Unfortunately it does not work for me
Unfortunately this app does not work for me, and i was surprised because there's no many positive reviews stating that the app is working great and being used everyday.
Most of the websites i'm monitoring have motion (slide banners, videos, etc). The issue is that when taking a screenshot and comparing with yesterday, it will show like 30% to 80% change on the website because it's taking a capture on the wrong micro-second portion of the banner for example, that leads to hundreds of "false alerts" on site changes, going to my email because I've set an alert to receive 30%+ changes to be notified, and it's always wrong, no changes, only the "motion bug" again and again.
Note that I haven't tested it lightly, I've tested with almost 500 different websites for 3 days, and could not identify a if a single website had "real changes" because of the "fake alerts".
Also believe that with an app being around for a couple years now, it's very basic. We can't organize monitorings on folders or tag them, we can't sort by date, change % or any other, can't increase the short number of rows to view per page, so for me there's like 20 pages of pagination per day to go through, and a few other things.
As a final thought, IMO this app has everything to be a game changer, but i think the dev team is not fully committed to it, so it's under-developed, or being done at a very slow pace and i'm afraid it won't change.
Wilfried_Pagescreen
May 9, 2024Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to write and share this review even if, of course, I would have preferred something more positive 🙂
There's plenty I could write there, but I think there was a mismatch between the way you've been using Pagescreen and whatever you wanted to achieve. Maybe, as you noted, we're not the best fit for you, and I am sorry about that.
- 500 websites under monitoring is quite a lot and is usually needed for teams/companies rather than individuals. It would require more than 3 days to set up and integrate with existing processes and workflows.
With such volume comes the bias:
- On your 492 monitors, 13 (2.6%) generated at least a change over 30%. That's 20 changes out of 1945 checks total (1%). That's proportionally not hundreds as you wrote, and proportionally/statistically fair and to be expected.
More importantly, by setting up alerts for only significant changes, you likely filtered out the relevant changes to receiving only, or mainly, the false positives with large shifts in layout. Ie:
1. Changing banners on top of a page, which are an edge case, that is true
2. or, blogs and other news pages with heavy change in content.
In terms of feature requests, tags and advanced folders are coming soon. You already have an organization by the domain name in our interface and filters on the dates or change percentage of the page + research options.
As for the development pace of the product, you'll be surprised. The last weeks have been hectic, given the company is self-funded and resources are limited. The AppSumo community has been fantastic in helping identify the next additions adding value to the solution.
After a lot of discussions (over 500!) and heat due to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holidays period, features are now being released.
In the last couple of weeks only, for example, we delivered:
- Enhanced webhook notifications (new alerts + threshold management)
- Bulk Edition capabilities on the monitors of a domain
- Selector for partial monitoring
- ...
We're 100% alive, committed, and there for a very long time! 😉