Don't you just HATE spending good money on a product,
just to find out that it just doesn't work, doesn't work as
advertised, or you find out later that you could have
gotten a better solution, that does more, works better
and is FREE!

From: Stuart Halpryn
Date:

Dear Friend,

It sure bugs the heck out of me!

We have to face the facts; this industry is FILLED with a lot of junk that's released in a rush to get products to market that never should have been released in the first place.

Bug riddled, unfilled promises of performance, the list goes on and on - most offering no support, or poor support at best.

Bottom line is that if you do your due diligence, you'll find that there are already a TON of solutions already available to solve many of the problems that we face as Internet Marketers.

In fact, many of those solutions are FREE - lower or comparably priced to some of the %@#!$ that's being foisted on unsuspecting buyers.

It's a 'Buyer Beware' Marketplace!

It's really sad, because there's tons of money being poured down the drain, in a time when open source authors are producing quality programs, some quite well known, many having already gone through many incarnations resulting in fairly bullet-proof, secure, reasonably bug free programs.
That being said, nothing is completely bug free, BUT, and here's the clincher - many/most of these programs are developed and worked on by the open source community as a whole, so fixes (that work) are usually readily available as any bugs are discovered, and support forums are usually in place to help you. And if that's not enough, you'll usually get these superior solutions with nothing more than a request for a donation!

hmm.......

The following is a list of free/low cost/comparably priced solutions to some of the the more common issues that we have, and in some cases, alternatives to some products that you might find available for sale....

This list will keep growing as I find more solutions to help us all.
Feel free to email me with any alternative solutions that you've found, and I'll be happy to add them to the list, with your name & URL so you get credit for your find!

Please feel free to pass the URL of this page on to your friends, enemies & list members (and don't worry, this page will never have any of my sales listed here).
Together we can end the stranglehold that they have on us and on our wallets!

Cost Effective Solutions

There's a big to-do lately about the effect that Microsoft's IE Java Patch has had on imbedded Java/ActiveX on your web page. In fact, at least two marketers have come out with very costly solutions (one is almost $100!) for the problem.

http://www.happinessu.org/ will show you how to fix the problem yourself OR if you don't want to, don't know how to, or just don't have time, you can follow the link at the top of his page, cut 'n paste your page into his form, and it will fix it automatically for you....
There are a ton of other solutions available, which you can find if you run a search on - EOLAS - in Google.

Blogs

b2evolution - http://b2evolution.net/ - FREE
A blog script featuring multiple blogs, categories/sub-categories, skins, search function, multiple languages, search engines friendly URLs and a user forum.

Nucleus - http://nucleuscms.org/ - FREE
A powerful blog script featuring multiple blogs, multiple authors, drafts and future posts, bookmarklets and a user forum.

WordPress - http://wordpress.org/ - FREE
WordPress is a personal publishing tool with focus on aesthetics and featuring cross-blog tool, password protected posts, importing, typographical niceties, multiple authors, bookmarklets and a user forum.

Customer Support

Crafty Syntax Live Help - http://www.craftysyntax.com/ - FREE
A Live Help chat system featuring monitor your visitors, proactively open a chat session, multiple chat sessions, referer tracking, page view tracking, multiple operators, canned responses/images/URLs, multiple departments each with different icons, leave a message. Offers a user supportforum

Help Center Live - http://www.helpcenterlive.com/ - FREE
Very powerful all-in-one help center including Live Help, Support Tickets and FAQ. Features include unlimited operators/departments, monitor visitors, initiate chat, collect visitor's information, track visitor's footprint, autosave chat transcripts, canned messages, leave a message, auto-assign tickets to operators, unlimited FAQ topics and a user forum.

osTicket - http://www.osticket.com/server/ - FREE
A Support Tickets system featuring email piping, pop3 login, unlimited email addresses, admin/staff/user panels, avoid autoresponder loops, limit maximun tickets user can have opened, accept attachments and limit size, pager alerts for admin and a user forum.

Forums/Bulletin Boards

phpBB2 - http://www.phpbb.com/ - FREE
A widely-popular open-source bulletin-board package, works well, simple user interface and admin panel, clean look, scales well, and can be customized. Support forum.

SMF - http://www.simplemachines.org/ - FREE
Elegant. Effective. Powerful. Free. SMF is all of the above. SMF is a next-generation community software package and is jam-packed with features, while at the same time having a minimal impact on resources.

Shopping Carts

OS Commerce - http://oscommerce.com/ - FREE
A power-user shopping cart with a big variety of modules and support of almost every payment gateway. A big developers community is ready to offer custom solutions depending on your needs. User forum.

Zen Cart - http://www.zen-cart.com/ - FREE
Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently. User forum.

Surveys

PHPSurveyor - http://www.phpsurveyor.org/ - FREE
Develop, publish and collect responses to surveys. Display surveys as single questions, group by group or all in one page or use a dataentry system for administration of paper-based versions of the survey. PHP Surveyor can produce 'branching' surveys (set conditions on whether individual questions will display), can vary the look and feel of your survey through a templating system, and can provide basic statistical analysis of your survey results. User Forum.

Advanced Poll - http://www.proxy2.de/scripts.php - FREE
A highly windows-inspired poll script. Advanced Poll is a polling system with powerful administration tool. It features: multiple polls, templates, unlimited options, multi-language support, IP-Logging, IP-Locking, cookie support, comment feature, vote expire feature, random poll support and more. Supports textfile and mySQL database. Lots of other cool/useful scripts on their site too! User forum.

Miscellaneous

Mega List Builder- http://NetActivated.com/mml.htm - FREE
This FREE List Builder will ELIMINATE all of the problems created by so called safelists, junk co-reg leads and more. Now you can SAFELY email people that actually WANT to read your emails, and never have to be worried about being accused of spamming. Easy to sign up, easy to use.

Moodle - http://moodle.org/ - FREE
A course management system designed to help educators create quality online courses. Available in 34 languages and features a WYSIWYG HTML editor. The teacher has full control over all settings for a course. There is a flexible array of course activities (Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops), user logging and tracking, mail integration, a user forum and much more.

FAQMasterFlex - http://www.technetguru.net/design/faqmasterflex.php - FREE
Unlimited categories/questions/answers, web-based administration and a user forum.

PHPlist - http://www.tincan.co.uk/ - FREE
A powerful mailing list featuring multiple mailing lists, attachments and a user forum.

phpFormGenerator - http://phpformgen.sourceforge.net/ - FREE
A form generator featuring up to 100 form fields, all kind of input fields incl. file upload, customizable fields attributes, send submitted data to an email address or store them in a database, admin panel, user forum.

More on the way as I have time to hunt them down & add them

Click to E-MAIL

Don't you just HATE spending good money on a product, just to find out that it just doesn't work, doesn't work as advertised, or you find out later that you could have gotten a better solution, that does more, works better and is FREE!