Thanks everyone for your words of encouragement and for offering great suggestions!
We thought long and hard about how we could fix this, and how quickly we could get back up and running. We think we have a good first approximation of a solution so less than 24 hours later, we are back in business!
Its going to need tweaking as we go, but hopefully it will let us get the site back up now instead of waiting for that perfect fix and keep the site down.
Basically it boils down to a few things:
- Financials: Many of you rightly mentioned that some of you guys are not bots. Just really dedicated folks out to save the rainforest! While we do have a few bots, its not the only reason we suddenly found our rainforest commitments outstripping the ad payments coming in.
A big problem is that we sorely overestimated the ad revenue coming in and we need to re-adjust the payout rate of rainforest acreage. That means we had very little padding going in and had to suddenly shut down to avoid not being able to meet our rainforest protection commitments due to revenue/protection mismatch.
While we would love to give out 1/4 of a foot per question right, it seems like we need to back off of that and go at 1/9 of a foot per question.Bottom line, while this means more answers per sq ft protected. Not ideal, but this will help us keep our doors open, and deal w/ any uncertainties like bots w/o shutting things down suddenly. We figure its better to go on than to just shut this thing down.
If you’re an ad optimization expert (nay even semi-decent) we’d love to get your help to improve the ad numbers.
- Limits per user. We’ve also stuck in a check in the system to put a daily upper bound on how many sq ft you can save. After that, you won’t be able to save any more for 24 hours. Don’t worry though, we heard you. The bound is extremely high–high enough that you willnever h it it unless you can pretty much answer questions without resting, eating or going to the bathroom. If you hit it and you aren’t a bot, you should get a prize.
- Captchas. Eventually we may go the captcha route. I’m not a big fan of captchas (is that warped letter an f or a t?) so I hope we can avoid it, but we will keep our options open and remain flexible.
Thanks for bearing with us as we adapt to these new circumstances and find the sweet spot of optimal rainforest saving. Thanks also for using the site. You keep us going!
