Hello everyone,

I know that it is very distressing to find your earnings fluctuating. We are really trying to iron this out here at 123RF. As you know we've just shifted to a new design and with that comes new challenges. customer and photographer's satisfaction does take priority around here and we are working hard so that our clients are satisfied with the new site changes and features that we now offer.

Now coming back to the issue of earnings fluctuations. Over the years, the number of downloads that have been logged are piling up (quite literally) and now we find that generating your earnings page is taking up a lot of CPU time and this often causes our servers to be overloaded.

What are we doing to fix this? Basically, 3 things:
1. Dedicated and faster servers to handle the load.
2. Restructure both the downloads and earnings database into more resilient schema.
3. Recode the scripts that display all earnings and downloads so that they perform faster.

For the month or so ahead, you will find that your earnings will indeed fluctuate. The reason for the fluctuations are:
1. Certain canceled transactions, which are due to fraudulent activities. Sometimes it may takes several months before the bank informs us of a fraudulent transaction and we have no choice but to cancel it from our records.
2. Clients' request for cancellation. We do request our clients to provide us with a written letter stating images downloaded are not to be used and have been deleted from their systems.
3. Duplicated download logging, at times the server registers 2 or more downloads from the same client, on the same resolution and of the same image. We have upgraded our scripts to take these duplicated entries into account.
4. At times, the server will time out due to heavy load and can only process certain download data and left out the other portions, this could cause faulty reporting of downloads as well.

Please rest assure that some reconciliation on your earnings figures will definitely occur over the next month as we scale up our operations. But we will be responsible for the problems and will find way to compensate those of you who are affected by this exercise from our own coffers. We ask that you do not worry as we have all download logs intact and we will live up to our end of the bargain.

Kindly understand that we treat all our contributors as fair and equal business partners and we are aware that first and foremost business partnerships are built based on mutual trust and forging a solid reputation. We are not in the business to ruin our good reputation that we have so painstakingly built over the years by not addressing and subsequently resolving this siutation, but we do ask for your patience and understanding.

123RF.com is constantly growing and as you know, growing means expansion, upgrades and at times, it's just plain difficult trying to grow up. I do hope that you'll accept this explanation for now and kindly give us time (approximately 1 month) to upgrade our infrastructure so that we can achieve both customer and contributor satisfaction to once again win over your trust and develop a win-win situation for everyone.

Thanking you for your kind understanding.

Alex
for 123RF.com