How we are responding to users getting banned
Most-excellent S&P users,
After analyzing which users have been banned, we have concluded that Digg set up a “honey pot” of multiple fake users to see which stories were being paid for. They were thus able to determine a few stories that were being promoted and banned the users who Dugg them.
In response to this, we are going to fall back onto our trusted users. Since we have been in successful operation for a while now, we have a large base of users who have been with us prior to the creation of the honey pot. We know the exact time of this based on the stories users were getting banned for Digging. As long as we only allow trusted users to Digg for us, we should be virtually impenetrable moving forward.
We have added functionality to change your Digg username; this can be found on your Digg user page. We have quarantined all users who were Digging the same stories as the banned users, and will un-quarantine them after they change their Digg account with us.
How to Change Your Digg Account:
Digg can track you not just by your username, but through cookies and by your IP address as well. In order to change your Digg username and avoid getting banned in the future, you must first delete the cookies from your browser and then sign up for a new Digg account using the IP anonymizing service known as Tor. Tor is very easy to use, and there is a handy Firefox add-on for it here. Once you have done this, enter your new account on your Digg user page.
How S&P Will Grow Going Forward:
S&P will no longer be accepting new users who were not referred by one of our trusted users, at least for a while. If you have been Digging for us for a long time, please refer some of your friends right now through email.
And of course, we are planning to expand to our next site in a few weeks. Stay tuned.
Other Actions We Have Taken:
In the event that our honey pot conclusion was wrong, we have also changed our algorithms significantly, and have changed our de-referrer service, just in case Digg bought them out.
Subvert and Profit will never die!
Alas, it had to happen some time
It appears that Digg finally found a small segment of our userbase and has banned them. In the last 24 hours, we’ve heard from 8 out of our 1000+ users. This low number is encouraging, since it means that this was just a small slip on our part.
We’re going to lay low for a couple days, gather information from the banned users, and figure out how to prevent this in the future. We will never stop improving our algorithms and techniques. If you have been banned, please contact us so we can ask you some questions about your usage of our service.
We are also going to lower the minimum withdrawal amount to $5 over the next few days.
A few of you have asked if we can change the Digg account connected to your S&P account. We are going to make a function to do this, but there is the issue of IP addresses and cookies. Digg can track you by either of those methods, so before we change your Digg account we’re going to have to verify that you have deleted your cookies and are using Tor. This is very easy to do… more on this soon.
Remember, contact us if you have been banned!
User Payouts
We made it! We’ve now been around long enough for our users to reap the benefits of our system. A significant portion of our userbase has just received their first $10 payout, a few of whom made more than half of this in referral income.
Initially, we overlooked the fact that users would sign up with an email address besides the one linked to their PayPal account. We corrected this quickly by allowing users to enter their PayPal email address on the finance page, but this caused the finance page to crash for users viewing it for the first time. This is a cookies issue, and if you are still having trouble accessing the finance page, just delete the cookies from your browser and the problem will vanish.
Stay tuned for an entry about the future directions of this site…
Referral Links!
We are pleased to introduce referral links. You now have the option to either send an email to your friends through our site, which will include your link, or post the link yourself into an email or on your blog. Bloggers, we’re looking at you.
Remember, we pay you 20% of your friends’ earnings forever! This does not affect your friends’ earnings. Our users earn anywhere from $3 to $10 per week… do the math yourself, and you will see that this could be one of the most lucrative affiliate programs on the Internet.
To see your link, log in and visit the Digg user page. The link is simply http://subvertandprofit.com/social/ + your Subvert and Profit username.
Thanks for Subverting - it’s time to Profit!
This Thing Actually Works - Some Preliminary Data
We’ve been promoting stories onto the front page of Digg for almost two weeks now, and we have surprised even ourselves at our effectiveness. To protect our users, we can’t release too many details, but here are the most important tidbits:
- Not a single user has reported being banned from Digg
- The average user makes $3.50 per week, while top users make about double this. This should increase as we get more advertisers.
- Not a single advertiser has been dissatisfied with our service.
- Our quality control on advertisements has worked amazingly. Only on one story was there a single comment that suspected Digg-gaming due to the content of the story. We quarantined the users on that story for two days, and nothing ever came of it.
So, what’s next? We’re going to pick up the volume slightly on Digg, and then look beyond. We don’t want to hurt Digg by promoting too many stories to the front page in a day. So where are we looking? Stay tuned…
If you are an advertiser or a user, feel free to post your experiences with our site, e.g. how much you’ve made, how many visitors you got to your site, etc.
Subvert and Profit!
Digg-Gaming Paused As Anarchy Breaks Loose
Update: Digg has calmed down, so we’ll start back up immediately.
And we thought we were creating a stir on Digg by selling votes. Promotion of advertisements will cease for the night, or at least until the very intense rukus about the leaked HD-DVD hex code dies down.
Check out Digg right now to witness a real example of Internet anarchy!
For a while Digg was censoring its users and banning their accounts and IP addresses, but this appears to have stopped, as the front page has been completely dominated by stories about the code for hours now.
Advertisers: we’ll be ready to get you on the front page of Digg as soon as this dies down. Things have been going very well.
Server Downtime - RESOLVED
*UPDATE* Everything is back up now, so we’ll begin verifying everyone’s activity. There are a few stories in the queue, so stay tuned.
subvertandprofit.com is currently not functional due to our server going down. We have contacted our host and things should be back to normal within a few hours.
Since we’ve started off on shared webhosting, we’ve been prone to downtime of our Ruby on Rails server. Unfortunately few shared webhosts know how to configure their servers properly to keep Ruby going. We’ll be switching to our very own dedicated server once we have enough money (should be soon, if today’s success is any measure).
Fortunately we finished off a set of advertisements before the server died. Operation will begin normally as soon as we’re up again.
Successful Launch!
During the first three days of our operation, we have placed a good number of stories (both paid and random) on the front page of Digg. As far as we can tell, none of our users have been banned. We have kept almost all of our users busy.
Many of you have been asking when you can expect to see money in your account. We place money in your account once we have verified your activity. We try to verify all Digging activity for a day all at once, and we should be doing this within the next hour. *Update* Since our Ruby on Rails server decided to crap out tonight, we will verify your activity once it is up again.
A few of you encountered a couple minor bugs in the system. Thanks to your feedback, these bugs are now gone.
Operation will only get smoother, cleaner, and faster from here.
Subvert and Profit Open! First Advertisements Reserved
We are happy to announce that Subvert and Profit is now open for business!
To make sure our launch runs smoothly, we are beginning with a small number of pre-scheduled advertisements from the very first advertisers to put money into their accounts. We will open up the interface to all other advertisers once these have been successfully placed. Check back towards the end of Tuesday. Advertisers hoping to get on Digg’s front page at a certain time should come to us about 4-8 hours before they want to get on the front page.
If you are a Digg user, you can log into your account to see if you have stories to Digg. We are approving a small number of Diggs at first to ensure that enough users Digg these stories, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see anything yet. Once we get data about user Digging, we can expand the number of advertisements we accept to keep our entire user pool busy.
Read the guidelines, and then go get ‘em!
Finance Section Open, Launch Monday, April 23rd
After implementing some new, clever improvements to our randomization algorithm, we are now ready to give a date for our launch.
Subvert and Profit will be officially open for business on Monday, April 23rd.
In preparation for the launch, we have opened our finance section. Advertisers will be served during the launch based on the order in which they added funds to their account, with the important exception that we reserve the right to reject any advertisement. We are trying to keep our visible impact minimal, and this means rejecting advertisements that would very obviously never make it to the front page of Digg. Please keep this in mind before adding funds to your account.
We apologize for the extended delay. After reviewing our algorithms, we came up with some new ways to prevent Digg from setting up a honey pot on our site. We decided it would be worth it to wait the extra week as we implemented these improvements.
Help our launch be successful by logging in on Monday!