I’m so disappointed with ThemeForest.

I’m so disappointed with ThemeForest. Our agency has been using it for a while, purchasing several themes for our clients, allowing them to choose the ones they wanted. While it’s been a mixed experience, most theme support has been decent, until now.

We recently encountered extremely bad and toxic support. Despite the theme having only 5-star reviews, I was shocked by how poor the support was. I decided to leave a 1-star review, hoping it might prompt the theme’s admin to respond and address our concerns. A few days later, I checked back, expecting to see some effort to make things right, but instead, I discovered my review had been removed.

This completely shattered my trust in ThemeForest. It feels no different than platforms like Trustpilot, where you can pay for good reviews. Has anyone else experienced something similar?

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@andersjensen055

Ratings and reviews can be left as a reflection of a customer’s experience of the item they’ve purchased. However, authors can challenge reviews left, and also Envato have a Rating or Review Removal Policy.

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It’s all about expectation from the support and most of the cases, buyers are confused what the support is or what the modification is.

This may be your case as well as most of the cases are related to the same expectations.

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Of course my review was completely honest and based on my own experience… I mean as a business owner myself, I understand how these things work, they remove negative reviews to make it seem like there’s nothing but positive feedback. It’s dishonest and not the way I prefer to operate tbh.

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I wouldn’t say I had huge expectations. I’ve been doing web design and SEO for over 7 years, so I know how things work. We usually only contact support when we’ve exhausted all other solutions. In this case, a student in the office reached out regarding a theme a customer had already purchased, it wasn’t an in-house design or anything.

I mean i do believe in the idea of helping each other in this field. And yes, I understand that support for a $60 theme is naturally limited. But the issues we faced were simple things, like asking how to fix laggy elements or making minor CSS adjustments. To me those are fair support requests.

What’s most disappointing tho, is seeing Envato remove honest reviews for their own benefit. That feels incredibly dishonest and undermines trust in the platform.

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If there’s any issue with the item, you may request an update for the item and the author should/would consider your suggestion but it doesn’t mean that you’d get the item updated right away.

For minor CSS adjustments, as stated, it’s on the gray area and it can be considered as “modification/customization” and it’s up to author.

About the review removal, as @123Simples suggested, if it fell under the category that it can be removed for some reasons, the review can be removed by the Envato team after reviewing the details.

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I suspect this played a big part in the issue - the author wouldn’t be able to determine the circumstances except that it was not the buyer asking for support which makes it understandable that they would be hesitant to help.

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We are the buyer, and the student is one of our employees in the office :slight_smile: You misunderstood this. We assigned it to a student because it’s a small website design. Normally, we design and develop our own sites.

After all, what we requested was basic support. I mean this is one of the reasons Envato themes are falling behind, as more people are opting to hire designers and developers to create custom themes. Custom themes come with fewer issues, are faster, lighter, and tailored specifically to each site.

That’s exactly what we’ve done and what we always recommend to our customers. Using themes from Envato has been nothing but trouble, and I’m sure you’d agree, especially if you run an agency, that the best theme is one that’s customized for the specific site.

True but for many buyers it’s a question of thousands of $ vs less than $100

You’d be shocked how many agencies (not in any way reflecting yours) plug Envato themes as client projects without being transparent with clients and then things get very complicated when they can’t develop/manage it without author support

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It’s the trouble for you to solve as an agency, you cannot charge your client and ask for author to fix the issue you/they are having. If you’re unable to provide the support as an agency for your clients apart from depending on authors support, that’s the situation you need to figure it out/solve. It’s unfair to claim the support is not good while your client is having an issue with the theme you have purchased/promised to the client the scoop of the service.

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Sounds like you might be a theme owner who dealt with bad reviews, but don’t take this personally, this isn’t aimed at you directly.

The issues we’re facing are theme-related, like bugs or incomplete functionality (e.g., menus opening on the wrong side or themes needing updates). These aren’t customizations, they’re basic fixes that should’ve been handled in the theme.

And of course we’re not charging the client since they already bought the theme. But we’ve had to bring in our developer to adjust the child theme because, like some Envato themes, it wasn’t fully coded or polished.

You’re definitely right, but in the long run, I’d always recommend developing a custom theme or hiring someone to do it. It saves a lot of hassle with future updates. That said, there’s nothing against prebuilt themes, they’re great, and we’ve actually used a few in the past! :slight_smile:

Removing honest reviews is even worse, it feels like it undermines the whole point of feedback. I’ve had similar experiences on other platforms, and it’s definitely frustrating.

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@andersjensen055

Just catching up now on this thread. Firstly I’m sure your review on whichever theme or script this was, was meant with good intent from yourself. All of us mods and forum members on the forum platform do not work for Envato, nor do we get some sort of back-hander, pay-off, extra payment or sweets just to give our help and advice. In that case we have nothing to gain when we participate on the forum, and as undoubtedly appreciate, we are just here to help :slight_smile:

I am 100% a buyer so I get where you are coming from. Sometimes themes and scripts don’t always work the work I expect them to, and in my own personal cases, either I have worked it out myself, or I ask the developer for some help. HOWEVER, if I have bought a theme, then after the support period has expired, I don’t expect them to even answer me but they do. It might not be that case with you - perhaps you bought a theme, then asked for help within a matter of days or weeks?

Okay so how is that any different POTENTIALLY to a theme sold on the marketplace?

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I get what you’re saying, and just to clarify, my intention wasn’t to spread hate, that’s why I didn’t name the theme. It’s just frustrating when honest reviews get deleted. I’m just here to discuss it with you all since we’re in the same kind of market :slight_smile:

I still had 4 months of support left, and we usually don’t contact support unless there’s really no other way to fix the issue ourselves. In this case, we did, and while it’s not a big deal, we always find a solution, it’s frustrating when support doesn’t actually help with what it’s meant to.

About developing custom themes, we have an in-house developer, and yeah, a custom-built theme designed specifically for your business or site tends to have fewer issues. They’re also lighter since they don’t come with all the extra features needed to suit every type of site. That’s not to say prebuilt themes are bad, they’re great for many projects, but they won’t be perfect for everything. Custom development just has its own advantages for certain cases.

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@andersjensen055

Thank you for your reply. I agree it can be frustrating if honest reviews are removed - every business needs to accept that not everyone is going to be happy. I take your point on custom theme development too :slight_smile:

I’ve experienced something similar with ThemeForest… It’s really disheartening to see this happening on a platform we once trusted. I feel like this kind of moderation undermines the reliability of user reviews. Hopefully, ThemeForest will take these issues seriously and make necessary changes.