I've had SEF Advance installed on our site for a long time. It was very easy to set up and worked perfectly so I had no complaints at all 

Then late last night I went to our site to discover this message:


Error!

The installed copy of SEF Advance is not licensed for [SITE]
Please notify the site admin to purchase a valid license of SEF Advance for this site at http://www.sakic.net

I had made no changes to the site (and haven't done for some time). So I sent off an email to ask for advice about why this error suddenly occurred. I also searched the FAQ and the forum on here but found nothing that helped.

I also contacted our host but he couldn't see anything that would have resulted in problems.

What our host did do though is reply very quickly. He always does.

What I didn't get and still haven't is a reply from SEF Advance.

So not wanting a non working site and worse still a message on our site accusing of us being thieves, despite having happily paid to use this component, I had to uninstall. I tried a reinstall but even with the component disabled the error/thief message showed.

Having uninstalled the component of course all our links are broken. Not just within the site but on our blog (on a separate domain). So in desperation I've had to turn to an alternative SEF component. And to my surprise the free component I'm now using seems to be at least as good, if not better! Its taken an hour of fiddling about but thats quicker than waiting for a response about why SEF Advance isn't working.

Now I'm sure that somehow despite having done nothing, this will have still been my fault. But what I would advise to anyone thinking of purchasing SEF Advance is that you do take the risk that if something like this does go wrong you can't do anything about that message appearing on your site (and certainly not the image we want!). If you choose to use the free alternative you're not going to get that message because theres no need for it!

Maybe there are very good reasons to choose SEF Advance over the alternative but so far I can't see what they would be. I have no problem at all paying for good components and SEF Advance was a good component for our site. It would have made all the difference to have some sort of reply to my email - even if it didn't help solve the problem it would at least have given the impression of being a valued customer.

I wasn't meaning to be argumentative - I think the components excellent but I think more people than just me would assume that if a plug in is listed on your list of extensions it will be compatible.

If it bothered me more I'd have willingly offered to pay a developer to fix the plug ins to work with our site - instead I've set up manual redirects and that seems to be working ok.

I asked the initial question on here because you'd said "I understand that Virtuemart is one of popular components and I am willing to help but then I require your assistance." - so I thought I'd leave a message to offer to help and to ask if there had been no progress - thats all and I'd have happily accepted a "no" response - as it is I got no response which to me is worse than a negative one.

I'm not meaning to waste your time now and I don't mean to kick off a load of trouble - I thought that maybe other people would be wondering the same as I was about whether this component can work with virtuemart. My experience is that the plug in linked to from this site doesn't work - however if you don't have too many products you could try setting up a redirect for each product url.

I do understand that it must be very frustrating having people constantly pester you about third party scripts but I think thats probably inevitable when its pretty much impossible to track down the authors of some of those scripts. I only asked because it looked as though you may have been starting some work on this one - please accept my apologies for doing so.

In the end I had to redirect each product url manually - not ideal but it mostly seems to work so far.

I realise the third party components aren't the responsibility of SEF Advance but I did check that it was (supposedly) compatible with Virtuemart before purchase and seeing it listed on the extensions of this site was the deciding factor for my purchase.

Unless I'm the only person this extension doesn't work for - it seems to me that the leaving the version listed on this site is a bit misleading. I also think a reply (even if it was to say no!) wouldn't have gone amiss.

Other than this the only other problem I've found is that I had to disable community builder SEF url's because it caused a problem with the registration on our site. Besides that I've had no problems at all and the component is excellent - so I'm not complaining - I just think maybe the information could be more up to date and less misleading.

thanks - tried that and it almost works but unfortunately it does weird things to my module positions so can't use it 

Hi - was there any development on this? If not what help do you need? I can't code but am happy to help out if there is anything I can do because I'd like this functionality too