As part of our nightly update we’ve implemented a new feature where the site will now indicate if you’ve already rated a review or any comment on any page, so you don’t waste time rating it again. You can only rate something once but the system previously continued to display the rating buttons even if you had already rated something.

We meant to add this functionality earlier but it just got forgotten about. Thanks to user drknlvly6781 for the feedback and reminder.

At this point most of the new features and functions we’re adding are coming from user feedback and suggestions. If you have an idea on how we can make the site more useful or easier to use, please don’t hesitate to tell us what’s on your mind.

Posted August 27th 2009 to IM Report Card Updates • Comments (6)

We get emails all the time from users asking us for info about specific sites that aren’t yet listed on IM Report Card. Usually they are asking because they are trying to make a quick decision to buy something or join this or that site because of a “limited time offer”.

So here’s a tip for you …

99% of “limited time offers” are completely bogus. If you haven’t already, you might want to read our article about Bogus “Limited Time Offers”.

Never buy or sign-up for anything in a hurry just because the site claims it is a limited time offer. Do your research first – search Google, search discussion forums, see if it’s listed on IM Report Card, etc. before doing anything.

I’ve been marketing online for many, many years, and I’ve made a lot of money online, and I promise you that even if you do miss out on a true limited time offer, it won’t make a bit of a difference in the “big picture”.

Even most legitimate limited time offers are not one time offers – the offer will usually be made available again in the near future. And even if you miss it – so what. There is no 1 product or website that is going to determine your success or failure online.

There are a 100 different ways to make money online, and 100s of sites and products that can help you do it. Always do your research before buying anything if you’re worried about getting “scammed”. If you miss out on a great offer, you’ll find another. I promise.

Speaking of worrying about getting scammed, I think a lot of people do themselves more harm than good here. I have some advice for you about this in the next post …

Posted August 26th 2009 to Internet Marketing • Comments (10)

We’ve added a few new forums where you can ask about or report scams related to sites that we haven’t yet reviewed on IM Report Card.

We’ve been meaning to add these for awhile and just kept forgetting, so thanks to conesuseagle for emailing us and reminding us about it!

There are 1,000s and 1,000s of sites out there, and eventually we’ll review almost all of them. But the only way to approach what we’re trying to do is to start with the most popular sites and work our way “down the list”.

In the meantime, we hope that these new forums will be helpful. If you’re curious about something that we haven’t reviewed yet, go ahead and post your questions about it and maybe other users who have experience with that site will chime in about it.

And if you’ve been scammed or had a bad experience with a site we haven’t reviewed yet, you can now warn others by posting about it in the new Scam Site Reports forum.

We’ve also added a few general discussion forums. We’ll try to chime in and answer questions when we can, but the success of these forums will depend on user participation so we’ll just see how it goes…

Want to be alerted of new reviews added to the site?

Just subscribe to our new Recent Reviews RSS Feed!

We’ve added a few “top 10 users” lists to the homepage. Get busy, post helpful comments, and get your profile seen by 1,000s!

Posted August 23rd 2009 to IM Report Card Updates • Comments (2)

We’ve added public user profile pages so you can learn more about other users, see all of their comments, send them a Private Message, etc.

To view a member’s profile, just click their name next to any of their comments. You can also click the username of any of your referrals to see their profiles.

Be sure to go to your primary Profile page and update your new public profile too.

And as always, let us know what else you’d like to see. We’re open to all suggestions!

Posted August 21st 2009 to IM Report Card Updates • Comments (2)

We are a well-funded company that has been doing business online for 10+ years. We’ve developed, owned and operated dozens of sites in various niches.

Our goal with IM Report Card was to build a kick-butt site that will help a lot of people, and then figure out how to make some money from it for ourselves later.

But apparently some users can’t figure out how we can afford to pay users if we’re not making money from the site right now, and worry that we’ll have to shut down the site because we won’t be able to afford to pay users as described on the Rewards page.

To address these concerns, we’ve gone ahead and added some Google ads to the sidebar of certain pages. Any time someone clicks any of these ads, we’ll make a little money.

This should be enough to cover our operating expenses, so hopefully this will alleviate any concerns you may have about the longevity of IM Report Card.

Posted August 20th 2009 to IM Report Card Updates • Comments (3)

We’ve had a bunch of requests to be able to link directly to a specific review using your referral link, and we’ve just added this functionality. And it’s real easy to do.

Just add the Review ID to the end of your referral URL like this:

http://www.imreportcard.com/r/Username/xxxxx

The Review ID is a 5-digit number that can be found in the footer of any review page.

Check the referral section of your Profile for more details.

Posted August 20th 2009 to IM Report Card Updates • Comments (2)

We’ve updated the Suggestion form so that it will now update in real time as you type, alerting you if the site you are submitting is already listed or in our database to be reviewed. This should make it just a little easier and more efficient to submit new sites.

Posted August 13th 2009 to IM Report Card Updates • Comments (1)

When we first launched the site, we were mobbed by all sorts of crazy people who thought they could just post silly comments and earn credits. This was at least partially our own fault as things weren’t as clear as they should have been, etc.

Anyway, in the early days we were being bombarded with literally 1,000+ new comments a day – and the majority of them were either just silly, random comments, spam, etc.

In order to get things under control as quickly as possible we implemented “warnings” and a “timeout” system where each time a user submitted an inappropriate comment they received a warning and were put in “timeout” before they could post more comments.

And after 3 warnings they were put in “permanent” timeout and couldn’t post any more.

Since then we’ve had plenty of time to do a lot of work “behind the scenes”, as well as build up our FAQs page and just generally make things a lot more clear for new users in terms of what IM Report Card is all about, what kinds of comments are acceptable, etc.

… so effectively immediately we’re starting fresh, and everyone gets a clean slate.

Aside from those users who have been permanently banned for trying to post obscene, spam, or other extremely unacceptable content, we’ve reset everyone else’s “warning” count to 0. So if you had 2 warnings and have been leery of posting because of that, there’s no need to worry any longer.

We’ve also increased the number of warnings to 10 before a user is put in “permanent timeout”. We were going to get rid of the warning system altogether, but we decided to leave it in place and just raise the number of warnings to 10.

If you have any intention of being a valued member of our community, you should never even get close to 10 warnings so this shouldn’t affect you at all.

Our guidelines are now extremely clear in terms of what constitutes an acceptable comment. They are clearly posted in several places, including right here in the FAQs.

Of course, if you have any questions or something still isn’t clear, just contact us.

Finally, we would like to take this time to apologize to everyone (except the scammers we’ve had to ban) for some of the early confusion due to things not being clear on the site, our moderators being new and occasionally making mistakes, etc.

IM Report Card is now running like a well-oiled machine and we’ve only just begun …