***Reserved***
08/11/2021
With the release of 3.13, we are closing this thread.
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback.
Let’s try this again…
As many of you are aware, Stardock released Fences 3.10 on Steam and Stardock.com late last week (July 22nd), and as you may have noticed, it did not go well. Actually - to say it did not go well would be like retelling the Vesuvius eruption as just another cloudy day in Pompeii...
What happened
We had been working on Fences 3.10 for some time – it was up in beta for several months. It contained a bunch of stuff we were excited to release. However, we missed a couple of things to but it mildly...
-Windows Explorer Crashing
While we were aware of some (rare-ish) Windows Explorer crashes, we believed it was related to customers that had higher than normal security measures as seen here:
https://forums.stardock.com/502301
Turns out, it could also be caused by VERY long URL shortcuts:
https://forums.stardock.com/504691/get;3812652
MUCH thanks to eniom for finding this and providing feedback.
-Wallpaper Engine compatibility
We’d gotten some reports of an issue with Wallpaper Engine and started to take a look, but from our knowledge, the overlap of users with Wallpaper Engine + Fences was quite low so we were OK moving forward with the update while we looked into it. With that, and since the beta on our website had gone well, we decided to go ahead and get the update out on Steam at the same time we released at Stardock without doing an opt-in beta on Steam first. This combination did not turn out well.
In retrospect, Steam would be exactly the place where there would be folks experiencing Wallpaper Engine / Fences overlap and we should have never released on Steam \ Stardock at all while we were still figuring out a solution.
We discovered that WPE issues had actually been introduced into the last version put onto Steam in 2020, but most people didn’t have this version. It was a small update, so we hadn’t pushed it out to existing users (anyone who installed 2017-mid2020). So we had spent our time looking at where in all the recent changes something might have gone wrong. Forum members quickly pointed out that 3.0.9.11 worked whereas 3.0.9.23 did not, which led us right to the answer.
More discussion can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/607380/discussions/0/3055114073639412141/
Within a day, we decided to forgo scrambling to attempt a fix and yanked 3.10 – replacing it with 3.09.11.
What we’re doing
We must start with an apology. We are sorry that certain miscalculations and decisions caused frustration for our customers and support issues for the Wallpaper Engine team (thank you for your help, Tim from WPE). We're also very thankful for the help the Stardock \ Steam population provided – directly contributing to the eventual solutions.
With that, Fences 3.12 is now available at Stardock as a beta and on Steam as an opt-in. Once we’re confident the issue is resolved, we’ll be releasing it to all.
In the meantime, cheers, and enjoy your Fences!
- Stardock Software
