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Quite a few members over the last few weeks have aked if we can provide payment options for the Light Version which allow them to pay for a longer period up front rather than having $2.99 deducted every month.

This has now been implemented. We have a 3 month option at $8.97 every 3 months and a 6 month option at $17.94 every 6 months – both are still priced at $2.99 per month but just billed less freqently.

If you are a new member and do not have an IMAutomator account then you can click here to create a new subscription and you’ll be able to select which option to use. For existing members with a free account who wish to upgrade to IMAutomator Light, you can click here for the 3 month option or click here for the 6 month option.

As mentioned in the last post, we’re experiencing some performance problems with some of the sites in our private network and this is causing the submissions to fail with server errors. We have decided to order a whole new server instead of just an upgrade but have been told it will take a few days to order, setup and migrate all the data.

The sites most affected are ChickenMonkey, DF008, Swigies, Xelo, Enjoy USA, Kabayani, Things4U & Monster. Apologies for the inconvenience at this time!

Over the last few months we have started to build our own private bookmark sites (meaning they are only used for IMAutomator submissions). During the last week or so the performance has started to drop on them which has resulted in server errors causing failed submissions.

As such we’re now in the process of a CPU upgrade on the servers which should be done by the beginning of next week hopefully. Apologies for the inconvenience.

We have now disabled access to the Free service. For those members who have a free account (note that you will always retain the actual account), when you login you will be taken to an information page that explains that the free service has now been discontinued.

No data has been removed – all jobs remain in the system as before which means that if you choose to upgrade now or at any time in the future you may simply pick up just where you left off.

Over the next day or two all submissions from free members will be paused so for any bookmarks in the system that were not yet complete, these will remain incomplete until the account is upgraded.

New Payment Options Coming

Quite a few members have asked if we can implement some alternative payment options to allow payment up front over a longer term to avoid potential fees for small $2.99 payments. We are looking into this and it should be possible to implement. We hope to put these in place by the end of the week – we aim to offer 3 month and 6 month payment options.

We recently announced that we would soon be replacing the Free version of IMAutomator with a ‘Light’ version costing $2.99 per month. If you missed this email you can read the announcement on the following blog post:

http://www.imautomator.com/blog#imautomatorfreetobereplacedwith299lightversion

The Light version of the software has been available for two weeks now but for those members who are still using the Free version of this software, this service will be discontinued on Monday 6th February 2012 – 4 days from now.

What Will Happen To My Free Membership?

You will still be able to login to the site but you will no longer have access to any of the tools. Also, all submissions from free members will be suspended. Note that no data will be removed – we will simply halt the processing of the outstanding jobs from free members. You may upgrade to the Light version at any time and this will restart all of your submissions using the same schedule they were on originally. So, if they were going at a rate of 1 per day, they will be re-scheduled to continue at 1 per day.

If you have any questions about this change, please get in contact and ask!

Directories tend to be a one-off submission type unlike bookmarking as for each website you can only submit the home page. However, the great benefit they offer is that many of the are quite high PR compares to bookmarking sites and they also tend to hang around for a long time.

We’ve been busy adding some new directory sites and have also added some search engines too (the submission process is exactly the same so it makes no sense to separate into two tools) and we’re now up to 26.

As this tool is just for Pro members, this is the time to make use of the Secondary Submissions tool if you have not done so already. If you already submitted your sites using the directory submitter in the past when we had fewer sites, you can re-schedule them using the Secondary Submissions tools and these will be submitted to all the new directory sites that we just added.

In our delight at fixing the mysterious bug that occasionally caused a bookmark submitted by Free / Light members to have less than 15 submissions we erroneously introduced a new bug which gave a rather blunt, “Error Submitting Bookmark”. This again, only occurred on fast submissions.

That has now been fixed also and we have also changed the way our trial sites are tested. We now simply add one randomly to a selection of submissions. That means sometimes you’ll have 15 and sometimes 16. For Pro members, this applies to you too so whatever the current total sites are, sometimes there’ll be an extra one for a trial site.

The bug we reported yesterday where some jobs occasionally have less than 15 submissions has been fixed. It was an obscure issue which only affected jobs that were submitted using the fastest submit option and only happened on a handful of jobs.

Unfortunately we cannot rectroactively fix the jobs that were affected in the past but all new submissions should work correctly now. Apologies for the inconvenience.

All bookmark jobs submitted by Free or Light members should have at least 15 submissions for each bookmark. Sometimes they will have more if they are used to test out the sites that we have on trial but it should always be 15 minimum.

There seems to be a bug where some jobs are showing less than 15 but we’re having trouble tracking down exactly when this is occuring. It appears that the jobs are correctly being scheduled with 15 submissions when first entered and then ‘losing’ them some time later. I suspect this is to do with removing dead sites from the system but it is not clear at this stage.

If you see this happening, in particular if you notice it when you first enter a new bookmark, please do get in contact and let me know. Thanks for your help!

It’s been a busy day today! We’ve just uploaded two new articles to the training page in the SEO section. This is good reading if you’ve just started using IMAutomator but you’re not sure how it affects your actual SEO efforts.

Continuing from the announcement on Sunday that we’re replacing the Free version with a Light version, this Light version is now available and new members may no longer create a free account. What does this mean for existing members of the Free version?

First of all, you may continue to use your free account as normal for the next few weeks until the 6th February. This is the cut-off date. At this point, you will no longer be able to submit new bookmarks and all of your existing outstanding submissions will be suspended. We’ve implemented a ‘pause’ mechanism – they will simply be held in the system without being processed until you upgrade to the Light membership. When this happens, the submission times will ne re-calculated to resume the drip-feed effect in the same pattern as you originally specified.

Let me give you an example to make that a little clearer… Lets say you submit a bookmark with the default option of 1 link per day about a week before the cut-off. 7 of the 15 links get submitted but there are still 8 outstanding. You have not upgraded and your account is paused. The 8 submissions are still there but are not being processed. Some time later you decide to upgrade to the Light version. When this happens, your submissions will be unpaused and the submission dates will be re-calculated to continue submitting at a rate of 1 link per day. If we did not do this re-calculation, all the links would be submitted at once, which is not what we want.

I’ve had a lot of feedback about the announcement to replace the free version with IMAutomator Light. A question I have been asked several times is whether or not the Light version will be getting any new features.

Initially the Light version will be exactly the same as what is now the free version but some of the new features in development – such as the spinning support (yes, we’ll release it eventually!) we had originally planned to make Pro only, but will be releasing to all members.

Following on from yesterday’s post, changes are underway for the IMAutomator Light version to be implemented. The fast submit option (all links in 1 or 2 days) has now been disabled for free members. It will be available to Light members which should be available in a day or two.

Pro members are not affected by this change.

Some time in the next few weeks we will be discontinuing the free service and replacing it with ‘IMAutomator Light’ which will carry a small monthly fee of $2.99. Let me explain why we are making this change…

Despite the fact that IMAutomator is still only on it’s second release, the growth over the last couple of years has been huge – far greater than ever anticipated. At the time of writing we have made close to 28 million submissions of behalf on a huge number of members. The vast majority of submissions (in excess of 80%) come from free members.

We pride ourself on the free service – it is the ‘pre-seller’ for our Pro service and I personally have told people many times that there will always be a free service. However, I have to go back on my word and change the business model in order to protect the business as a whole.

Severe Abuse of the Free Service

The trouble with offering something completely free is that is leaves it open to abuse. Now I am sure that the vast majority of individual members do not abuse our service in any way. However this morning I found a single user with 24 different accounts and these are just the ones I happened to stumble upon – I did not specifcally go hunting for them.

I have always known that people could create multiple accounts and use that to totally bypass our limits of 10 links per day to 15 sites. I simply relied on the fact that most people would be honest and hopefully there would only be a small number of abusers and perhaps naievely I also assumed that it would be fairly minor abuse – I envisioned people perhaps creating a couple of accounts, but 24? That hit home just how large the problem could be.

There are two ways that I could deal with this – I could spend vast amounts of time & energy trying to crack down on the abusers but ultimately this will be futile – people will always find a way to create multiple accounts. Even if I could prevent it this way, this use of time does nothing to propell me forward towards the next release. I would rather spend my time building new tools, adding new sites and making the software better for everybody.

The second way, and the approach I am going to take is to quite simply replace the free version with a paid version that carries a small fee of $2.99 per month. I have chosen this price point to be affordable enough to all those who genuinely use IMAutomator to promote their sites but high enough to deter those who chose to make multiple accounts.

The Damage Caused by Such Abuse

Perhaps I should take a moment to explain exactly why this abuse is such a problem. It does two things – increases the overall number of submissions by an unknown factor and secondly, it causes duplication. The 24 accounts that I found were all promoting the same websites – the exact same URL’s in fact.

Many people ask why we do not allow the same URL’s to be submitted multiple times – it is because this is not how bookmarking sites work. They store a database of links and each one is a single backlink to the URL in question but if more than one user attempts to submit the same link, each additional one simply counts as a vote for the first one and does NOT create an additional backlink.

However the real meat of the problem is that if we submit 24 copies of the same URL to the same site in a short space of time it rings alarm bells at the site in question and it can cause our accounts to get banned – this is in fact exactly what this abuser of IMAutomator has done. He abused it to such an extent that I noticed the unusual activity and then of course blocked all his accounts. Now there’s nothing to stop him creating another 24 accounts tomorrow and indeed, for IMAutomator we would create new accounts if necessary but the real issue is that if an account gets banned it takes all the backlinks with it!

Integrity of Our System is of Paramount Importance

This is the reason we have such a strict policy on spam – it is not because we personally have an issue with sites about casinos or drugs etc but because submitting such content can get our accounts banned and that brings down those links for ALL submissions ever made for that account – it affects every member in the system!

IMAutomator is designed as a service to build backlinks – if those backlinks do not survive over the long term they are useless. We will do everything in our power to protect the integrity of the system so that it remains a valuable backlink building tool which will bring our members thousands of backlinks over time.

Now somebody creating an extra account of two to enable him to submit a few more links each day is no big deal. It uses up a bit more of our engine resources but there’s no real harm done and as we have not charged until now, it’s really not something I have been overly concerned with. But when that abuse reaches the point where it is damaging to the other members then I will step in and take action.

I know this has been a very long post but I wanted to explain exactly why I am charging – it is not for money. If I wanted to make more money I would simply allow more people to purchase the Pro membership! Now I shall explain exactly what is going to happen over the next few weeks.

Implentation of the Light Version

We are going to roll this out in three phases:

Phase 1: Preparation

Everything on the website is geared towards the concept of a free and a paid version – every article, every email in our sequences, even every video. All this will need to be changed though the videos will be done later as they will be re-done with the next release anyway.

Phase 2: Free version replaced with Light

We will create a new product – ‘ IMAutomator Light’ and make that available as a product that you can upgrade to in the way that you would currently upgrade to the Pro version. New members will no longer be able to create a Free account though existing members with a Free service will continue to have their submissions processed for the time being.  At this point I will email members so they understand what is happening and will allow a grace period – probably around one month to give the existing Free members time to upgrade.

Also during this grace period we will disable the fast submission options. Those who would like to continue to use the service would be advised to upgrade as soon as it becomes available to ensure that their links will continue to be process after the discontinuation of the free service.

Phase 3: Discontinuation of the free servive

Once we have given people a decent amount of time to make the upgrade (we will of course keep you informed via this blog, our Facebook page and email) we will make the switch. What will happen here is that submissions made using free accounts will no longer be processed. If we continue to process them we would simply be opening ourselves up to even more abuse – I imagine those that abuse the system would just create even more accounts to try and submit as much as possible while they still can. By stopping all free submissions from being made, this would make such activity pointless.

Pro Members Not Affected

Note that Pro members will not be affected by this switch in any way. The fast submit options will still be avaiable – everything will continue to work as normal for Pro members.

The problem with the internal network of sites has now been resolved and they are all working again now and now that we know what caused the problem, we’ve taken steps to ensure it does not occur again.

We have another problem with the small network of sites that we own. The sites are working but the submissions are not. Server support is working on the issue now. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Many bookmark sites cannot be added to IMAutomator due to the fact that they require a CAPTCHA to be filled in on the submission page – this is a dynamically generated image containing some combination of letters / numbers designed especially prevent automated submissions.

Actually they can be added – but unfortunately there is a cost associated with submission. We’re going to be adding support for a service called Decaptcher which allows these codes to be entered during a submission process like ours. But for now, we simply don’t include the sites in IMAutomator.

Most of the article directories that we use are based on a number of popular templates and it would appear that one of the templates has recently had an upgrade which places one of these CAPTCHAS on the submission page for these so we’re having to remove them also. 5 Sites were removed today but luckily we have a few more article sites on the list ready to be tested for submission next week so we should be able to get the numbers back over 50 again soon.

The name server issie has been resolved now so our network of sites is fully working again now. There are some issues with a few others sites but nothing out of the ordinary. Aviation Central appears to have died and we have now removed that. We’re getting intermittent problems with V12 and EBaums World but we’re working on those. After Christmas we’ll be working again to bring in some more sites.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year people!

All of our sites are up and running on the new server but something odd is happening with the domains which is causing some of them to continue to point at the old server. Our new host is working on the issue and has advised us that it will be resolved soon!

The sites on our network are back up and running now but initial stats are showing that the performance isn’t quite 100% so we’ll be keeping an eye on that and possibly tweaking things on the server if need be.

There will be no IMAutomator support on the 25th & 26th December; any emails and issues over these couple of days will be addressed on the 27th. Happy Holidays people and honestly, if you’re reading this – stop working and go spend some time with your families!

We mentioned in the last post that the host on which a network of sites (that we own) took our account down for consuming too much CPU (!). Unfortunately they were not able to resolve this for us – Bad HostGator! Therefore we have now purchased a dedicated server from an alternative host.

This server is now up and running and all the sites that went down should also be back (with all data intact) within 24 hours. Thanks for your patience!

We have a few sites in our system that are on the same host. This host has determined that they are using too much CPU and has temporarily disabled the account. We are currently in negotiations with them to arrive at a solution and the sites will be back online soon – apologies for the inconvenience.

The language check bug has now been fixed (just needed a quick change to the API that we use!) and the language detection has now been reinstated on the submitter.

On the subject of language detection… sometimes it has some difficulty with products when there are brands and model numbers in the title. The workaround to this is to ensure that there is plenty of plain text for it to work with. If you get an error saying that your contec is not in English when submitting something of this kind, just put a couple of extra sentences into the description field and it should go through properly.

We have encountered a problem which caused the language check to fail and report an unknown language for all submissions. We have disabled the check until a fix is found so submissions are working again now. Apologies for the inconvenience.

We’ve had a spam filter in place for some months now but it was rather crude and would only be applied manually after the submission had already taken place so members did not know if their jobs had been marked as spam until they next logged in and saw their job flagged and the warning that goes with it.

What we have now done is to move the spam filter check up a level to the point of submission. Now when you submit a job if the spam filter suspects that the job could be spam it will place that job into a moderation queue where it will stay until it is moderated by a human.

When moderated the job will either be deemed to be not spam in which case it will be accepted and submitted at that point just as if the member had submitted or it will be rejected and a warning will be placed on the member account as before but the job will never enter the system.

Note that we now have a link to our submission guidelines on the actual submission form so if you are in any doubt as to the content of your link, please check those guidelines.