My redeemed credits for 2010 and 2011 have reset to zero, with my earnings level being cut to 15%. This is totally unacceptable. I have no way of knowing if they are paying me at the correct rate or at 15% per sale. Is everyone the same?

I see there is a thread on site. It seems we are now all being paid at the lowest rate. Wonderful.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on November 18, 2011, 23:07
My redeemed credits for 2010 and 2011 have reset to zero, with my earnings level being cut to 15%. This is totally unacceptable. I have no way of knowing if they are paying me at the correct rate or at 15% per sale. Is everyone the same?

Yeah, my royalty rate is at the base - 22% - now and no RCs. Hopefully they're fiddling with it and lowering the RC minimums. But - a glitch on iStock? Whodathunkit?!!  

Edit: Saw the thread on iS - looks like it's normal for this to happen. Dear God, our lives are in the hands of engineers. - Malcom, Jurassic Park

I wish I'd taken a screenshot once I'd passed my target.
Yesterday the Balance figures were all over the place, but seemed to get sorted OK, so hopefully this will too.
How do they manage to break the system so often?
Must have been trying some new tweak. But why should they be tweaking something that affects our balance, or our RCs?
SNAFU

Just when I worry that I'm overstating the case for iStock's software department being incompetent, we get another gem like this. Doesn't anyone test anything before they push it live? And if they do test it and didn't find that, then their testers aren't competent either.

Oh i'm sure we'll get payed our now at-a-too-low-rate royalties retrospectively; in a couple of months some small random sum will be dumped in our accounts without notification first and thats that. Whether that amount will be correct, we'll never know; that they made sure of. (there is the possibility you'd have to send a mail to support first so they can keep what they took from the ones that dont follow forums etc. It's really the same with the zero-amount dl's for those opted in in the PP).

Is that list of screwups still somewhere around here? There's plenty of things to add in the meantime (refferal links over 600 characters long that nobody gets to work, zero amount dl's on TS, this, .....)

Have they really just gone home for the weekend with no update?

There are a fair number of unhappy people in the Help forum thread on IS suggesting that this should be treated as an urgent issue. And given the complete lack of detail on every sale (once again I'll refer to my old suggestion about this, which seems like basic simple accounting for paying suppliers) knowing what we should have been paid is near impossible.

I notice a couple of posts in that thread on the point I brought up here a few months ago. That when you transition to a higher commission level, you don't "instantly" advance to that level as soon as you reach it. Instead, you have to wait 2-3 days until the system catches up with reality. Despite the fact that iStock's website claims you will immediately advance.

Maybe they were trying to fix that problem and broke everything? 

I was offline a lot today and didn't see this happening until I logged on from home tonight. this is a really brutal c*ck up. I'm adding sales manually in the meantime, what a nightmare...

What the. Bad enough they broke it. And then the clock-watchers just bugger off home for the weekend. Incredible. Truly incredible.

As JoAnn says, if this can happen, what other accounting messes occur behind the scenes? We need proper sales reports. But we'll never get them. Jeez I'm pissed off.

Did anybody? seriously ?  expect this to work.

This is no bug. They are just testing a new future feature

Since my sales have been so crappy lately 22% of zero and 35% of zero is all the same to me.

It's typical that there is absolutely nothing that can happen to contributors that merits spending one cent on overtime to the software engineers. They couldn't care less what level of service they supply to us - after all, we only give them 85% of our earnings (80% in Sean's case, if this ends up on the list of "bugs pending action") to keep their company going.

Quote from: RapidEye on November 19, 2011, 06:19
What the. Bad enough they broke it. And then the clock-watchers just bugger off home for the weekend. Incredible. Truly incredible.

This is a perfect illustration of how and why Istock are sleep-walking to their death. They neither think nor act as if they are operating in a competitive market place at all. Heigh-ho.

new base rate royalty. Much simpler for accounting.

To err is human but why the mistakes are always in their favor? Amazing 

Chill ppl, they're just getting ready to implement the canister levels back again

I just got through the IS thread. Lol it's absurd to see just for what a bunch of idiots they see us and treat us accordingly. They'll chill over the weekend and try to fix it over the next week. I suggest we all deactivate out ports for the time being

Quote from: wut on November 19, 2011, 11:00
Chill ppl, they're just getting ready to implement the canister levels back again

For one brief, Pollyanna moment, I shared that fantasy.

Quote from: RapidEye on November 19, 2011, 06:19
What the. Bad enough they broke it. And then the clock-watchers just bugger off home for the weekend. Incredible. Truly incredible.

As JoAnn says, if this can happen, what other accounting messes occur behind the scenes? We need proper sales reports. But we'll never get them. Jeez I'm pissed off.

I never quite worked out how a big business like iStock which is open 24/7 every day of the year can get away with this 9 to 5 attitude. There are numerous times when things are broken on POETS day, and they just get left 'til Monday morning. It really is unbelievable.
The sales report thing REALLY needs addressing. As you say it won't happen though.  

Quote from: wut on November 19, 2011, 11:00
Chill ppl, they're just getting ready to implement the canister levels back again

wouldn't that be nice. I would get a raise after all and not just some new bling. it looks like a bug. we'll see what happens to royalties earned during the 'outage', at least before sharpening pitchforks ;-)

Wow.  This is really upsetting.  I was at 149455 - less than 1/2% away from keeping my 19% royalty rate - and that hadn't updated in a couple of days.  Now down to 0 RCs overnight and only 15% instead of 19%.  And waiting until Monday to address this is really wrong.  

At this point I have absolutely no confidence that we will get a full accounting of money owed to us.  

Something else that bothers me is that up to now, the raising or dropping of our royalty rates based on RCs has not happened instantly. Now, all of a sudden there's a bug and our royalties are dropped immediately.  This does NOT inspire confidence.

Quote from: lisafx on November 19, 2011, 16:15
At this point I have absolutely no confidence that we will get a full accounting of money owed to us.  

This really is absurd and sad in a way, but I'm actually happy I'm not getting any sales since last night 

After 100+ comments, You-Know-Who finally weighs in with his usual elementary school principal snarkiness and closes the topic and remind us it's the weekend. Wait til Monday. Right...Monday...beginning of a holiday week.