logged in and found this under my referral bonuses... Jason Larson 450 Richard -2,100 1,800 Base + -1,650 Bonus = 150 Total Weight
Hmmm... that's interesting... I'll have to check how someone even got a negative weight. But at the very least, I'll put a minimum weight of zero.
Yeah, but it's pointless because the weight bonus comes FROM the site you signup, so you end up with the same total.
so you'll have more weight if you don't sign up with a ref than you would if you do? that's a bit odd.. though I guess it does prevent abuse
Correct... making weight bonus appear out of thin air would lead to lots of abuse and artificial bonuses being generated. If you have any better ideas on how to do it, it's open for suggestions.
Just thought of something, as I signed up my first referal to the network - what if the 10% extra was taken from the network as a whole instead of the person that's signing up, that way there's no negative impact on people signing up via referals? For instance, say there are 10 people on the network, all with a weight of 1000 (to keep it simple). And 1 guy signs up 1 more person. The total network weight would be 11,000. New guy would have a weight of 900, where as the guy that referred new guy would have a weight of 1100. Under my proposed system, the guy who referred the new guy would still have a weight of 1100, but everyone else would have a weight of 990... So it rewards the people that refer, but doesn't really take away from anyone in a significant way, but only further encourages people to refer so to not have a lesser weight... Did that make sense? (It's 3:40am here, so it might not have... if it didn't, let me know, and I'll clarify in the morning... hehe).
So for every 10 referrals you make, you want to have 100% of the entire weight of the network? Plus, what if you were referring people with a tiny weight that brings no value to the network? Seems like an easy way for people to setup their own mini site and instantly gain 10% of the entire network value as a "bonus".
No, no, no... you misunderstood me, Shawn... not 10% of the whole network... the exact same 10% you would have taken from the person that was referred, but instead of that person loosing out on 10%, it's spread out across the network... are you following me?
No... let me try to explain again. I'll try to use more realistic numbers as well. Let's say there are 200 members in the network currently, all with an average of 5000 weight points, therefore giving the entire network a value of 1M. For the sake of the example, let's say everyone has the exact same weight to start @ 5000. Now, 1 person gets referred to the network (who also has a site with weight 5000. Now, the network has a weight of 105,000 right? Now, the referrer (call them person A), gets a 10% bonus based on the weight of the site of the person who was referred (call them person B). There for person A now has a weight of 5500, right? In the system we currently have, those 500 weight points would come from person B and given to person A, leaving person B with 4500. The part about the current system that sucks is person B could have signed up without the referral and would have received 500 more weight points. My suggestion is take that 500 points away from the pool. So person A will still have 5500 points, but person B, along with everyone else in the network will give up a couple points (~2.5) giving each person in the network 4997.5 weight points... so instead of the person that was referred being penalized, the entire network received a very small penalty for not referring someone... Does that now make sense?
But isn't it better than penalizing people for being referred? Plus, the weight being taken away from the pool is negligable when looked at on a per account basis (plus this way it encourages people to refer more people to the network).
Shawn, What would happen to a site that registered through a referral that only had 1 page in Google, even though there may be more pages awaiting indexing?