Well, we had some issues this week. There are two ways to look at it, as there always are. On the one hand given the volume and percentage of code that changed, the fact that the problems were confined to one part of PayPerPost.com (taking opportunities) is fantastic. On the other hand, of course, that’s probably one of the most visible and hihgly used parts of the application. We can only apologize for the problems here.

We have thousands of users, with thousands of ways of doing things in the system, some correct, some incorrect. We simply didn’t count on some of the ways many of you get things done. That’s an oversight on our part. For example, there are still problems today with segmentation on opportunities with some bloggers who are ineligable able to opportunities that they should not have access to, and others who should have access finding themselves locked out.

I’ll tackle the latter case first. We use URL Trends to gather information about the blogs in the system and assign their page ranks and Alexa ranks. It’s a partnership which has always been astounding. Recently though URL Trends have had problems of their own and we’ve been working hand in hand with them to resolve these issues as quickly as possible. Joel Strellner, the owner of URL Trends, said it best in an email to me earlier.

“Our entire team sincerely apologize to you and the entire Pay Per Post team and community for the errors. We hope that this issue does not permanently hinder our relationship between our two companies.”

The issues are now fixed and within the next 48 hours (because of the way the ranking updates run) you’ll start to see the results trickle into your blogger dashboards.

The other issue, that of taking opps and bypassing segmentation, is one that we are currently looking into. Thankfully we are a human based system and our last line of defense will always be the excellent team of dedicated reviewers we have. If you are an advertiser and worried that your opportunities are being snagged by bloggers you don’t really want, don’t panic! The reviewing team will catch these and reject them.

At the end of the day we are a company and a system that has grown exponentially in size and complexity in an incredibly short period of time. We’re still in Beta and there will be kinks to iron out. As a development team we have learned a great deal this past week alone about how our community and marketplace operate and we’ll be using that knowledge in the coming weeks to build out a complete set of automated tests to make sure we never again do a deployment with as many issues as this. We’re using this as an opportunity to improve the application, improve the output of the development team and totally shore up the platform for the massive growth that we know our future holds for us.

There have been a lot of comments here on the blog and on the boards, both encouraging and scathing. We welcome both. It take’s passion on a subject to post a passionate comment about it, regardless of whether that comment’s tone is positive or negative. One of the most phenomenal aspects of PayPerPost is our vast and passionate community and I for one am very glad you are all out there to keep us in check and provide us with excellent feedback.

Thanks for bearing with us.

Pete

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