Hi, this is Benjamin here.   I want to quickly update everyone regarding a change in the provider that we recommend for unhacking services.  I also am inviting your feedback on this issue.  In short, we are no longer recommending that people seek out help from WordPress Help Center.  Instead, we are now referring people to NetCrafted, a company that some of you are familiar with. Scott at  NetCrafted has been helping many of our customers with troublesome WordPress Updates and site migrations for quite awhile.  Now we are referring customers with hacking issues to Scott, as well.

So why the change?  For those that are interested or affected, here are the details.

Frequently, we receive Emailsfrom ProPhoto users asking for advice in getting their blogs unhacked.  We hate hacks and do our best to solve the problem.  Sometimes, simply manually reinstalling WordPress does the trick.

But it’s just not something we specialize in and often the solution requires specialized tools and knowledge. We feel awful when we see this happen and it is important to us that people feel supported, even if all we can do is forward them to someone else who might be able to help.

For a long time, wphelpcenter.com was who we recommended and we received good feedback regarding their services.  They briefly closed up shop at one point but re-opened under new management in the spring of 2011.  At that time, we started recommending them again.  It’s been about a year now, and we haven’t gotten the same good feedback that we received before.  In addition, over the course of the last few months, we have been receiving very negative feedback from some ProPhoto users to whom we recommended their services.

What seems to be happening, at least in the cases we have been made aware of, is that people are paying for unhacking or other services up front (and quite a bit of money, at that), passing on their log in information, and are given a timetable of about a week.  Then, they never hear from wphelpcenter again, the promised work is not performed and they are left with a site that is either still hacked, or in a state of partial disrepair.

Obviously, this is unacceptable.  We have attempted to contact WordPress Help Center, and their president, Nathan Garza, but just like our users, we have not received any response.

I assume this could be for a number of different reasons.  Perhaps they no longer provide unhacking services?  Perhaps they are not dealing with these kinds of individual, one-time-fee services.  We simply don’t know.  Whatever the case may be, we strongly recommend that you NOT contract with them for any services.  You do so at your own risk.

Now, here is where I want feedback from other WordPress and ProPhoto users.

• Has anyone had a different experience with wphelpcenter.com?
• Has anyone else had a similar negative experience?

We would love to have some more information.  Feel free to send that to us directly at http://www.prophotoblogs.com/support/contact/ or comment on this post.