Just one questions, why we didn’t hear about “grandfathering process”?
For buyers who purchased before Sep 01, 2015, Can I provide support for free as I promised?
Actually, we have a client made a purchase before the Item Policy Changes, and he contacted Envato staff, they replied:
“We also have a “grandfathering process” for these items. This means that any item purchased prior to Sept 1st will be held under the support policy that was in place during this time. So if the author offered lifetime support when you purchased it, they are required to provide lifetime support for your purchase.
Should you have problems with the item support, please let me know.”
This was never kept a secret. Envato staff mentioned it several times in the initial conversations on the forums.
It may be that it was not overly discussed because prior to the changes the ‘lifetime support’ was an unenforceable agreement between the author and the buyer and one which envato have no control over.
To bring this into the conversation around the new policy whereby envato are able to further enforce support, at least for the first six months may have caused unnecessary confusion.
The new policy did not ever change anything it only added a benefit and peace of mind to buyers.
As far as i know (always best to open a ticket with support to double check), offering support to buyers from before the new policy is ok and up to you.
I believe that envato prefer authors not to ‘advertise’ it (like many used to) for the very reason as mentioned before that they understandably want to avoid confusion between enforceable support (first 6 months under new policy) and voluntary support (as it always used to be).
As for checking - I am not an author but can you not check purchase info via the API?