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Prior to June 2007, I've never received any payments to my knowledge for about 8 months which doesn't make any sense since I was advertising Second Life on one of my major TSO sites + on my SLP site. In June I (and other people that I know) suddenly received their first L$500 payout and after complaining, I received an additional L$1500. The same happened to 2 other people I know. Somebody else told me that they also received an affiliate payout in June from a person who became premium about 2 years ago. At this moment I seem to be getting payouts every few days which makes a lot more sense but the question still remains - "was the refer-a-friend program broken prior to June 2007?".
Thanks for the additional info and for your patience, Yo – I'll ask our billing & webdevs and see what we can find out for you.
Yo, I heard back: we have an earlier internal issue related to another Resident who's reported similar problems, and I'll be looking out for other concerns.
We don't conclusively know yet whether/when the Refer-A-Friend program was broken, but over the last stretch of months, a lot of changes have happened to our billing code for PCI compliance, anti-fraud measures, etc. and it may have inadvertently affected referrals too. We're hoping to a more service-oriented code base, so various pieces of functionality will be much better isolated from each other. This will hopefully mean less of this kind of breakage. In the meantime, I apologize for the confusion and trouble this has caused you, and will be sure to update this as I get further updates. I explicitly refferred my RL fiance back in February, a few days after I myself had joined, and we both became Premium members within a few days. I have NEVER received anything for his referral. Or do you mean because he joined with the annual subscription rate, it will take TWO YEARS for me to get anything???
added to category "New Account Creation"
Outdated is not a resolution - reopened.
Alright so what happened to payouts prior to June 2007? What's the sense keeping this topic open if LL doesn't know the answer? If they didn't know the answer back in 2007, why would you guys suddenly know the answer at the end of 2008? Instead of moving this topic from one spot to another, just close it so you discontinue wasting LL resources. You would think since I posted this issue that I should be able to close it as well.
Linden either needs to fix the problem or stop offering the incentive - although you first noted the problem last year, it's still current and the referrals still don't work. At this point, it gets closed when Linden fixes it or they say it's not going to be fixed.
Mark - this topic is not about referrals currently not working (because I'm getting payouts right now), it's about the referrals not resulting in payouts prior to June 2007. If you believe referrals are currently not functioning correctly, you need to submit this as a separate issue because that's not what this one is about.
yo-
please open the profiles of a few of the accounts you've been getting payouts for. Please check their join dates. Then report back here. Thanks. In particular, I'm interested to see if any of your payouts are from accounts created after July 2008 (That's an 8, not a 7). If there are, I'm interested to know if the new signup used the new registration portal or the old one. (This would require more work than just opening their profile).
Yes I know this discussion probably belongs in https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-841  , but if you run SLProfiles.com, you might have some valuable information.
BTW, I don't see the harm in keeping the issue open – the June 2007 problem and July 2008 problem might be related. Perhaps the "billing code" problem has resurfaced. Possible or no? My working theory is that its the new registration portal causing the problem. But only the Lab can know. It's still broken based on my own recent experiences in referring and related WEB-841 notes it as such. If the problem is supposedly fixed for you and it's just a matter of not getting a past bonus, that should probably be an individual support issue, but the task is still valid, there's a Linden assigned; ergo, let Linden fix or close this & any related issues. Also, while there's a related task, this task shows that the problem has been unresolved since you opened it (giving a historical reference), and there's nothing to suggest that it was fixed in the interim. Lack of response from LL is not a resolution & the JIRA is a collaborative effort
Here is an example of a referral bonus that I received
Date: 2008-11-29 04:21:49 You know looking at my results, you guys seem to be right - this seems to be the only referral I've received money for in a very long time (I received 2 payments of L$500 for him) while I used to receive payouts at least once a week. thank you very much, yo, for pulling up that profile.
the picture is becoming clearer.... I've never received anything for anyone I referred either..
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Bug
Reopened
Major
Refer-a-friend program broken (prior to June 2007?)
of last year. I haven't receive a payout until last month and according to Linden Lab the 3 ppl that signed up just joined Second Life. Since we get about 1.5-1.8 million page views a month on SLProfiles.com, I highly doubt it is possible that nobody ever became a premium member between last October and June so it's clear that the refer-a-friend program hasn't been working for at least 6 months. Nobody at Linden Lab (even program manager Glenn Linden) is able to give me an explanation for what happened which leaves me with the JIRA. How many people have been effected by this bug? Strange but when I received my first payout in June, suddenly a few of my friends who never received a payout before also received their payout. So - what happened with all the payouts prior to June?
I found one related internal issue, that the Premium referral "payout will happen over three months". The wording on our website was wrong and confusing, and we've changed it:
========-Referees must be billed successfully for two billing cycles in order for the referrer to receive credit. Referral credits are then given according to the following schedule:
1. L$500 at the beginning of the referree's second billing cycle, approximately 31-35 days after they upgrade.
2. L$500 one month after the first credt.
3. L$1000 one month after the second credit.
========-Source: http://secondlife.com/community/referral.php
Does that apply at all to your case?