Birthday Bonus Club
21st Nov 2009 16,318 Members - Birthdays today 39AlertPay Problem
Several people have mentioned that AlertPay have a problem in accepting MasterCard and Visa credit cards - there is a full description at blog.alertpay.com
NOT our Newsletter
Yesterday, you probably received an email purporting to be a newsletter from us - and it was completely empty. Many of you responded to the email and were informed that you had been removed from our mailing list.
The “newsletter” was initiated by a persistent hacker who managed to find the script that we use for sending real newsletters and the unhappy result was that you received a confusing email.
The current situation is as follows :
- The hacker - a client of IRides.com - has been blocked
- The newsletter script has been removed
- An email has been sent to all who think they have removed themselves to reassure them
This will not happen again and I must apologise for this incident
The March Report
February was a short month - but a good one!
Our stats show that we had 270,000 unique visitors, 700,000 visits and over 2 million pageviews. Our membership also increased to 10,500.
During the month, we sent out over 12,000 Birthday Requests for 270 Birthdays.
Our January Birthday Stats read like this :
Birthdays : 133 Requests : 6,694 Total request Amount $29,411
| Confirmed | Paid | Pass | No-Show | Fail* | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Members | 573 | 1,267 | 208 | 4,636 | 10 |
| Amount | $2,652 | $5,412 | $918 | $20,383 | $46 |
| * Email failure | |||||
These figures are disappointing !
They show that 69% of our Members simply ignore Birthday Requests - and that is over $20,000 that should have been donated and wasn’t! They also show that only 25% of Members who take the trouble to Pay the Birthday Boy/Girl fail to forward the AlertPay confirmation email, and, unfortunately, we have no other way of confirming your payment and updating your Rating. For January only, requests that are shown as Paid will not incur any penalty but they also will not increase your Rating.
As for the No-Shows, the rules will be applied very strictly so, if you ignored a Birthday Request - expect your Rating to drop!
Within the next few days, expect to see the following
- We will introduce a simple procedure that will confirm your AlertPay status - the whole process takes about ten minutes out of your life and will ensure that your Rating is updated immediately a donation has been made. This procedure will become mandatory from May 1; in other words, if you have not confirmed your AlertPay status, we will not send a Birthday Request for you.
- We will offer Gift Vouchers at values of $10.00 to $60.00 - plus a 10% handling fee. Gift Vouchers are designed to be given to people that you would like to have join you in BBC but just don’t have the cash to do so. Holders of Gift Vouchers will not receive Birthday Requests as their Birthday donations will be paid automatically. Whilst Gift Vouchers are designed to be given to other people, there is no reason why you cannot use them yourself
- We will introduce an Ad Credit Exchange where you can offer your Ad Credits for sale to other Members. The exchange is subject to a minimum value of $20.00 and a handling charge of 10% will be charged to buyers. So, if you don’t want to advertise yourself, put your Ad Credits into the Exchange and recover some of your donations!
Looking forward to a Great Month in March - thanks to everyone for your support
Advertising is LIVE!
As of today - we are in a position to accept advertising from our Members (I hope to be able to offer similar service to non-members later this week
Why AlertPay ?
We have had received various comments about our use of AlertPay rather than some other payment gateway - most commonly suggested is PayPal.
Firstly let me state quite categorically that we will never consider using PayPal. Read the rest of this entry »
Never thought I’d say this …
I really never believed I would say this …
PLEASE DON’T SEND ME MONEY!!
February Update
Where does a year go when you’re having fun
January 2009 has come and gone and I’m really happy with the results that we achieved :
- Half a million visitors
- 1.45 million page views
- Over 7,000 members
- An average of 18,000 visits daily and 46,000 page views daily
- Over 100 Birthday requests sent
Your email address
Every day, we have signup emails rejected for various reasons - mostly because our mail server’s IP address has been “blocked for abuse”.
Please note that we do not send any form of SPAM and we do not have the time to chase up every spam-list to clear the IP address. With most of them, it takes just one complaint to get an entire IP block listed - and it can take days to get it unlisted.
All About AlertPay
As you will all know, our Birthday Requests are handled by 
..and, to get the best from Birthday Bonus Club your Account needs to be set up correctly!
- You must set up your AlertPay Account before your Birthday - otherwise no-one will be able to pay you
- Make sure that your account is either Personal Pro or Business. Otherwise, you will not be able to accept credit card payments.
- Be sure to confirm your email address - your Account is not active until you do so!
- Make sure that your Account is not in Test Mode - see below
- As soon as you possibly can - send your Verification Documents to AlertPay - this is a legal requirement for AlertPay and you don’t want your funds being withheld because you are not verified!
Test Mode
As far as I can see, Test Mode is disabled by default - but, to be sure, please do the following:
- Login to your AlertPay Account
- Click on Business Tools then on IPN Setup - bottom LH corner.
- Enter your PIN and click on Access
- The next page shows your Test Mode status - if this is Disabled there is nothing more to do. Otherwise, select Disabled and click on Update - done!
Confirming Your Payments
When you have made a donation to another member’s Birthday, you will receive a Confirmation Email from AlertPay. As soon as you receive it - please forward the full email to the email address shown in your Birthday Request.
Please note that the confirmation email address is handled by a script whose job is to convert the email into a confirmed request - it cannot answer queries about the Birthday Request itself. If you have queries, please route them through Contact.
We check uncleared confirmation emails once or twice each day; so - if there is anything unusual about the email, it may take 24 hours or more to clear since it must be handled manually.
About Cookies
Just a quick word about Cookies
Birthday Bonus Club creates two cookies :
- bbcsponsor - is set when you visit a Member’s Welcome Page - it has a “lifetime” of 24 hours and, if you sign up within that time, it identifies your sponsor - regardless of the pages that you might visit in the meantime.
- bbcmem - identifies you as a Member with a lifetime of 365 days - it is refreshed each time that you log in.
When you visit the Signup page, the two cookies are processed in the order bbcmem, bbcsponsor with the result that - if you are already a Member - you will appear as the sponsor on the signup.
Very occasionally, a visitor will arrive without a sponsor and then clicks on “Welcome” or “Signup” - in this case, a random member will be used.
Every care has been taken to ensure that you don’t lose referrals.
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