Most people reading this probably don’t even care and may not even have a clue what RefMaker is. It also, in my opinion, died a long time ago… but now refmaker.com and refmaker.net are officially defunct… the sites have both been down for a few weeks now. Looks like Rick Hill finally gave up on trying to keep it alive.
RefMaker is a big part of my personal Internet history. Way back when there was the big boom of “pay to surf” companies that paid you to run their banner ad programs, RefMaker was there to help people have all of their referral links in one place, even if you had no clue how to make a website.
But the big part of RefMaker wasn’t getting your own promotional website, it was the community of members who posted on their forums. Which, back in 1999, was hosted on delphi.com when forums like that were still allowed under their TOS. RefMaker forums was like what bargainshare.com is to me now. I wasted so much of my time there that they even made me a moderator. 😛 That was quite an accomplishment for me because I was so much younger than most of the RefMaker community. Here I was, 18-19 years old, and pretty much (I really hate to put it this way, but this is the first word that comes to mind) “babysitting” people who were in their mid-20’s and older and making sure nobody spammed, flamed, or “skipped” another person in a referral chain. It was really a thankless job, but I would probably do it all over again, if given the chance.
When the forums moved from Delphi to RM’s own servers (because now they were in violation of Delphi’s TOS), that’s when things really seemed to start dying. Not only because most of the good pay-to-surf programs disappeared, but because it lost the traffic potential that came from being listed as one of Delphi’s top forums on the main page.
I think when I left, it was around the fourth of July in 2001. I just didn’t see a point in staying at a pay-to-surf forum since I didn’t even participate in the programs anymore, so Independence Day became my independence day from being a RefMaker moderator.
I still continued to use refmaker.net’s webmail service right up until the day that it stopped working for me. I’m glad that I saved every important e-mail and changed my e-mail address for every online store that I shopped at with that e-mail address. After last year when the domain expired and nobody knew if it would get renewed or not, I learned my lesson and transferred everything to a different address.
Now that it seems like it’s gone for good, I guess there’s nothing left to say except…
Goodbye, RefMaker!
I remember you on the Refmaker forums. I was just searching through some of my old forums accounts and stumbled upon your blog while trying to figure out what ever happened to Refmaker and Rick.
I was a mod too on the forums a while back and was just about the same age, trying to moderate and manage the forums and flaming from the Skiddly CEO.
Good times.
Hey, Evan. I remember you too. Those GPTS days were interesting trying to have as many things on my screen at one time. LOL!
Oh, man, Skiddily. Haha! I remember that guy too.
I have no idea what happened to Rick either. I still have him and Grace (wvpdles) on ICQ, but I never use ICQ. Haven’t really talked to anybody at all from those forums in a long time.
I ended up leaving RefMaker and spending more time on deals sites. Tim of FatWallet asked if I wanted to be a mod there too, but I turned him down since I was busy with college at the time. I ended up as a moderator at two other forums though. One is a dead import video game forum and the other forum is Bargainshare. I still lurk at FW, but mostly spend my time on B$ and CAG. I know that callgirl from RefMaker is on FW as Justincase, but I don’t think she posts there anymore. I’ve seen your posts on FW too… it was easy to figure out who you were since you used the same username as on RM.
Good to hear from you again. I hope everything’s going well!