JMH Techtronics

Table of Contents:

I. Introduction
II. Press Releases and Articles
III. New ChaCha Front Page “Enhancements” Scam
IV. Pay Me Now Fees Scam
V. Working for Free and Deactivations
VI. ChaCha Archives

When you get paid to work by the hour when you are punched in and the duties you are asked to do aren’t for free. At ChaCha you don’t get paid by the hour, but only when you are actually in a Live Search with an infoseeker. So if you are not in a search with an actual infoseeker you will not be getting paid.

Adding to the previous point from the article ChaCha New Front Page “Enhancements” Scam I want to give you an idea of what I am talking about here. The guide application is set up so that the results you display to infoseekers must be categorized so that they can be put into the search database. Whether or not this categorization is accurate or not is really of little importance to this discussion, and that can be argued by those that actually want to debate how good ChaCha is as a place to search for answers.

Now recently live guides have been asked to do a bit of overtime. It isn’t required, but certainly encouraged. When a session with an infoseeker ends, guides are asked to optimize the results that they have given to the infoseeker. This means that they can go in and re-categorize and make sure that they have the best results possible for the ChaCha database. Now the concept is great actually for ChaCha and ultimately the database. Of course guides don’t actually get paid to do this. This is just extra work they can do out of the kindness of their hearts. Since I mentioned int he last section that the consensus is that guides may be phased out eventually to a much smaller role this is something else that most would argue contributes to that. Not only are guides working for free, but they are also adding to a database that is trying to become its own stand alone search database that will work with out live guides.

Besides this request, how many of you guides have been in a search, and subsequently found the application locking up and then taking your pay away? This happened to me all the time. A few pennies here and a few pennies there adds up when you only make pennies doing this low-end money maker. ChaCha says they will pay you if you take the time to pull all th info related to the search, time, etc. and submit it to them. Seriously this is for about 20 cents in most cases so not many are going to do it. Then you would have to wait for weeks to even get a response on it if you did.

I never really checked this from search to search when I did it because I just assumed that their software worked reasonably well enough to keep track of it. Looking at your earnings page after every search shouldn’t be something you had to do. So one day I decided to look at my hours and do the math. What I came to find out is that almost 1/3 of my time was free. This wasn’t going over the time limit time either. At that time the time limit was 20 minutes so it never occurred, but maybe once in a blue moon. I contacted ChaCha with my question on why my pay was not being credited. They had the nerve to ask me to go through my entire earnings history and track down every single instance of when I may or may not have been paid when they would likely have access to much more detailed reports on my account. Can you believe this? At this point I would have had hundreds of pages to go through between trainings and real searches to find all these instances. I responded by telling them that I did not have time to go through such a scavenger hunt and that my stats clearly showed I did the work. All they had to do was look at it and see themselves. Suffice to say I never got a response after 3 more inquiries and never got paid either.

ChaCha Guide Deactivations

There are quite a few stories going around about ChaCha Guide Deactivations. Most are deserved and the guides will not argue the fact in these cases. What they do argue is that they were not compensated for any of the money left in their accounts after they were terminated even though they performed the work. This is why the ChaCha’s Pay Me Now Scam is such an issue. Guides are afraid to keep their earnings in their accounts for fear of a possible deactivation with out warning. They pull their earnings more often than they would want to, and therefore incurring a $2 fee that goes to ChaCha every time they do.

Just the story of guides not being paid when deactivated being out there forces many to use that Pay Me Now button more than they would like. They don’t trust ChaCha. Many fear they will be deactivated for silly reasons, and frankly there are those that have been. They may get locked out and have to go through a process of e-mailing, or even talking to the HQ to get the situation taken care of. This could take days and even weeks.

Then when guides are deactivated they are looking to get the money that was in their accounts. Most of the time the guide was deactivated for one instance. One search where they got flippy with an infoseeker, or just were having a bad day and got reported by a prankster. This may have been 20 cents they earned in that search, but ChaCha may be holding a couple hundred dollars they earned previously and only if you contact them and complain will you ever get that money back.

Take a look at this story from a guide who was deactivated and owed $441.80 that he had left in his account here.

Interesting read on his struggles with the deactivation as well as the timeline for him ever getting his money that he was owed.

ChaCha’s “Guide Agreement” is so vague that anyone who reads it should understand that it is so lopsided to favor the rights of ChaCha that you may think you are reading a work of fiction. They do nothing to make anyone think they will not be gouged out of their account money anywhere if they happen to be deactivated so they again have that nice little scam going for them to help add to that Pay Me Now Fees Scam. Everywhere you look with ChaCha they are looking to squeeze the guides out of some cash using fear tactics, and just plain lying.

What a great company. You RahRahs should be ashamed of yourselves for coming here and trying to justify how this company is run. Beta my ass. This is something that sounds better served for the Indiana Labor Board than talking about how “It’s still in Beta”.

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Filed under: ChaCha, Computers and Internet by JMH

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