Yeah, this was a bad scenario. The guy was there as recently as May 2020, he helped me get a license reactivated. It was a good module and got a few good upgrades over the years. And when we purchased it in 2014 things were good, support was fast, etc.

Its sad that he/they had no connection to anyone that is still around in the Dnn community. No one so far has even surfaced a name or a City/State/Country (that I am aware of). I am sure that if they could be reached, open-sourcing the project would be a logic step that they might be willing to consider and then I or others would be willing to take the lead on getting it setup and modernized enough to compile and use. But here we are in Apr 2021 without much hope.

Jeremy,

I understand and appreciate everything that you've said. And I don't think that we are in great disagreement. Still, there are some things that could keep me up at night if I were to think about them.

There was a recent incident where many of us learned what could happen if the server hosting an important site became unavailable. I was lucky in that the worst I suffered was a week or so of fear, uncertainty, doubt - not to mention the potential loss of clients and the clients' losses of business while their sites were down. I certainly take multiple off server backups a lot more seriously that I once did. Others were not so lucky.

Its all good Joe, I greatly appreciate the conversation. Cheers!!

And to be absolutely clear, I'm not blaming any purchaser of the module or modules or suggesting that they did anything wrong.  There is only one villain:  the company that left all of you high and dry.

Joe,

Were you one of those affected by the Managed.com attack that took down their services last November? I heard a lot of people in the DNN world were affected by it. I never used Managed.com myself, so I was not affected by their outage, thank goodness.

I myself had a similar incident with a VPS of mine last year, but luckily I had offsite backups. I only lost a day of data in my situation.

I really do wish that there was a way to contact this vendor that vanished.

Vendors come and go - that is the way it is. But what I don't understand is: If someone gives up, why doesn't he put the source code to GitHub, so everyone who needs it is able to get it and modify it and bring it foreward...

Happy DNNing!
Michael

Ben,

I was one of the fortunate ones.  All of my Managed.com sites return to service without a loss of data.  Others were not so lucky.  Since then I have diversified, and also taken great pains to make sure that everything is backed up off-site.

I used Telerik's Just Decompile to get the source and re-build the module. I've put the code on GitHub. I have made a hand-full of "improvements."

https://github.com/gflansburg/Reservations

Gafman,

That's awesome! If you don't mind me asking ... what "improvements" did you make. Also ... how did you handle the Licensing portion of the application? Did you create a backdoor license code or another method to make this module work without their licensing servers?

I completely removed the licensing portion.  They were using certs to sign the GUID value of the DNN install.  Since I didn't have access to the private key I was unable to duplicate the signing.  So I removed all those checks and instead you "choose" what version you want and it unlocks it.

The big change I made was with BCC notifications and the other four "user" lists in the settings.  It was designed create a comma delimeted list of UserIDs from the Users table.  We had a need for outside vendors and distribution lists that won't necessarily be in the Users table.  So I changed it to a command delimeted list of email addresses.  In addtion, I added auto-complete to those text fields (when the Users table how more than 100 users) so that it will give you a pseudo drop down list.  You don't have to pick the user from the list and you can now put in any valid email address.  Now that I think about it, if your users list is less than 100 you won't be able to put in any arbriary email address.  Maybe I should just get rid of the less than 100 code all together since I have the auto-complete on the text box.