I don't own GT, but after a LOT of time I've finally figured out that I probably should. Instead, I went with Powerseek. Here's a recent reponse I gave to someone who wanted some feedback from PS owners, which I'm throwing out here just to make all the rest of you feel good about your buying decision. Here it is:
I own PS and, while on the whole it has many things to recommend it, I would not buy it again if I had to do it all over again. In fact, if I hadn't already created a directory with almost 80,000 links and 13,000 subdirectories, thousands of them cross-linked, I would abandon it. Today I would probably go with either In-Link or Gossamer Links, mainly because of the community that both have. Yea, I'd likely go with Gossamer, which has so many people writing add-ons for it. True, you have to pay for many of them, but a lot of them are free and Gossamer probably has at least as many features, at least the important ones, as PS 'out-of-the-box', and it's only $50 more.
With PS, there is NO community, you get only what the developers give you when they want to give it to you. When I bought the script, they had forums, not exactly thriving but they were there, and other members told me that the lack of posts there was because some 'accident' had befallen the previous boards and all the posts had been lost. Well, lo and behold, four or five months after buying the script, the forums were suddenly gone again one day, a victim of some other mysterious system failure, and for several weeks there was only a message that they MIGHT return at some point. They never did. I've owned the PS script for almost 2 years now and the forums have been gone more than half that time never to return, and I'm forced to continually beg for scraps of information about what's going on with the product. Support is usually pretty quick to reply but most of their answers are vague and no time estimations are given for anything, and because they're unwilling to tell you what exactly they're working on you really don't know even what you're waiting FOR. Right now I'm still waiting for the next big version, 3.0, hoping it's going to be really good and remedy many of the complaints I have with the script, but I have only my own 'guesstimate' as to when it'll finally come. I'm thinking that it MUST be by the end of this year, because it's been two years since 2.0 came out, which is about the usual time for these kinds of scripts, it seems - they are all usually VERY slow between major versions.
Anyway, just a couple of the major complaints I have about the script as it is now: YOU CAN'T MOVE DIRECTORIES, for one. This might not seem like such a big deal at first but if you have a large directory like mine you'll soon see that this is a glaring omission. In-Links and Gossamer Links both DO have this capability, btw, as well as other even cheaper scripts. I know of at least one which is only $60 that allows you to do this! Also, you can add fields ONLY when first installing the script, but if you reinstall the script to do so you risk messing up your existing database. Needs change as a project grows and takes on new life, so this sucks. Link-checking in the script is abysmal. As it is, it's broken, to put it simply. When you check categories by ID, it often returns results from other categories. When you check by telnet it...well, it's just f**cked. I've used telnet a few times in the last few days to check links: the first time it returned only 327 broken links out of about 80,000 links, even though I know there were many more than that, because I've been building this directory for almost the last 1 1/2 years and this was the first time I'd run a major check on it - because I was finally about ready to take it live. The next couple times I ran it, despite the search going on for 10+ HOURS at a time, it wouldn't return more than 38 broken links in the admin, despite my being able to clearly see many more than that scrolling by in the telnet window. Focalmedia's response to all this?
"The linkchecker is being revised for ver 3.0 but work on it is not finished. We will include it in ver 2 if version 3 is not released yet."
That's it, their total response. To me it doesn't even sound that important to them. And I have to ask myself: Is it even POSSIBLE that they really tested this feature before release? How can it have been out there for 2+ years and still be this horrible? Haven't other people been complaining about it over all this time? Well, I don't know - because there's no forums!
PS, aside from some nice features, a couple that the other big-hitters don't have, has a fantastic interface, probably the best of them all by far, but in the end it's proof that what's more important is what's UNDER the hood. If 3.0 isn't a HUGE improvement, I'm going to have to abandon it, despite all my hard work.
Hope that helps somewhat. /
And I hope that makes all you GT owners feel good!
I own PS and, while on the whole it has many things to recommend it, I would not buy it again if I had to do it all over again. In fact, if I hadn't already created a directory with almost 80,000 links and 13,000 subdirectories, thousands of them cross-linked, I would abandon it. Today I would probably go with either In-Link or Gossamer Links, mainly because of the community that both have. Yea, I'd likely go with Gossamer, which has so many people writing add-ons for it. True, you have to pay for many of them, but a lot of them are free and Gossamer probably has at least as many features, at least the important ones, as PS 'out-of-the-box', and it's only $50 more.
With PS, there is NO community, you get only what the developers give you when they want to give it to you. When I bought the script, they had forums, not exactly thriving but they were there, and other members told me that the lack of posts there was because some 'accident' had befallen the previous boards and all the posts had been lost. Well, lo and behold, four or five months after buying the script, the forums were suddenly gone again one day, a victim of some other mysterious system failure, and for several weeks there was only a message that they MIGHT return at some point. They never did. I've owned the PS script for almost 2 years now and the forums have been gone more than half that time never to return, and I'm forced to continually beg for scraps of information about what's going on with the product. Support is usually pretty quick to reply but most of their answers are vague and no time estimations are given for anything, and because they're unwilling to tell you what exactly they're working on you really don't know even what you're waiting FOR. Right now I'm still waiting for the next big version, 3.0, hoping it's going to be really good and remedy many of the complaints I have with the script, but I have only my own 'guesstimate' as to when it'll finally come. I'm thinking that it MUST be by the end of this year, because it's been two years since 2.0 came out, which is about the usual time for these kinds of scripts, it seems - they are all usually VERY slow between major versions.
Anyway, just a couple of the major complaints I have about the script as it is now: YOU CAN'T MOVE DIRECTORIES, for one. This might not seem like such a big deal at first but if you have a large directory like mine you'll soon see that this is a glaring omission. In-Links and Gossamer Links both DO have this capability, btw, as well as other even cheaper scripts. I know of at least one which is only $60 that allows you to do this! Also, you can add fields ONLY when first installing the script, but if you reinstall the script to do so you risk messing up your existing database. Needs change as a project grows and takes on new life, so this sucks. Link-checking in the script is abysmal. As it is, it's broken, to put it simply. When you check categories by ID, it often returns results from other categories. When you check by telnet it...well, it's just f**cked. I've used telnet a few times in the last few days to check links: the first time it returned only 327 broken links out of about 80,000 links, even though I know there were many more than that, because I've been building this directory for almost the last 1 1/2 years and this was the first time I'd run a major check on it - because I was finally about ready to take it live. The next couple times I ran it, despite the search going on for 10+ HOURS at a time, it wouldn't return more than 38 broken links in the admin, despite my being able to clearly see many more than that scrolling by in the telnet window. Focalmedia's response to all this?
"The linkchecker is being revised for ver 3.0 but work on it is not finished. We will include it in ver 2 if version 3 is not released yet."
That's it, their total response. To me it doesn't even sound that important to them. And I have to ask myself: Is it even POSSIBLE that they really tested this feature before release? How can it have been out there for 2+ years and still be this horrible? Haven't other people been complaining about it over all this time? Well, I don't know - because there's no forums!
PS, aside from some nice features, a couple that the other big-hitters don't have, has a fantastic interface, probably the best of them all by far, but in the end it's proof that what's more important is what's UNDER the hood. If 3.0 isn't a HUGE improvement, I'm going to have to abandon it, despite all my hard work.
Hope that helps somewhat. /
And I hope that makes all you GT owners feel good!