I refer to the closing of https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...883#post620883 5 minutes ago.
A number of Posts were deleted in advance of this closure.

webmaster has decided to offset a flare-up of the perennial issue of the Update Service, citing the OP's concerns have been addressed.
I was in the middle of a Post when the Thread was closed and as I was cited in the webmaster's Reply, I wish to indicate I was misrepresented without the right of reply.

This is what I was about to Post:

Quote Originally Posted by webmaster View Post
#1 If I had not posed the questions, I would not have seen this document
We created this document for TalkGraphics members. We've posted a link to it in Announcements and the moderators have been briefed to link to it as soon as any question is raised about the Update Service to try and prevent exactly the sort of meandering and sometimes confusing answer we've seen in this thread! Acorn prefers to point to his own thread, Magix prefer to point to their own generic Update Service page but this TG FAQ is tailored to the exactly the questions we see asked in Xara support (with input from the moderators, and if I remember rightly Acorn) and it's hopefully clearer than both!
Kate, your memory is a little shaded. I contributed to the FAQs and I was a Mod at the time. There was absolutely no other Mod input and very little flex from your side so a lot of my observations were omitted.


I don't recall a single Thread where a Mod has Posted the link to the FAQs; I have seen you do so but no others.


Not every Customer of a Xara Desktop application (XDA) is a viewer of TalkGraphics. It took me 10 years to even realise it was useful to me.
To abrogate your responsibility of fairly describing your products' capability to all your Customers with a TG-specific FAQ document is amazing. I have suggested many times that the Download All option should be an XDA built-in option. You are quite liberal in putting hooks into the program to sell Magix products and renewal of the Update service, so this is fully in your gift.


A search in the Xara Desktop Help Center for "download all" returns 202 hits! None explicitly link to a page. By chance, https://help.xara.com/article/50-the-designs-gallery, which not longer exists, being the Local Designs gallery, and https://help.xara.com/article/113-wh...ontent-catalog happen to have an image of Download All, with no word of explanation! After a lot of reading and searching for "download all" in quotes, we find https://help.xara.com/article/185-ho...gner-templates that doesn't really stand out for XDPX users, does it? [https://webdesigner.xara.com/support.../download.jpg]. It is nigh on impossible to raise a Ticket with Magix. All this is a picture of the real word experience your Customers face.


You (Xara) fail to distinguish newly added content which will only run with a particular XDA version so when the Update Service expires and an unfortunate Customer has to reinstall the XDA or even MS Windows, the entire Cache content could evaporate and your 'valued' Customer is left high and dry as the Components in their design file not longer work. To assume this is no big deal indicates that what Xara is offering in its updates is minor. If you did value your Customers, you would be advising of the risk or provide mitigations.


My Thread on what to do after the expiry of the Update Service and XDA reinstallation might better explain things like the limited recovery of the Page & Layer gallery > First Look > Free Example Components or how to extract Components from one's stock of XDA design files. I could even publish a design file that has the kernel of all of your Components (as so many are replays of the same underlying code). It should not be down to me or TG.


Quote Originally Posted by webmaster View Post
"as to what other companies are doing..." Yes, we all do it differently. Adobe for example has a different model, where obviously you lose access to everything, program and all, when your subscription expires. We have all made our different decisions about the best way forward, and what we must all try our best to do is explain how our model works.
The point is your "model" does not work equitably in the real world.


Acorn