Goodbye Shareaholic – Hello Monarch

I am switching all my sites AND my clients sites from the Shareaholic plugin to the Monarch Social Sharing plugin.

I REALLY liked Shareaholic. I loved the way it looked, the way it worked… I really loved most everything about it. Until I found out they were cheating me and every other user of their plugin.

How were they cheating us? By changing our affiliate links in order to steal our affiliate sales. You can read more about what they were doing here. I’m thankful for the WP Site Care Team who brought this to my attention.

It appears that Shareaholic may be changing some things in response to being ‘found out’, but it doesn’t matter anymore. I can’t trust them now.

All the more reason to be really careful about the WordPress plugins you choose. When you add a plugin to your WordPress site, you are letting that author of the plugin have access to your site. Do your research.

Using the Shareaholic plugin shows that even with research, you can still get a bad plugin. Even so, it’s worth the risk to use an open source product such as WordPress because of the time and cost savings. The good thing is that the plugins are easily replaced and problems can usually be fixed when we find out there are abusers and hackers on our site. We just have to know who to call.

So, if you are using Shareaholic for sharing to social media sites, I recommend that you change it out as soon as possible. There are many other plugins out there that will do the same thing. I chose Monarch because I trust Elegant Themes who made the plugin. Perfect timing for them to launch their new social sharing plugin!

I like the way Monarch looks and feels. It has lots of options so that I can customize it for my sites. And they have my trust. So, go ahead and share this post. Let others know that they shouldn’t use the Shareaholic plugin.

If you need help switching out your plugin, please let me know. I’ll be happy to help you out.