LIveJournal stole my Referral Fees... Do you think it will do something to replace them?

[reviews_and_ramblings]

All right, thank to the tip found on this LJ

http://caffeinepuppy.livejournal.com/214632.html

or maybe thank to something LJ did overnight, the out links to Amazon pages are now working. But I'm not satisfied! LJ has still not replied to my support request if not with lame excuses, and to give you an idea, in December my Referrals fees were 35 dollars, in January 36 and in February 6! So, more or less, LJ stole 30 dollars from me. They could at least give me 2 years of paid account, or something similar, at least they could answer me!

The only answer I had from them is:

"This problem can be caused by the presence of malware, such as adware or spyware, on your computer and you may wish to perform a scan of your computer to make sure your computer is not infected. Information on what malware is and how to remove it can be found at [http://community.livejournal.com/howto/31316.html]."

Yeah, sure!

Instead the last reply from Amazon was:

"Our technical specialists have investigated the problem with your links, and have determined that it is due to something on the Live Journal system. We suggest that you contact Live Journal to see if there has been a change in their policies for affiliate marketing links."

So Amazon did answer me, and probably they even spent time in investigating, and I'm not paying them! I instead have a paid account with LiveJournal, and they are still not answering me.

I don't know if you can see the request, but this is the link:

http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=1046745

I have no problem to share it, I'm still laughing at the spyware answer

BTW my post on this issue is dated February 22: http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/964023.html, but LJ did nothing to help me. Only tonight, after people started to repost about it, something happened. I don't really like the attitude that, if the problem is not public, LJ will do nothing...

ETA: from what I read, I noticed the problem with Amazon, but that happened with ALL referral fees from 150 website (included, i.e. ebay), and all the referrals fees went to the same Associate ID... I would really like to know the name of the owner of that ID. Yesterday night LJ removed the code, and today I found two referral fees on my Amazon account, that was more or less usual before the code. So LJ for more or less a month stole my referral fees, and so it did for all LJ users with an Associate ID from a variety of website.

Comments

Not responding

[pabrown.livejournal.com]

It seems to me a lot of the big sites are like that. I hear a lot of people have problems with groups like Facebook, but they say trying to get an answer from them is next to impossible. We've all seen how bad it can be getting answers from Amazon, now LiveJournal. These groups are so huge and so labyrinthine and powerful they seem to forget who made them that way, and that it's okay to ignore the 'little people' who swarm around their sites like busy little ants.

Re: Not responding

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

What probably piss me off more is that they probably knew what they have done and tried to "sell" me the theory of the spyware malfunction, as if I did something and not them. Elisa

Re: Not responding

[pabrown.livejournal.com]

That is so common. You go to someone for computer help and it somehow is automatically someone else's fault. It's never their software. It just drives me crazy when these sites make it so hard to contact them, or when you do, you get canned responses that don't address your issue, but give blanket solutions. Sometimes I wonder if real people even read the emails that come from their contact us pages.

Re: Not responding

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

Ditto! Elisa

[kika-k.livejournal.com]

Ok. Ammetto che anche se ho capito quello che hai scritto per me è arabo.
Cmq. Hai mai pensato di avere un account permanente?

ciao

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

Si, ma costava un po' troppo, magari in futuro... Elisa

[semioticwarrior.livejournal.com]

WTFH?????

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

Ditto! Elisa

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Hi! We don't know each other at all, but I have a permanent account here, and I wanted to mention that how they react to your loss is going to be a major factor in whether I keep my journal on LJ or move to Dreamwidth.

Now that they've been pressured into acknowledging the problem, the only remaining question is whether Livejournal can be pressured into taking responsibility for their mistake, or whether they think smiling and declaring the problem fixed will be enough to shut up their users.

Please let us know whether they do anything about your lost affiliate fees.

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the comment, I'm so pissed off (sorry the bad language) that I for sure will post about it, good or bad the answer will be. What really bother me is not really the 30 dollars, is not knowing where people went after leaving my LJ. I use the Amazon Associate account to monitor people interest in the books, to know what my friends like or not. I use the money I gain from Amazon to buy other books to read and review, especially books of new and unknown authors, so, really this behavior of LJ did damage me a lot, in many way, not only monetary.

And what REALLY pissed me off was the first answer, about the fact that mine was a spyware problem: they possibly couldn't have misunderstood my request, they knew that they did something, and that answer was really ridiculous.

Elisa

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

I have a journal over on Dreamwidth, and since hearing about the malware ads that Livejournal allows, I'm leaning toward making the switch. It's a nuisance, but there's a lot of international crime going on on the net, and I don't want to support a site that facilitates it (which LJ does by allowing these ads.)

http://void-star.net/2010/01/livejournal-malware-interstitial-advertising-and-you/

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

Even if it not seems, I'm really a luddite. I spent a lot of time to understand how to use LJ, how to personalize my LJ, how to make it pretty. I have a DW account, but every time I go there, I run away scared, I'm not able to modify the template to be like the one I have here, I'm not able to personalize the menu, and so on... Yes I know, it's stubbornly, but I WANT my LJ to be as it always was, simple and easy. Elisa

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

So do I. I don't like change on someone else's terms, and computers are all about other people changing the tools I want to use. But once the original LJ team sold the system, it was only a matter of time before it became just another corporate piggybank.

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

I started to use more actively GoodReads, I'm already on Amazon, obviously, and on LibraryThing, in a way, I'm already in other media, so, I can consider LJ only another place where I can write. Sure, I don't have all the appointments on the other websites, and some of them, like the Inside Readers, are good post, but still, I'm not so linked to LJ as before. Elisa

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

If you want to contact Amazon about this, it might help to know that the replacement affiliate ID for Amazon was "5336432744-20".

Which, if the textual affiliate ID the same setup was slapping onto Target links is to believed, belongs to "Performics_Driving Revenue Inc".

Those are the only two sites whose affiliate IDs I looked at. Now I'm kinda tempted to do a little scripting to hit the outboundlink.net redirect server with links to random pages on all the sites it substitutes things for, and see what else turns up…

They ignored my support request (http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=1060243&), too.

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I will for sure contact Amazon. Their support center not always is effective (even if the one for the Associate Program is a little better), but at least they replied to me 2 times, once to tell me that they are looking into the trouble, and second to tell me that, unfortunately, it was not their problem.

I'm not tech at all, but I know a bit of compture, and my laptop is overprotected, and the spyware suggestion was ridiculous. Plus it was obvious that something was happening, as I said, I use the Amazon report to monitor the out clicks from my posts and they were drastically lowered in the last month.

Elisa

[ryan-field.livejournal.com]

This is an epidemic. I've had similar problems, where no one gets back to me. And all this week I can't get into my facebook message page and I've been trying to answer messages by e-mail so people don't think I'm ignoring them.

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

In this case, I think the answer was pretty simple, a very bad IT error from LiveJournal side, but they have not yet found a good excuse for that. Elisa