^ I'll just leave this here...
If posts with Ripple addresses keep appearing here I'll start thinking these people are all bots configured to start posting Ripple addresses on any thread mentioning other addresses...

As far as I know, "wiki" is not a synonym of a website with contents that everyone can edit. There are lots of wikis with locked-down pages that only the admin can edit, wikis that can only be edited by certain people (e.g. people who register and send an email somewhere asking for write permission), and even wikis (like the Bitcoin.it one) where one must pay to edit.

Personally I think that requiring a Bitcoin payment to enable editing is a smart feature to prevent bots from posting spam, and it ensures that the editor knows enough about the subject of the wiki (Bitcoin) to create bitcoin transations. About the fee being too high... well, some months ago 0.01 was "nothing". Now the standard for "nothing" is more like 0.0005, or even lower. That the fees are high is a more adequate subject for discussion, in my opinion.

EDIT: seeing that, as described on https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BitcoinPayment , the proceedings from the payments are used to keep with wiki online, and since probably not that many people are signing up, maybe the fee is not that high.

gbl08ma

LaEvfX7g59KVpV2ZfsATa86mmzRTsaJBKD

Thanks!

Letting everyone know I got paid for what I sent.

What assures that I'll get the 0.4 BTC from you after paying the 40000 XRP?

Free? Why not?

127TavrniCUUCrERbYHKC8nnKRXqJW2iDJ

Thanks!

rsgg1U8UpYodp1GM3NDaYfMrZge97Gpvc9

And this withdrawal is done by emailing you with our CoinURL username and password, right? I'm not sure my 0.05 btc pay for my password (it is unique, but one can figure out my "uniqueness" system from it). While it's true that you, as the website owner, could still have access to the password anyway, the fact that you're asking for it makes me believe you didn't have access to it in plaintext. Or are you just asking for the password as a means of confirming the account ownership? And if yes, doesn't that mean you have access to the plaintext passwords so you can compare?

This is sad news. On the other side, other Bitcoin-powered advertising networks will have more market share which will help them not close at least for now.
I really don't know how many ads CoinURL served in a day (haven't checked the global stats since long ago), but I don't think you'd need such powerful server to serve ads. Maybe having two or three smaller servers (and using them based on the visitors location) plus a proxy server would have been cheaper and more efficient. Also, were you ever able to try alternative web server software such as nginx, which is usually lightweight even under heavy load?

Have you thought on scaling back CoinURL to be just URL shortening with interstitial advertising like in the beginning, and dropping the banner ad portion of the service (not sure how much that would help reduce the load)?

I read your post but I'm not sure I understand what happened to the balances of the user accounts. Is this money gone? Is it included in the "unspent clicks and impressions" category? I speak for my ~0.05 btc so it isn't much of a loss (well, if you take into account that's how much I get from ads in two months, yes it's a big loss) but I understand there may be people who had higher balances.

Apart from the downtime, lately I'm getting a lot of "Server overloaded. Please come back later!" messages shown on the ad slots on my website.
I don't know if this message is served by your scripts (i.e. you can change it) or by the hosting provider.
If you have the power to change it, would you please take off the "Please come back later!" part for when the problem is with ad slots? Because visitors of my website (specially first-time visitors) may think the problem is with my server and that they should come back later to my website, when it is operating properly and the overload is just in the ad slot, a problem that is actually out of my control.

Is there a way to disable this new form of password recovery for a single wallet? I believe password recovery ability should be optional, for the reason picobit described:

Last time I checked the service is still up, yes, even though nobody uses it. I'm still using some legacy/unsupported blockchain.info APIs (which still work) but if people start using the service I may update my code to use the newer APIs (which would also require more work on my side, because it is not possible to generate an infinite number of addresses on the same blockchain.info wallet).

There are no user accounts. You first create a link, then edit it to specify the amount of bitcoin the user must pay to visit it along with the address to which I'll send your earnings.

I don't think it would be fair to have people who contributed a high number of questions playing along with people that never have seen any questions but the ones they have already been questioned. At the same time, that can be a feature too: "People who contribute lots of questions have more chances to get more questions right in time", motivating people to submit questions.

Anyway, are you sure it's a good idea to have users be able to submit new questions? You'd have to check if the questions aren't duplicates, they are well written and that their answers are correct; from my point of view, this can be a lot of work, if users start to submit a lot of questions.

From my point of view a true newbie never has that much money to send accidentally... someone who has 200 BTC should probably know enough about Bitcoin to know what to do, or else I'd say it's an early adopter which forgot about the project for some years and is coming back now (and in that case, from where did the person in question get the wrong address to send to?).

Is there any chance there's someone sending money to OP's address, with the intention of sending to another address with the same/similar firstbits?

Why do I think that's too much when at least 40% of the questions have been answered so many times that a simple Google search will reveal the answer without even having to click any of the results?

I fear the game may turn more into a "see-how-fast-you-can-type-at-a-search-engine" game than a knowledge and betting game. And then it'll become a bit boring/unfair (people with someone to help or that can type very fast will win most of the times, making it very frustrating for new users).

Why don't you try to make some profit by taking fees somewhere between the advertiser and the affiliate, and buy a dedicated/virtual server for your websites? I know reducing other people's profit is not the perfect solution, but I can't think of any one better though.

I wonder if the profits from showing the banners will ever sync with the main server once it comes back up...

EDIT: looks like it is up, just very slow, to the point that half of the time the connection drops before the page is served.

I don't need it, I believe you (specially because it isn't all that important now, whether you bought the license or not). I just remembered of that because I read a web hosting forum where lots of people try to use nulled software and then their servers get suspended, and go cry in others' shoulders...

I only hope this flaw and VPS shutdown aren't caused by the use of nulled WHMCS... any way, it's gone.