Newspaper Theme 12.5 License Activation Not Working

I bought the newspaper theme 12.5 from Themeforest, installed the required plugins, but I can’t activate the license as it keeps bring error “sorry you are not allowed to view this page” I have checked everything with my host and admin permission and they’re working fine, I don’t know why the theme is not allowing me activate the license key, I’m stressed out from trying for almost 4hours.

Same issue here. They seem to be slow to react and fix their issue. Others have posted in this same forum about the same problem, and their technical support people want wp-admin access to your website so they can presumably manually activate the product… I cant/wont give wp-admin access for security reasons. I too have wasted a lot of time trying to activate. About to leave a negative review because they’ve known about this issue for at least a week now I believe, and no fix and they still sell the product without updating their product page to notify the customers that there is an activation issue and you’ll have to contact support between Monday thru Friday in whatever timezone they use…which would be nice to know before you buy. It certainly shouldnt take more than a week to fix their activation issue or develop a new method…should be a high-priority task to make the most essential of installation features work properly for new customers…

If I could get a refund, it would have been amazing; the fact that you can’t get a refund and their theme isn’t installed makes me feel like I have been scammed.

Yeah i feel your pain. They should have at least a tier 1 “site down” critical support ticketing/alerting system where a customer can still get through to someone for support even if its a weekend. At the very least, if multiple customers like us all open a tier 1 ticket for the same reason, that should raise a red flag. Ive worked in IT for 2 decades and it must be nice to never have anyone on call or work a weekend lol. I personally dont want a refund, I just desperately need the product to work. I was intending on building my website all weekend and now I literally cant do anything except write the pages and blog posts in a text editor, and since I have a day job, I cant work on building my site until next weekend again…assuming they can fix the activation issue this week, without wp-admin access to my site, because I cant allow backdoor access to my site due to security concerns. Looks like they released this build of their Newspaper Theme on August 10th…which means activation has been broken since the 10th IF its a client-side issue…however it could be a service or API/connectivity failure on their own primary server that manages the activations, and who knows precisely when that issue may have started if thats the case. I saw another person mentioning activation issues in this forum on Aug 14th or 15th. Today is August 19th and apparently it wont be fixed until at least August 21st because they wont be back to work until Monday… and thats assuming they can fix it on Monday. I really need/want this software to work. I shut down and moved my site off another platform and this is lousy timing for me to start building a new wordpress site with this theme since I cant build right now. I think this theme will be fantastic though, so I have to suck it up and wait now.

• This reply was modified 2 years by the-website-builder.

Looks like I cannot delete/edit my prior comments in the forums here. Not sure how it sounds like I had two different errors though. I had one problem. I clicked the “activate” button, and nothing happened, no matter what I tried.

I did however, get a direct email reply from your support team, not sure if it was you or someone else who replied. They mentioned the following, which ended up being very helpful for me figuring out the root-cause of my issue, so I’m posting it here to hopefully help others in the future: Check with the browser inspector in the console, there is an error like so for example – https://prnt.sc/mbuXJ2imLhBy Is this perhaps happening in your case as well? Or are there other errors in the console perhaps?

In my case, the problematic plugin for me was an SMTP email plugin that allowed me to force WordPress to use AWS SES to send all of my emails, and for some reason, the Newsletter Theme would not let me activate the product because the SMTP plugin kept trying to do something with the email address field in the Newsletter Theme Activation Form. I disabled/uninstalled my SMTP wordpress plugin, then activated the Newsletter Theme, and then I re-enabled my SMTP email plugin, because I need that in order to get WordPress to send-out reliable emails to my customers…. Im really hoping that the YaySMTP plugin doesnt break other functionality within your Newsletter Them in the future… I’ve asked your support people if I could please send you the YaySMTP plugin so that you can fix your Theme so that it no longer conflicts with the YaySMTP plugin….I feel like other basic SMTP plugins would do the same thing with your Theme.

In order to help others save a LOT of time in the future, can you please post the following on your license activation help article on your website? Had I discovered the earlier comments that I received from your support team, on your Newsletter Theme license activation “how-to” page, it would have saved me considerable time and headache this weekend with identifying the problem-plugin: Check with the browser inspector in the console, and look to see if there an error, for example – https://prnt.sc/mbuXJ2imLhBy – Is this perhaps happening in your case as well? Or are there other errors in the console perhaps? If you are seeing errors, it may well easily identify a plugin problem going on with your website

Last thing I’d like to ask, can you please advise me on how to manually activate the product should I ever need to? I can see in your code after doing lots of searching, that there at least used to be a manual activation method….but the URL that pointed to manual activation from my website is no longer accessible on your end:

If your company recently removed the ability for us to manually activate the product, then I beg you to please bring that functionality back…my example should be enough of a good use-case for you offering this feature.

Thank you for your time and help.

Happy to provide my plugin for futher testing on your end. WP Mail SMTP is great, but its very expensive in comparison to YaySMTP. Thanks for your feedback.