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Hippo Technologies is down?


Cheryne Jewell
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This has been coming for a while now. They have stopped responding to support tickets ages ago. It was only a matter of time before their services stopped working altogether.

I'd suggest switching to CasperVend. It works better then Hippovend. They have great support as well!

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Honestly, I'm surprised it's lasted this long. Support for hippo, and proper functionality, has been gone for a couple of years now. I figured their website and servers would've gone by the wayside shortly after.  When I still had a shop, and land, inworld I used some of their products and they stopped providing any kind of cs or support in 2014, maybe late 2013. 

Not trying to minimize anyone's trouble over this or anything, of course. It really sucks to spend money on something that someone has no intention of actually providing service for. But, if it helps anyone switching, Casper has always come highly recommended, ever since they opened, and I've used their products without any kind of issue. Support is also always available, or almost always anyway(can't say 24/7 since, you know, life and stuff). I'd definitely stick with them. It's a pita to switch over at first(lotta work) but it's worth it.  There are probably a couple other merchants that have similar services and products too, but for the life of me I can't remember any of them atm. 

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Our HippoVend system appears to be failing as well.  I'm sorry to see them go, and really would have appreciated some kind of heads-up to allow time to make a proper transition in-world (as well as back up any recent sales records).  I'm putting signs up at in-world locations directing customers to the SL Marketplace while I get a new system set up, tested, and deployed.

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Pamela Galli wrote:

I dont use the Hippo vendors but I do use the Updater. I am hoping the updater will still work without connecting to anything. Otherwise, disaster.

 

I would not hold my breathe on that, Pamela. If their server is down this mean nothing will work anymore as long they ll be down.

I had a bad experiment with their service years ago and i definitely stopped to use anything related to them, bec i dont know if one day they happend to have a good service, but when i needed to use their group service, it's been a lame. it took me 15 days to finally get an answer from their support service and by this time i could finally solve the issue by myself. I pointed to them the info given by them was wrong and how to fix it. And no matter what, they never corrected the info. I went several times after to check, and it was still the same (they were giving a wrong slurl for ppl to connect into their account).

After this, i know some ppl have complained here in the forum about the fact they stopped completely their support service. But i knew some services were still working like rental system etc.

But it looks like they totally stopped now. So  well time to switch to another system for the ppl using that one till now.

The hippo story confirm my opinion that i dont want to depend on an external server. Even if a system is working today, you can never tell for tomorrow. (It happened to me for a radio system i bought years ago and that stopped suddendly to work one day when they put their server down).

So for my vendor system, i prefer to use one that is not depending on an external server. I use Old Newman's ones for years now, and i am 100 % happy with it. It has redelivery, gift card, report and several other features, its easy to use, it's not expensive like some others and at least, i know that never i will have to face an issue bec a server will be down, except SL one. 

 

I understand that maybe Hippo's owner wants to do something else with their life and so doesn't want to continue the server service, but by all means, the least they could have done is tell their customers. 

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I don't see any valid reason why I would trust a 3rd party, web based, vending processor. Especially if you have hundreds of products.

They are not immune to hacking, or simply just walking away because their ex-wife took all their money, or who knows what....

 I mean how many times you need to re-deliver or update products? you can do all this manually.

The sad thing is, their products are still available for sale.

 

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Well if its from Hippo there is a lot of chance it works from external sever. Your item called server being the inworld server connected to the web server.

As far as i know most of the services from Hippo were hosted on an external server. 

I dont know the update system, but i bet it works a bit like the hippo groups.

With the groups, the list of members was hosted on a webbased server and you could manage it from a website. 

Inworld there was also available features, but if you wanted to move a member to a new role, or send smth group wide, or delete someone etc, you had to do it from the website.

For their rental system, the website was more limited as most of the rental features were done by the boxes themselves. BUT no matter what, those ones stopped working aswell, as another thread (old one, but reactivated from this week) is telling, and its causing a lot of issues to people using them.

This, because the datas collected by the boxes are managed externally on a web based server.

And it looks like everything from Hippo was working that way. So if the inworld items cant connect to this website (because it's down) and so cant access to the datas, then it wont be able to work.

i know nothing about this update system, but it would not surprise me if the datas were also stored outside SL and so your box will no longer have access to them. I hope im wrong :)

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Expect disaster - all their in-world "server" devices rely upon a web server behind the scenes.  To be on the safe side, you may want to try testing your system by pushing out an update on a test item.

A word of caution to makers/creators who use the system - the vending machines still have the appearance of working to customers, and are accepting payments from customers.  Normally, the way it works is like this:

  1. Customer pays vendor
  2. Hippo takes lindens
  3. Transaction recorded
  4. Payment sent to maker
  5. Item sent for delivery
  6. Customer receives item.

However, currently the servers are dead, so only steps 1 and 2 are happening. Go in-world and unregister your vendors asap to both shut them down and revoke the permissions that Hippo Tech has to access your account.

I am currently directing our customers to our SL Marketplace store, and will replace my in-world vendors as soon as possible (it will take me a little while to configure and test a replacement).

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If you recall, Hippo's original creator (Andy Enfield) sold the company to a company (I believe called B and M software group) that would continue to provide server power and offer customer support.  They would continue to sell the products, as well as subscriptions for groups and support packages.

As I'm reading through recent complaints and posts online, it sounds to me that as revenues from sales and subscriptions dropped, they may have either simply pulled the plug, or the business was no longer self-supporting and they've pulled the plug (the generic info part of the site exists, but the account login side does not, and the main store island is no longer accessible.  That's just a guess, it could be anything.

Remember, through those scripted objects merchants have given Hippo Tech access to their account and Linden balance.  You should probably go through your in-world locations and unregister any Hippo products asap (especially including any servers).

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We have checked our sales and it appears payments were correctly made to our creators during the outage. Items were not delivered obviously. So now that servers are up 36+ hours later we can take care of deliveries manually. Believe me we will be working to migrate our 1600 products to another system. For the love of Pete anyone who has Hippo should immediately download all of your sales logs and customer information. Especially if you have hippo groups so that you have it in the event of another meltdown. Grade F to Hippo Tech for communication with it's customers.

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I saw that this was posted...

https://hippotechnologiesnews.wordpress.com

The trouble (for me) is, I don't buy it.  They dismiss it as 'a few well caffeinated hours' but I know from my own firsthand experience, as well as reports I've seen online that it lasted much longer.  The explanation also doesn't address the shutdown of the in-world island main store.  From what I can tell, it's been shuttered, and they're downsizing to a parcel elsewhere which appears to currently have restricted access.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dosojin/235/182/30

(I can hit the landing zone, but the entry-way blocks me with the 'cannot enter the parcel, you are not on the access list' error).

I agree, this is a major communications fail and I no longer trust them.  Time to back up customer data and work on a transition plan.

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I went through this years ago when Apez collapsed. very fraught, very time consuming.

 

The result was that I bought the Hippo system but found a number of issues such that I didn't deploy it and after conversation with Andy at the time, found his approach way below a standard of customer service that one would expect. He didn't like me commenting on certain security issues with the system and preferred to ban me and cancel all open support tickets. That set the tone for my experience.

 

Result was a stellar piece of effort on my SL partners behalf, as he created or own custom web based vending system in under two weeks and the feature set left others in the shade.

 

Anyone experiencing the wrong end of a vending system fail and subsequent migration has my sympathy and very rare from me...a hug!

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FWIW they moved the store a while back months or more... that is not recent. It's also been in a restricted access state since it moved. My guess is that the new owners bought HIPPO but really has no idea how to manage or run a business in sl. Pure money grab since they certainy don't understand communication or customer service... they also have not demonstrated any ability to devlope or impove their products. 

I checked rackspace... https://status.rackspace.com/ it does appear they had some sort of storage migration beginning the 24th and ending the 26th.

The problem however is the lack of communication or responsiveness from HIPPO about the problem. One might also say tohave your store inworld and not realizing for months (or more) that the land is not accessable to customers is an extreme lack of attention to details. Hate to sound B-I-you-know-whaty... But in this case it's probably deserved. :matte-motes-smile:

 

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AdamZadig wrote:

Do you think the HippoRent will be ok? I dont think that uses an exrternal server does it? I literally was just about to set up some skyboxes with them! lol. 

Not if it's the same company. Hippo has been going downhill since shortly after its inception, and at this point, I'm positive the person in charge doesn't give two craps. If he/she did, the products would have ben taken off the market until things could be fixed, as was stated some time ago. That never happened, and nothing was ever actually fixed.

I would absolutely not use *any* of their products. Even if all seems "fine" now, it has done this before, and there is a glaringly obvious pattern with the company. The company has already proven to have no qualms with providing absolutely no customer service, taking services down(not just for maintenance) and not contacting customers before or even after it was done.

There are much better products, just about any of them are better at this point.

 

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