My plugin stopped working: why, and how to get it back
You opened the program and the plugin is not there, or a message says your key is not valid. The good news is that there are only four likely causes, and three of them take less than a minute to fix. Read them in order — the first one is the commonest by a wide margin, and most people stop there.
First, what kind of tool this is
The tool that stopped is tied to your membership of somebody's community rather than to a single purchase. Your copy holds a key, and every so often it asks one question with it: is the person holding this key still a member? A yes, and it keeps working. A clear "that membership ended", and it stops.
Which means most stoppages are not a fault in the tool at all. Something changed in one of three places: your membership, your key, or your copy's connection. The four causes below are those three, plus one rarer case.
If you want the whole mechanism rather than the fix, it is written up separately in the guide on membership licences. This page is for getting back to work.
1. Your membership ended — this is the common one
You left the community, or a subscription ran out, or a renewal payment did not go through. The membership is the licence, so when the membership ends the product stops after a grace window.
That grace window explains the thing that confuses people most: the tool kept working for days after you left, and then stopped out of nowhere. The window is up to seven days, and the stop lands at the end of it, not at the moment you left.
The one step: rejoin. Open the community page, join again or restart your subscription, then run the tool once while you are online. It comes back on its own — there is nothing to copy and nothing to paste.
And if you are sure your membership is fine, check the community page anyway. A second account you signed in with by mistake, and a card that expired quietly, are both far more common than they sound.
2. You made a new key, and the old one stopped
Your key is not stored as you see it — only a fingerprint of it is kept. That is why there is no way to show you your old key again: every press of "show my key" creates a new one and kills the previous one in the same breath.
So if you ever opened that window to check something, and did not paste the new key into the tool afterwards, the tool is still carrying a key you retired yourself.
The one step: open "show my key" on the product inside the community, copy the key you are shown now, and paste it over the old one in the tool's settings. Whatever is on your screen is the only key that works.
3. It went too long without connecting
The tool does not ask over the internet every time you run it. If it did, it would fail on a plane and in every outage. Instead it holds a temporary permission with an expiry date on it and works offline until then. That is a stored permission that runs out, not a permanent licence sitting on your side.
The permission lasts up to seven days. If you have been travelling, or working somewhere without a connection, or a firewall at work blocks the program from reaching out, it can run out before the tool ever gets a chance to renew it.
The one step: get online and run the tool once. The permission renews in a second, and you are back to working offline afterwards.
Notice the difference here, because it matters: losing your connection does not by itself stop anything. Only a clear "that membership ended" answer stops a tool. Silence, an error and a slow reply are all treated as keep-working until the stored permission runs out.
4. The seller retired it, or it was taken down
This is the rarest case and the one worth understanding. A seller can retire their own product and stop handing it out. And the platform can take a file down when what members report about it warrants that — in which case every key for it stops answering.
How to tell: open the product page inside the community. If it says the item is no longer available, this is your cause, and no amount of rejoining or re-pasting will change it.
The one step: message the community owner. The product is theirs — Nadi issues the keys and verifies the membership, and nothing more — so what happens next, a replacement or a refund or neither, is their call to make.
What the seller can actually see
Worth knowing before you write to them, and more worth knowing where it ends.
- They see the list of people holding keys to their own product, and nothing at all about anybody else's.
- For each key they see whether it is still live, and when that person's copy last asked — or that it has never asked once.
- They do not see where you are. No city, no country, no network address. That is not hidden from them; it is not recorded in the first place.
You can read half of that picture yourself. The "show my key" window has a line saying when your copy last checked in, or that it has not yet. That one line splits two very different problems: "has not checked in yet" means the key never reached the tool or the tool is not asking, and "checked in an hour ago" means the trouble is somewhere else entirely.
If it is none of the four
Then it is probably not about the membership at all. An update to the host program broke the plugin, a settings file went bad, or you are running an old version of the tool. Those belong to whoever made the product, not to the platform underneath it.
When you write to them, three things will save you both half the conversation: the last four characters of your key, what the "last checked" line in your key window says, and the exact words of the message you saw.