Artificial Boy

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[WEB-841] Refer-A-Friend link no longer exchanges calling cards with new signups. No referral bonuses for accounts created after July 2008.

This coincides with the launch of the new registration portal. My theory is that the new portal does not honor the u= parameter in the Refer-A-Friend url. (Refer-A-Friend URLs are described, here, on SL website).

Please note: If someone signs up for Second Life using your code, your name won’t be auto-filled on the registration form, but we do keep track behind the scenes. This is prevent folks registering from being confused by the sight of a potentially unfamiliar name.

Remember, anytime you use one of these methods to refer someone to Second Life, that resident is tagged with you as the referrer. Once they upgrade to premium, you will receive a referral credit of L$2000.¹

The L$2000 promise aside, Basic accounts should at least have a calling card exchanged with the person who referred them. This allows the fragile new SL user to have contact with the SLexperienced referrer without needing to navigate in-world search. Normally, a little blue dialog box would pop up telling the new signup where to find the referrer’s calling card. It would say, “You can now contact Nicolas Biddle, or any other resident of Second Life.” or something to that effect. That dialog box doesn’t come up anymore.

The absence of a calling card for the referrer in the new signup’s inventory indicates that the referral was not recorded “behind the scenes”. It is a difficult system to debug on the user side, indeed.

The last word from LL on the Refer-A-Friend program that I know of was in this blog post.
Refer-A-Friend Program Changes Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 2:49 PM by: Jesse Linden

Anyway, please take a look and vote. Thanks. Here’s the JIRA link again: WEB-841.

Also posted on SL Forums and SLUniverse.

-Big Adz ))