I've not had any sales reported at all today, which is weird. Are others seeing the same or am I just having a freakish day?

123 is having one of those little glitches that it gets now and then. For the first eight days of the month it is showing referral earnings of $338.01 and sales of 0. Going by past experience, in a little while this tally will vanish to be replaced by one showing I have zero referrals and made $15 or $20 this month.

So the question is, where does the 123 computer get these wildly optimistic figures from and what do they actually mean? They have to mean something, don't they? It's not as if computers created numbers from nothing.

Isn't it pathetic that the moderators delete a thread pointing out that once again they have ignored their own stupid rule that they will announce the start of the pp run (while rigidly enforcing the part of the rule that says nobody is even allowed to ask about it).
And having deleted the thread, they put up an announcment that it "should be starting", four days after the first part of it started and 24 hours after the beginning of the main run.
It's like Stalin airbrushing his old comrades out of all the official photos one by one as the memory of their friendship became embarrassing. Do the iStock mods really imagine that they can change history and make themselves look good by pressing the delete button?
I guess iStock doesn't bother telling them what it is doing, so they can't make their announcements until someone in the PP program lets them know what is going on.  

Just a bit of wild speculation... how long do people think iStock will continue to tolerate exclusives supplying RM to Alamy and other agencies?

Long ago, when we were all new to this game, iStockers vaguely imagined that RM meant the same as editorial. Now we've all grown up, we know that anything can be licensed as RM (subject to the rules).

What's more, iS now has editorial and with the price of Agency and Vetta content - and even standard "exclusive" prices - is now in direct competition with Alamy. On top of which, exclusives now have the Getty channel opwn.

So, how long until Getty wakes up and orders its "exclusives" to get properly "Getty family" exclusive and pull the plug on their Alamy portfolios?

I can no longer get the stats bars or the payment area to load. The "clickable" links to financials/friends/blog/stats etc. are no longer active. The images in my "most popular files" section no longer show up.

I've tried all the usual things in case it's some problem at my end - clearing the cache, restarting the computer, trying two different browsers (Firefox and Slimbrowser) - but that entire form area remains blank.

Is it just me or are others encountering this? Any ideas of how to restore it or is it another iStock bug?

Not being able to link to the area for claiming payment is soon going to be an issue.

A couple of bucks have been bunged into my account for a royalty adjustment, presumable for the time the site lost track of payment levels.

This seems a reasonable sum but I notice that it is not itemised which I think was promised. It's probably very wise of them not to waste energy even attempting it.

I went to bed without a single sale for Sunday and woke up to find half-a-dozen. It makes me wonder whether sales are still being reported as they happen.

Are others seeing sales appear in batches?

Some people say there was a mass boycott of Thinkstock and the Partner Programme. Others say only a small proportion boycotted it. It would be nice to have an idea of how widespread the boycott was or wasn't and an anonymous poll might give an indication of that, if enough people vote.

Thanks for taking part.

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 that iStock's bizarre CV system continues to grow. The word "Orange" now produces: colour orange, fruit orange, Orange City (Texas), Orange City (California) and Orange (France Telecom).

This limitation makes it difficult for people photographing Orange, Connecticut, or Orange, New South Wales, to place their photos in appropriate categories, since they are not included, so presumably these two towns will eventually be added to the list, too.

But what is the logic of this? For the CV to work properly, eventually every single geographical place-name in the world has to be added to it, just as every single definition of every noun needs to be included.

Half the tags now have a drop-down menus offering you either a random and incomplete scattering of options which despite its inadequacy is often an absurdly long list.  The keyword "sauce (food)" for example, lists about 35 sauces from the bizarre (vodka sauce) to the ordinary (bechamel), but no White Sauce or Supreme Sauce or Bercy or Bordelaise or  ... a complete list would probably run to thousands of sauces, certainly hundreds.

Once it is complete (if ever ... but it is an impossible time-wasting task) what it will have achieved will be the replication of the system it was meant to replace, where people just typed whatever keywords they liked and those words were found in the search.

Meanwhile, those who ticked "Orange, colour" because "Orange City, California" used not to be available, will continue to spam the colour search while buyers who want their images will now be directed away from them to the severely limited number of files that have the Orange, CA, tag because they have only just been uploaded.

What's more, they seem to slide these CA changes through on the quiet, so even if people wanted to re-keyword they will only find out by accident when a new option appears.

How long is it going to take Getty to realise just how stupid its system is?

We've been citing Fotolia's base rate as 16%, based on Leaf's excellent analysis at the beginning of this year. I've just realised that his calculation was done when "white" was at the pretend 25% rate. It has since been reduced to a pretend 20% so the 16% has to be reduced by a fifth.

Just thought people might like to know.

Are dt's sales figures updating today? I got masses of sales yesterday (July 4) but not a single one today.