I'm disgusted with Ciao. (ciao.co.uk)

Member Name: moonbailey

Product:	ciao.co.uk
Date:	22/10/01 (89 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fewer and fewer as time goes on

Disadvantages: more and more. Poor pay outs and bad customer service.

I only signed up very recently with ciao after reading about it here. I thought I'd have nothing to lose by trying another site simulataneously with this one.

Well, I have lost plenty:

My pride,

My earnings

Some of my opinions

and my rag!!

The problems started immediately. The registration didn't work and no password was sent. After two weeks of chasing them up, I finally received it.

Several more problems arose. On many occassions the site would not accept my password. Nor would it send it. Then when it finally admitted my existence, a technical problem meant that no opinions could be rated - thus losing me all my points for my ops that day and wasting my time rating others.

Lastly, I couldn't find categories for the things I wanted to write about. There were only a fraction of the number of categories found on dooyoo.

I got round this by submitting opinions at the weekend and letting ciao read them and create a new category for them. Only trouble was, after all my hours of hard work, they finally created categories for all of them. Then what did they do?

Posted the whole lot on their site at the same time!

So, I immediately got labelled a churner and got no reads for them. Many I'm sure made a mental not to ignore any future opinions from me too. I know I would! I had wiped half the members ops off the front page!

If anyone had read them, they would have seen that they were lengthy and well thought out. There was no chance I could have written them at the speed that they arrived on the new ops page!

So, I wrote a hasty email to ciao asking for them to retract the ops and resubmit them at intervals that were much more spaced out.

They kindly wrote back saying that they had deleted them from record and withdrawn them from the site along with any points I might have got for reads. They then said that I could resubmit them at m
y leisure.

BUT I'd written them online so had no record of them myself! How frustrating to see several hours of work erradicated!

AND NOW EVEN WORSE NEWS!!

I always thought they were stingy payers but the new rule is just insulting.

No money for writing.

Selected opinions only are paid for reads.

And even then, only if read and rated by members...

At a puny 1p per read!!!

This has reduced my average earning from 40-50p per read to 20p - if I'm lucky enough to pick one of their select categories.

They say that this will be made up for by a more generous premium fund judged on some factor that they won't divulge?

I've yet to be included.

And then they say I'll reap rewards and bonus points by earning from surveys.

Well, the only survey I received I was told I was not eligible for.

Funny that, the only information they had from me by that point in the survey was my income.

As I'm unemployed, I did not qualify for the survey. In other words, there was no-one they could sell my information to as a potential customer to flog junk to!

Why didn't they just email me to tell me to piss off - it would be a lot simpler.

Summary: