Would we get an email notification if one of our referrals canceled?

Like the referral emails themselves, do we an update letting us know we lost a referral should it occur?

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Unfortunately no, we’re not wired up for that.

hmmm… actually an interesting question. any chance that on the ‘meter’ page we could see a total of referrals, even beyond the 10? … and in the case that you guys are able to in the future account for cancellations, factor those into the total. This would allow us to be prepared for any changes to our financial obligations…

Does the meter update to reflect cancelled referrals?

And if it does… is it possible to set up an RSS notification when your personal meter page changes? Honestly no clue how RSS works precisely, other than it is supposed to send notifications when a page data changes. Never have managed to sit down and use it for myself to figure out if you can set up your own easily.

I’m afraid it doesn’t. Cancellations are still relatively manual and aren’t propagated through the system.

I feel there is a lack of transparency about the whole referrals system. I’ve had people tell me they used my code but not turn up in my referral meter. Couldn’t be solved. Now I read this and I think even if someone keeps track of cancellations manually… they still have to be deducted from the right referral meter in the end somehow. So it sure makes a lot of sense to me (and doesn’t seem to be extra work) to update this information in the (automated?!) system that drives the referral meter. That way you keep us informed in +/- real time, would certainly help grow the confidence. You asked us all to help spread the word selling glowforge to friends and family, please make this system more transparent and userfriendly for us in return.

Unfortunately the team is small, and time spent on that would come at the expense of delivering the product we promised you.

Dan, thanks for taking the time to answer. I really appreciate it.
I’ve heard this before as a reason/excuse for a lot of stuff and I understand you do have to make choices about what you do and what you don’t do. However in this case I see things different. Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe we are talking about a very large number of orders here. Doing everything manual seems crazy! With a little effort this process can be designed to be much more efficiently! That way keeping track of referrals (both adding and removing) will be less time-consuming so that the GF staff has more time to focus on delivering a great product. Adding referrals seems to go automatic already. Could it be that you want to avoid a negative spiral when people start receiving emails saying that other backers cancelled their order? I guess would have more respect if that was the reason… but you will have to tell everybody here how many referral dollars they have left sooner or later. And I guess people will be more ‘forgiving’ if they know it a little more in advance.

Now thinking about this I get very curious… I wonder if you’re willing to share with us how many people cancelled their GF order up to now? If I’m right I did read in a statement a long time ago that there was a very small number of cancellations back then.

Our contractor has been working on a tool to automatically process cancellations for months - long story that I won’t share about the gory details, but suffice it to say that it’s been painful enough that the last thing I’m going to do is add a new feature (‘auto-notify if this person was referred by another person’) to that particular hopper.

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sounds like you need a new contractor lol