Second Life: Earn2Life Update

As mentioned in my last post, i was going to test the web-offers with by installing the toolbar. For security reasons, I’ve set up safe environment where I could install the toolbar without any risk of compromising my actual working PC, which I also use for job and contains sensible data from the company I work for. After all, one have to be careful with software you install on your PC.

However, there was some “surprise”…

The preparations

Before I started, I had to check if installing the toolbar on a second PC is ok with the Earn2Life Term of Service (as of Monday, 24-11-2008). The only relevant passage I found in the Term of Service was the following one:

2. ONE member – ONE account – ONE computer – ONE household.

More than one person cannot use the same computer for accessing this site. Member cannot have more than one account.
You cannot have your friends or family members as your referrals if they are living in the same house/flat with you.
Cyber cafes or any other types of public computers are not allowed when accessing this site.

As I was the only person who can access this PC and the virtual machine on it and I had no more than one account, there wasn’t any conflicts with running/testing it on a second PC/test environment.

So in order to test this software toolbar provided by Earn2Life, I’ve setup a VMware environment and installed my Windows 2000 on it, as it was against the Microsoft EULA to install a single-licence Vista on more than 1 PC.

It took me whole 3 hours to install Windows 2000 and patch install all recent updates (after all, recent patches are still important even if it’s just a test environment and maybe I could use be in need of it at a later point in time).

Installing & Setting up the toolbar

Installing of the bar only took moments. After installing the bar, I logged on the Earn2Life page and wondered a bit as the Website said the toolbar was not installed. I restarted Internet Explorer and got same message again. After checking the View->Explorer Bars Menu, I’ve found a new Entry there which was added by Earn2Life. After enabling it, the bar was displayed in the Internet Explorer and recognized by the Earn2Life website.

But it said me, that the bar wasn’t connected. So far so good. I clicked on connect in the toolbar and a window popped up, asking me for my login. I’ve entered my Username and Password and it told me, the bar was successfully enabled.

Another click on “Connect” and the bar was connected to the Earn2Life network. Being full of anticipation, I’ve clicked on the web-offers Tab to see the list of offers. The more I was horrified when I got a Internet Explorer message box, telling me that the page couldn’t be loaded. Well ok, I thought and clicked the “Back” Button on my browser. Same message appeared. I tried it several times, same. So I thought maybe restarting the browser would help.

After restarting and trying to log in, I was shocked, that my account was blocked. Tried it a few times but same result. So I opened a support ticket immediately asking why my account was blocked, but haven’t got an answer within 48 hours.

Conclusion

As I have no definitive answer, I can only speculate what went wrong. My assumption is that their toolbar was somehow buggy and programmed pretty bad which caused an error when I tried to open the web-offers page and for some reason the account was blocked for this reason. It’s the most logical conclusion, as I had no problems with Earn2Life before that and this happened in the time I installed the bar and went to the web-offers for the first time after activating and it happened in a time span of approximate 30 seconds.

So my advice to everyone for the moment is: Don’t use the web-offers/toolbar if you don’t want your account being banned until this case gets resolved.