I just spent hours doing a manual review – I think it’s a bug
I just went through and manually reviewed many stories that I’m sure had a paywall on in the past – so how long have I not been paid for these very popular stories?
I always enable the paywall when I publish a story, with a few exceptions. There have been too many stories with the paywall being disabled for me to have made so many mistakes.
I know the stories had a paywall at one point. But when I came back and looked, suddenly there was $0 payment or a dash instead of any payment. Some of these stories that I know of were very popular and were recognized by people high up in the security space or cloud providers.
So what happened Medium???
I can’t say because I don’t have the logs – and besides, if the logs aren’t secure, they’re useless.
Here’s what Medium could provide:
- A list of stories that have the paywall enabled or disabled in a column on the stats page.
- The time and date of the last modification made to this field.
- The IP address that made the change.
- A list of connections with time and date by IP address.
If someone accessed my machine – the only machine I edit my stories on and the only network I do it from and closely monitor, then I could tell it was my problem from the logs .
However, given the way I monitor things, I doubt it was me, unless there was some sort of attack on the Medium site that exploited my credentials or session then that I was connected.
I can’t comment on any of this since I don’t have access to the logs, but I will now monitor this paywall setting more carefully.
The other thing is that after a manual spot check I think this is a bug and was potentially caused by Medium. Because all the stories where this happened have a hyphen (-) and no payment number.
It’s like someone deleted these payments and all the statistics from these stories and turned off the paywall. And that would explain why my stats have disappeared over the last few months after the Medium dashboard changed.