Earnings Calculation Glitch(es)

Glitch #1

At the end of July we upgraded the infrastructure on which your earnings are calculated daily. We made this upgrade in order to make the calculation process faster and more reliable. It also involved some minor changes to the calculation software itself. Minor as one of those changes was, it turned out to cause a major glitch.

It all seemed to work perfectly fine for a while but last week we discovered that since August 11th, some users were starting to see enormous increases in earnings. There were users who were promised earnings several times (and sometimes several hundred times) more than what they’d actually earned.  It is important to note that nobody was granted less than they should have been  — only more.

It took a little while to trace this issue and on the 24th we found out what the problem was. We fixed the bug on August 25th, ensuring it won’t happen again.

About 300 users that were affected by this glitch. Unpleasant as it is to see your earnings deducted on your dashboard, we decided to deduct the amounts that were displayed to those users so everyone will get exactly what they should get. We then started working on rolling back the data.  This is a very sensitive job that has to be planned very carefully. We scheduled the actual rollback to occur on August 30th.

Glitch #2

As it turns out, our August 25th bug fix solved glitch #1 but caused a second glitch to occur – one which affected the entire community. This time, many users saw higher earnings than usual, and some users also saw lower earnings than usual. Focused on solving glitch #1, we didn’t notice glitch #2 until today.

August 30th

Today we rolled the data back so the users data that was affected by glitch #1 was fixed, and sent notification emails to the 300 users who it had affected. However, we continued to receive glitch-related feedback and only then — especially after corresponding with one of the users who was affected by both glitches – we found the culprit.

Since this second issue affects the entire community, and since in this case it’s not only about users getting paid more than they should, but also involves users getting paid less than they should, we decided to take this public on our blog, and to let all of you know what we’re doing about it:

Rolling back the entire earnings data from August 25th until today is a very expensive, long and tedious process; Monthly payments are due soon; and we have the August Special for which we need to further calculate bonuses, preferably before your monthly statements emails are sent on September 5th.  The entire community is affected, and we hate to deduct any more amounts from our users; the glitch was caused by us and we should be the ones held responsible for it.

Therefore, we decided not to rollback anymore data. We will simply repay August 25th until today on top of what was already granted. This means everybody will be paid what they are entitled to plus some more. No one will be paid less than they should. The extra money will be paid from Triond’s pockets.

This process will take some time. It will probably take until tomorrow evening. We already re-paid August 25th, and August 26th is being repaid as I write this. We will update here when it’s finished.

Summing Up

We hate glitches, but they happen. Thankfully, our last earnings glitch happened 2 years ago, (also in August), and we surely hope this is the last time. We apologize for the glitches and for their affect on you. Though we can’t promise they won’t happen again, we do promise that if they do we’ll do everything we can to make things right, and we will always be fully transparent with you regarding those unpleasant issues, as we do now.