I am a member of an online site called My Points. My points offers a point reward system based on online purchases and visits to their sites and sponsors. With these points you can redeem many gift card prizes such as restaurant vouchers, gift cards for department stores like Wal-mart and online coupons for retailers like Amazon. I have even personally redeemed points and received my gift cards in the mail. So far in my experience I have not had one bad word to say about My Points. Until recently. So here is my bone to pick with My Points and my advice for other My Points members and people looking to join.
Last week I was on their site checking out their latest offers when I decided to try out their toolbar. As a reward for using their toolbar after one month you receive 100 points, however just for downloading it my account showed no initial points. I figured for 100 points an extra toolbar couldn’t hurt, in fact I thought, “Maybe this will even be handy.” I was wrong.
I have not been so aggrevated with a computer feature in a long time. Whether I was using the My Points toolbar or not it would redirect many of my searches to the My Points search results. This is not so bad if you are searching for something but in other cases it is total hell. For example when I was writing emails I would press send, instead of sending my email it would say it couldn’t find the page and take me to My Points. Also, when I typed in direct addresses in my original http url toolbar installed with my browser, ie Mozilla Firefox it would not even take me there. The My Points installed on my computer would override my direct command to go to a site and guess where it takes me, My Points search results.
If I wanted to search I would use a search bar but I didn’t I just want to go a particular site ie, http://instantfreecash.com but now this toolbar from hell is taking over half of all my chosen internet url destinations and to top it off there search engine never seems to even have the site I typed in listed. Not only is this making it impossible to even go to a website, send an email or finish one online task without being directed to My Points but now I have a major headache.
For someone who works online, my productivity rate dropped about 80 percent while having the My Points toolbar installed. In other words, the amount of work I was completing was minimal due to this stupid redirecting My Points toolbar. If the toolbar had worked properly as a toolbar should for searches and not take 50 percent or more of my “hits” to My Points I would have probably enjoyed having it. But instead My Points decided to get more traffic to their website by screwing over their customers and ignoring where they want to go and just sending through the My Points links. This is not only shady buisness and unethical but just plain annoying.
The only good thing about the My Points toolbar was how easy it was to uninstall. I guess they made it that way so they did not have people going berserk when they cannot even go to one simple web page they already know the url for. Nonetheless I didn’t even last 4 days with cursed toolbar and of course I received no points because I did not use their service for the whole duration of one month plus. I guess my point is that the My Points toolbar is more hassle then it is worth and a total disappointment in a search engine toolbar.
