Steven Zahm@ Steve
re: I have forwarded your message to our hostmaster, who is usually pretty responsive. I’ll let you know what he says.
Looking forward to find out the reply you receive. Hopefully it is a simple switch they can click!
re: I noticed when I logged in this time and went to the plugins page that there was a noticeable pause for ROT13 and Slim Plus before they separately displayed the new error message and the rest of the page displayed.
Right, that pause is WordPress attempting to connect to my site to check the license status. After a connection is made the response is cached for a day. The status check will not normally cause a noticeable delay but since WordPress has to wait, that causes the slight pause.
In case you are wondering… this was added to the Plugins admin page because I noticed only a small percentage of users took time to activate their support license therefore not benefitting from the updates are released. When they notice there is an update and attempt to do so, they’ll receive an error which generally results in them asking what the error is and how to fix it.
So I believe this will be very helpful while being subtle without be obnoxious (like many other commercial plugin which put their notices on the top of, every, admin page).
re: In any event, Connections and the Slim Plus template appear to be working properly on the front end.
Right, the license activation only affects the ability to run in admin updates. All other functionality will work just fine. I’ve run into a couple plugins which would stop working completely if the license was not valid/expired. I feel that is a little unfriendly so I do not add that type of limitations.