Hi everyone!

Today we have made some changes to the way people sign-up to Wealthy Affiliate for the Free Trial. On May 4, 2012 we launched the Open Education Project platform and with that launch we introduced a free 10-day trial so that people could come in and check WA out. This has been a great success as we have allowed many people to realize the potential of the Wealthy Affiliate program before having to invest any of their hard earned money in becoming a Premium member.

Until today we used Facebook to validate that members who join through the 10 day free trail are real people. We did this to prevent spam, and to prevent people from creating many accounts and promoting products etc. Facebook has helped us keep WA friendly, helpful, and safe for everyone to learn about online business.

This "safety" will not be compromised with the removal of the Facebook identity validation on the front end. We will still be using Facebook to validate that people are REAL. People can now join WA and have access to the system for free without connecting via Facebook.

However....

These people will be required to connect via Facebook if they wish to post any content and network via:

• Comments
• Blog Posts
• Training

Since the inception of the Open Education Project platform we’ve had a handful of people spam the community with links to products, or misinformed blog posts, even training. Until a user validates that they are REAL, we will not be allowing them to communicate.

A Give and Take Right?

I wholeheartedly think that it’s the right thing to do by preventing people from communicating until they are willing to validate who they are. We are giving people full access to all of our training, tools, and services. Now people can come into WA and first validate that WE are real and that WA is NOT a scam. In return we ask that they validate who THEY are to take full advantage of the support and networking aspect of WA. It's a give and take and we do not think it is too much to ask.

There will still be many people who do not want to connect via Facebook and they will be able to join as a full-time PREMIUM member to unlock the full membership including networking.

Invitations vs Credits

For those who share WA, we expect that the number of Invitations will increase. TOO many people out there do not want to give up their facebook information until they know that a service is legit.

We now allow people to enter WA without connecting and this counts as an Invitation.

Until today. invitations and WA credits have been on a one-to-one basis because ALL free members were forced to join via FB. Today this has changed. $1 credits for invitations are given out to people who confirm their identity. Why do this? The simple reason is that we need to validate that people who join are real before we can pay $1 for the invitation.

So where is this Credit System that we have been talking about?

The credit system is just a day or two away and this is going to allow all users who have earned invitations to cash out these credits using a really easy to use system. In the coming days you will be able to cash out your referral credits into real cash paid on the 1st of every month to your paypal account.

This is what the system looks like:

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The removal of Facebook as the constraint to join for the 10-day free trial will be a significant milestone in the evolution of WA and we look forward to reaching people an helping them verify that Wealthy Affiliate University is the REAL deal and that our community is the best place to learn internet marketing in the world.

I want to hear your feedback on this, so please leave a comment below!

Carson