Today we’re breaking one of nature’s imperatives and going live with something on a Friday (*piercing scream goes here*). Why would we do such a controversial and dangerous thing you ask? Honestly, I think we’re just bored. Not enough excitement lately and we, the VITY team,  apparently want to get back to the heady days of the beta and seat of our pants development, by living a little dangerously. Plus, we actually tested this build all last week and it’s been green for a while so there’s not much to fear. We good I think.

  We have 3 significant updates worth noting for both Advertisers and Social Influencers including requirements to your country of origin, the whole “approval” system that, um…, “was” in place, and how social Influencers publish their profiles.

  First, we’ve made the simple decision to restrict which companies can work with VITY at the current moment. This is mainly to do with the restrictions Stripe, our payment processor, has so I’m just gonna pawn off all the responsibility that way. So…

  Stupid Stripe! Damn you! Why Stripe? Why?!1!?! You can only work with a select number of countries? Dammit! Sigh.. well, what countries are they then?

  Australia
  Austria
  Belgium
  Canada
  Denmark
  Finland
  France
  Germany
  Ireland
  Italy
  Luxembourg
  Netherlands
  Norway
  Spain
  Sweden
  Switzerland
  United Kingdom
  and, drum roll please, United States.

  (I like to remember them by singing the countries in the tune of Happy Birthday FWIW. But don’t do it out loud! You’ll have to pay Warner Brothers for the privilege if you do…)

  So, basically, if you don’t live in one of those countries we can’t pay you so there’s not much point in signing up. You still can though,  we’re not gonna stop anyone, and Stripe is always adding more countries all the time, so it could totally work out. Who the hell knows with this stuff. Plus, there’s still the Paypal route if we decide to go that way.

Next, we’ve removed the oft confusing, and rarely used,  Approval system. We had thought during planning and development that it’d be one of the more heavily used features but it ended up causing way more problems than it solved. Pretty much, nobody got it. Seriously.  Every demo of VITY had the question, “hey, what’s the approval thing about?”. And we’d explain it, and NOBODY used it. So it’s gone for the moment. We may bring it back at some point, especially once we can refine it a bit, but for now it’s out. If anybody had actually used the feature, here’s where I’d mention the effects on existing campaigns, but nope.

The last update for the day is something that’ll only affect new users but what the hell, might as well post it just in case someone needs to create a new profile. Social Profiles are now public by default. Cool? Basically, before, when a user would create a social profile, said profile would be in a hidden state until explicitly published. The thinking being that profiles are important so care should be taken to ensure the user is cool with others seeing it. But just like approvals, it turned out to be more a pain in the ass for users than it helped. So, that too, is gone. Bye. Published by default.

Aside from a few bugs I’ve been told aren’t interesting enough to write about , that’s it for this update. Next week I plan on having a new feature released that’ll open up a whole new level of possibilities within VITY.

Too much?