Paddle - whatever the hell Paddle is, claimed, when I tried to recover my activation key, that I don’t have a purchase history!
How can I trust Scrivener in the long term? I keep thinking that one day your system will pull this trick, lock up MY WORK and either hold it to virtual ransom or just never let me open it, cut and past into word and have access to my work.
I’m going to find a way to save the entire file to a word doc and back it up as such after every writing session.
Guess what I am NOT going to ever do. That’s right! Buy Scrivener 3.
No way. Not a hope in hell. This constant disabling of something I have paid for is annoying and downright grubby. I. Will. Never. Buy. Anything. From. You. People. Again.
OKAY - JUST TO CLARIFY - I did find a copy of my receipt with activation key and I have Scrivener working again.
Paddle, I believe, is the merchant.
A third party.
Maybe they have issues with their system (I don’t know, everything is fine for me, V3), but that doesn’t mean that Literature & Latte will let you down.
You definitely should contact them as suggested.
Not everything is a catastrophy.
You should also technically have your activation code in your emails…
Search for “license” or “Scrivener” if you still have access to the email account from back when you first bought it. I don’t think it involves the merchant at this point.
EDIT: I just went through my archives and the merchant for Scrivener V1 on windows was rather eSellerate.
This started a few years ago and it started when they handed over or sold or outsourced some aspect of their thing to Paddle or some other company doing something similar to Paddle.
I love Scrivener - I don’t want to use anything else and I don’t want to feel like I need to save a complete copy so I can compile it and save it as an RTF in order to be certain that my work is safe.
It’s suss and annnoying .
It feels like my work is being locked up by something that actually intrudes onto my computer and decides to have dibs on my work until I jump through hoops to appease it.
Every time it happens it fills me with disgust.
I think it might be time to find an alternative to Scrivener because this is going to keep happening.
Believe it or not, I’ve been doing that. Or haven’t quite…it seems that every time I look in the most logical folder to keep it, it turns out I kept it somewhere else.
It still annoys the hell out of me having to do it.
Anyway, thanks for replying.
It is what it is regarding this intrusive DRM thingy.
I really hope they sort it out one day.
Anyway…back to work…my characters are getting impatient.
I am feeling with you. Experienced the same thing. With Scapple. Back when L&L changed their licencing policy and went to Paddle. Don’t know what’s up with that company. It got resolved eventually, but it was an aggravation I don’t need. Not just the hassle and waste of time, but the mere fact that you can be locked out of something you bought, is very disconcerting.
Luckily, all other software I own does it the old-fashioned way. Whether it’s my file manager (XYplorer) or Screenshot-program (Faststone Capture) or wiki-program (ConnectedText) etc etc — no other program requires activation of any kind. You enter your license code and you’re good to go. For life. No worries that someone may go out of business and you cannot activate your copy any more.
Scrivener got in touch and said that it’s literally out of their hands now that they use an external agency for their licensing. The licensing people are allegedly working on resolving the issue.
I wish they’d get it sorted because I would like to buy a copy of Scrivener 3.
What were Scrivener doing before Scapple and Paddle though? Maybe they could go back to that system.
There is already a thread about this, wherein some of the challenges we face were shared. I’d read through from that point down to get a better understanding of what causes it, and we ourselves cannot fix it.
As noted there, they are working on a new system to replace the buggy one, and hopefully it resolves a number of problems with the current setup, including this one. It is unfortunately taking them longer than we’d like, but we do still keep getting updates about it, which is encouraging.
We were using another vendor that went out of business, necessitating the massive amount of effort it takes to switch vendors. The “funny” thing is that people have seemingly forgotten just how bad the activation toolkit was with the previous vendor. There wasn’t just this one glitch essentially, but dozens of them, on both platforms. We probably removed about a dozen knowledge base articles describing various cryptic activation error codes, some of them with long multi-page troubleshooting guides to fix them. It was horrible. Paddle, by comparison, has been a dream. I know it doesn’t seem like that as one of the few that sees this glitch on a regular basis, but in the grand view, far fewer people are put out by activation these days. Is it perfect? No. What is?
I’m going to go ahead and lock this thread though, because spreading the same exact conversation out over two threads makes no sense. Feel free to contribute over there.
