Dear Writers,

Hi everyone. I hope all is well.

In case you didn’t notice, LetterRep got hacked yesterday. It wasn’t malicious but it was very deliberate. Just hours before the Googlebot crawled our site, a malware site from China entered through some older code we ported from the previous release to post a script that would embed cookies on visitor machines redirecting them to third party sites selling cialis, viagra, etc. As soon as Google crawled LetterRep, Google posted warnings, like ‘This site is not safe’ or ‘This site may be harmful to your machine.’ Needless to say, our traffic dropped down to nothing.

I made a call to the developer and we got the offending code removed and updated the older site code so it’s no longer vulnerable. Google re-crawled us early this morning and things seem to be back to normal.

In any event, you may want to delete the cookies on your computer in case the cookie re-directing you to the malware site was inadvertently installed.

Sorry for the trouble.

Next…PayPal.

PayPal started playing its games again with suddenly, WITHOUT WARNING, changing the fees for writers. What’s strange is that some writers were affected while others were not.

With the help of one writer (J.P. - many thanks), we found that if we choose the ‘Personal’ tab rather than the ‘Purchase’ tab when sending payments, the fee is reversed…so that LetterRep pays the fee and not the writer. Sweet deal, right? Hold on. LetterRep’s fee for this is $0.05 per transaction. Not that much, but after several payments, it starts to add up.

Here’s the solution…yes, LetterRep pays $10.00 to writers for each letter sold, however, PayPal wants their slice; so…these are the options: 1) You as the writer are paid $10.00 from LetterRep through the ‘Purchase’ tab where PayPal charges you 2.9% plus $0.30 for each transaction (more for overseas transfers), or 2) you are paid $9.95 from LetterRep through PayPal’s ‘Personal’ tab where PayPal charges LetterRep $0.05 cents for a total of $10.00. Okay…we’ve voted for you…the latter.

Who hates PayPal? We do, too. The problem is, no other payment processor on the Web reaches as many countries as it does. LetterRep has writers in the U.K., New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the U.S., Philippines, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa and lots of other places. Many of these countries, South Africa, for example, still do not accept PayPal. LetterRep has lots more people who want to write, but don’t because their countries don’t accept PayPal and they don’t want to work for free and the Snailmail and Western Union options cost so much to send to many countries that the earnings are outweighed by the fees. Those options are so bad they’ve been removed from LetterRep’s writer registration altogether.

We would really like to find a new payment processor…or, at the very least, a method of payment that is accepted by all countries…maybe, $10 e-gift cards to Amazon or something like that.

Send us your suggestions.

I owe you more posts about the new changes to the site. I promise to get those out to you soon.

Finally, on Wednesday I presented LetterRep to a venture capitalist. I’ll keep you posted as things develop. Wish us luck!

~Rob

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.