A Bad Week in Yuwieville !

And What a week it has been at Yuwieville ! It seems that Yuwie has been under attack from without AND within this week !!

The Y guy had earlier announced that October RSR rates would be not so healthy for the month of October which produced some grumblings amongst the citizens.

Then, he announces that "the little grey box" which many were reporting popping up on their screens was an attempt at phishing at Yuwie, and that Yuwie would not be asking for email address and passwords from members except on a secured login page. It seems that those who had enterered their details into pop ups would be advised to change their passwords asap!

And then he announced some more policy changes regarding payment for page views from sources external to Yuwie, would not be included in the monthly page views total on which payment was based - this had an effect of some members seeing their monthly pages views diminish, pooof, gone ! Some Members could hardly believe that large numbers, ie. 30,000 - 50,000 views has just disappeared from the control panel records.

And while this was happening, the advertisement load increased, and pop ups and unders, and the Yuwie servers groaned and sighed, and threw up page errors, refused to open pages, and simply went on a huge 'go slow program". And the members at Yuwie were NOT happy !

And that was the good part of the week !!

Now, with any significantly large group of people, there is always a certain section, shall we call them 'self server' - those intent of meeting their own needs. They are everywhere, so it is no surprise to find them popping up at Yuwie, particularly in view of the fact that money is involved. So there is that small minority who send out spam messages to "friends" recommending this or that and including their affiliates links - and OK I guess that is to be expected.

But this week in Yuwie saw the advent of a new form of spam/scam. Members started advertising on the noticeboards for sites external to Yuwie, promising loads of friends and loads of referrals. It seems there were a few different flavors of the same idea - but basically they were attempting to convince the unwary, that they had THE solution to improve Yuwie monthly earnings and it would only cost you $... per month ! They were CERTIFIED experts !

Yeah right ! It is free to join Yuwie, it is free and easy to add friends, and there are many many clubs set up to do just that - for free. So why pay for friends ??? It is also a fact that earnings on Yuwie have the potential to increase when you add referrals - but that is something you can undertake - for free using the many resources available to you. Yuwie itself provides much information on how to build your yuwie. There are many many members who share their knowledge and experience on this, for free !

This is not to mention the fact that these external sites are pulling members away from yuwie pages, and thus affecting the advertising revenue rates for all.

Well to cut a long story short - the Y guy made a pronouncement that these type of sites did NOT comply with the Yuwie terms of service, and that the profiles of those promoting them were shut down until the offending content was removed. He advised that the adding of friends could only be done while logged on to Yuwie and visiting the members page.

And there was much mumbling and grumbling from both sides of the camp ! And the servers groaned and went even slower.

And then today, when I went to login in to Yuwie to collect the weekly stats - it was not possible! Little pop up boxes appeared at every window requesting name and password - popups which were NOT on a secured page !! Every link produced a pop up except - the contact and support links which were dead - Seems some outside force is not happy with Yuwie either !

However, what IS important to remember, is that the majority of the folks at Yuwie are good people, who are intent on enjoying themselves. As this new site is in such a rapid expansion phase, it is normal to expect that such 'hiccups' will occur as Yuwie shakes, rattle and rolls into the social networking scene. In fact all of the above can be seen as a positive, in that it highlights the fact that many are recognising that Yuwie is a force to be reckoned with !

Weekly Statistics 25th October 2007

This week:

Total Memberships at Yuwie have increased from 158,180 last week to 190,937 this week- that is an increase of 32,757 in one week, which is approximately 8,376 more than last weeks increase.

New members joining Yuwie, so far for the month of October, have grown to at 85,990.

During this week again, many have again experienced extremely slow server response times and errors and difficulties logging on to the site.

Note - this weekly snapshot, was delayed due to technical difficulties was taken at 7 am Thursday morning(US time)or on Thursday evening Australian time.