Reporting a bit early here, but I felt inspired, and also my new phone has a screen recording function.
Besides the additional of more Travel posts, I have also built out several game wiki pages, notably the Dragon Traveler wiki, and new game guides for offers on FreeCash and Swagbucks.
After some sleuthing and head scratching I noticed an issue with the way Adobe Storage manages data in the cloud.
Free accounts receive 5GB of storage space which can be exceeded under certain conditions. For example, uploading multiple files at once which exceed the limit.
If further uploads are attempted after hitting the limit, a red message bar will appear at the head of the page, notifying users that they have run out of space and must either upgrade their account or remove files.
So far this is pretty normal as one might expect of a cloud storage service.
However, the issue is that many users find that the storage overage message does not go away or nor does it decrease in size as files are permanently deleted from storage.
This has likely led users to paying for a subscription to increase the storage capacity of their accounts as a way to bypass the “bug.”
But I don’t think it is a bug. I think this is an intentional effort by Adobe to drive users to subscribe. It’s a money machine. Just my opinion.
Adobe cloud storage appears to be associating the entire amount of storage overage to all files present when the limit is exceeded. If even a single file remains, all limit overage will be attached to the single item.
I have successfully recreated the issue and fixed it using the method provided below.
After encountering the storage bug, I deleted all but a single 12mb file from my cloud storage. The message read that I was 2.71GB over my 5GB storage capacity.
I was planning on using the remaining 12mb file to create a Short for YouTube after I cleared the storage bug.
I would expect most users to have files in storage that they would rather not have to delete, whether for business or personal use. It’s quite common.
The red bar remained in place after permanently deleting the files, and the overage amount (7.71GB) did not change.
Rebooting, clearing cache, and cookies, had not effect. Following the instructions provided by Adobe Support members also did not clear up the issue.
Since I had a copy of the video file still on my hard drive, i went ahead and sent the last file to the Trash. Then I navigated to Trash and selected the file and Delete Permanently.
You can see in the image above that the system had relegated the entire 7.71GB storage limit overage to the single remaining file in my cloud storage.
An after I deleted the final file, my storage was cleared and the overage message disappeared.
I watched a video on YouTube the other day that I felt especially compelled by. It got me to stop and think a bit more about my previous YouTube channels and to reconsider posting videos.
When I decided to close GameGirlsGallery (GGG), I also deleted my ASMR and Thrifting channels as well. They other two had fewer than a hundred subscribers, so it wasn’t any real loss.
After 18 months, GGG had well over a thousand subscribers and I regularly got comments and engagement on the content I posted. The decision to close the channel was difficult, but necessary. It was the same with removing that type of content from this website (Hard Choices: Removing Site Content).
Well, yesterday, I decided to go ahead and try again with YouTube. I’m terrible with following through on plans, but I will try to do a live stream every Wednesday and a recorded video once a week.
Ideally, I would like to be able to livestream with my phone, but you need 50 subscribers to do livestreams using the YouTube app. I thought about doing it in the office, but its so messy here, I’d be quite embarrassed.
I ordered an action camera off of eBay for 20 bucks and that should arrive sometime next week if holiday traffic doesn’t slow the parcel down. Its magnetic and has a lanyard and metal pad that can fit under clothes. That will allow me to film while I am out sourcing, but still keep my hands free.
I really wanted an Insta360 Go 3S, but its way out of my price range. My wallet can’t handle anything that fancy. Hopefully, the generic I bought will be able to manage my needs.
Other than videos related to eBay, I will likely include some slideshow videos of my domestic travel blog series.
Anyways, the channel is @FatWalletRefugee (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMzS1MYRiA570YCdXuEEQ-g)
Thanks for reading. See you next time!
I had a couple of Zoom meetings this morning at NC time (-4 UTC). So I woke up at 5:50 and logged in for those. They ran for just under 3 hours.
Afterwards I ate a light breakfast of granola and banana slices in yogurt. I added some hazelnut milk to balance it out.
Around eleven a friend of my mother’s, Julia, came and picked me up and we went downtown to Tommy Knockers for brunch with another friend of my mother, Ruby.
I had the Scotch Egg, a hard boiled egg wrapped in ground bacon and spices, topped with mustard and paprika. The eggs lay on a bed of garden greens quite stylishly.
To drink I ordered the tap cider, Alpenfire. I didn’t care for the cider, it was a bit like light beer. It didn’t have much body or depth of flavor. It was maybe like a semisweet apple juice.
It was a very nice opportunity to meet up with old family friends. Ruby’s son, Cedar, was my best friend growing up. I still consider him my best friend, that’s a position that could never be replaced.
Julia’s daughter, Nina, was another young friend. I can remember playing together with dolls and LEGOs. Her father raised stick insects and had games on his computer.
I recall watching the premiere of Powerpuff Girls at Julia’s house. They had a special event running on Cartoon Network with some prize giveaway you had to call in for.
Fond memories. I got a chance to inquire about the other children I had interactions with. Kali lives in Tennessee, Cherese is in Florida, and Becky is in Oklahoma. Rebekah is still local and something of a sports prodigy.
After the meal we must have chatted for an hour and a half. All sorts of topics. Quite pleasant.
I was able to get a phone number of another friend’s sister, Lily, and I left her a voicemail inquiring about her brother, Lang. Hopefully we can meet before my flight home on Monday.
During the drive back to my father’s house we stopped at Laurel Groves, the cemetery, and I had a chance to pay my respects to my best friend, Cedar. He was just a year younger than I. It’s been 13 years since he passed. I wish I had kept in contact with him more.
There are many people I have lost contact with. I recall my first email was a Hotmail address. I lost the password sometime around going to Job Corps on February 5th, 2005.
At the center I had a Yahoo address and I was introduced to MySpace. I recall connecting with mostly students at the center and maybe someone from Port Townsend.
Sometime in 2006 the kids around me started talking about moving to Facebook. I remember logging in to MySpace and someone snorting and saying, “you still use that?”
I’ve always been regarded by others as being good with computers, but I’ve never been good with keeping up with trends. I expected Social Media to be a fad that would eventually go away.
Anyways, Facebook was quite effective. I was able to put in my schooling history and it brought up the profiles of several friends. That was quite impressive compared to MySpace.
I used the Yahoo email until I moved to NC. At some point the account became inundated with spam and I made an Outlook account. I initially try recovering my Hotmail, but I couldn’t quite remember how it was spelled, Aquila13 or something.
I still use the Outlook account these days. I tried getting back into the Yahoo, but it’s totally gone. I think Yahoo went away at some point. Been sold off or something. But the email address wasn’t recoverable.
So, unfortunately, I was never able to copy my contact lists over between any of the accounts. Additionally, I had multiple technology scares that led me to purging my social media accounts time and again over the years. Now I don’t use it at all.
Now with all the AI stuff going around I just don’t feel like I understand computers anymore. The last technology hurdle I successfully passed was Bitcoin. I chased the mining game from 2013-2020.
I should have just held with the HODL crowd. If you count all the Bitcoin and Litecoin I ever bought, I would have a multimillionaire by now. Thousands of coins to pay for GPUs and then ASIC mining rigs that were soon obsolete.
My last mistake was liquidating my last coins to cover the EIDL loans and other bills. I did it two months before Bitcoin hit $10k. I could have paid my debts and had plenty of cash left over.
Went off on a tangent again, sorry.
TLDR: Disappointed with the operator. Stopped using it. Several undisclosed terms of service and billing issues.
Sometime back in July (2025), I watched a YouTube video about the Rocket AI tool. The service uses AI, and you interact with it to ask it to build either a website or a mobile app. The system utilizes tokens for all tasks, and it is free to sign up and begin building.
I got interested and started brainstorming a possible app I could make using Rocket. After I came up with a workable design, I made an account and started interacting with Rocket.
It was pretty slow, but I think there were just a lot of people using the platform. I had time to get up and grab coffee. I watched TV for a while.
During the first creation step, I was given a list of 6 possible pages to include in the app, based on the criteria I had supplied. I only had enough tokens to create 4 of the pages, so I decided to complete the last 2 during the next week.
You start with 2 million free tokens and are supposed to get another 1 million each week, but there is a cap on token usage of 1 million per week. You can probably see where this is going.
After my first week, the new tokens did not arrive, and I had to contact support on Discord. The support person couldn’t find my account, but the system refilled the tokens the next day.
I then managed to spend all 2 million tokens in the next session, which is odd because after rechecking the notification, it still said I had a limit of 1 million per week.
The following week, I still had a zero balance. The notification area of the screen looked different as well. The “1 million per week” text was gone. It simply said 0K/2M.
So just as I did before, I hopped onto the Discord channel to check the support thread.
I found another user asking about the missing tokens, and the support person had replied that the 1 million free tokens were only for the first 2 weeks. Just a free trial, essentially.
It never said that in the YouTube video I watched or on the signup pages. I also couldn’t find it in the Terms of Service or the Help documentation.
Another user had pointed out that after upgrading, their token count hadn’t properly increased from 1M to 6M. Support said that the 1 million “trial” tokens were replaced when upgrading to a paid plan. So instead of having 6M total tokens, the user was left with only 5M.
This term of service is also not mentioned in any of the documents or on the payment page itself.
Several users had issues with the service, including,
There are more issues, but I don’t have the patience to cover them all at this point.
Possibly part of the problem is that there only appears to be a single member of staff answering all the support requests. After reading through many of the help requests, I started to wonder whether or not the company was actually just one person.
Many AI-based services have become available since the technology has become easier to interact with. There is perhaps some danger in signing up for an unvetted service. Though these could simply be the growing pains of a startup.
For now, I have decided to stop using the platform. I won’t be continuing with my app project. If I find a similar service, I might try that out instead.
About Us
Our mission is to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience and quality clothes at affordable prices.
The apparel in our shop has been sourced from a variety of sources, including thrift shops, yard sales, and liquidation stores.
Feel free to make an offer on any of our garments. We offer free returns on all items.
For delisted items, message us through eBay @LaFemme1st or drop a comment on this post.
Previous Article – My WordAds Experience (Q2)
Next Article – Quarterly WordAds Report for 2025
I got so busy with my eBay reselling that I forgot I had this series of posts I had said I would run. It is now partway through Q1 of 2025, so I have a little catching up.
Site traffic for these months was roughly the same as the previous period. But I did see an uptick in the number of ads displayed. I would attribute the increased ad views to the continued fine-tuning of ads on the more popular post topics.
As mentioned in the previous article, my goal is to reach $66 in annual earnings. This should cover the price I paid for the premium hosting plan featuring ad revenue.
| Month | Ads Served | Avg CPM | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| July | 22,531 | $0.23 | $5.11 |
| August | 37,472 | $0.24 | $9.09 |
| September | 30,110 | $0.20 | $6.05 |
I’m not entirely certain why the revenues shot up for August. The increased traffic was nice, but it seemed to peak and then fall off the next month.
I had removed some 20 redundant posts which may have caused the drop.
That “removal” had been in error due to a bad bot, and customer service was able to remove the error. They also clarified that the site was receiving traffic accurately.
After I got the green light, I relisted all the taken-down posts. This caused a surge in traffic to the “new” posts. Both the Google and Bing web crawlers showed an uptick in analytical data during this period. Many of those old posts had been removed from the indexes because they were old and didn’t get much traffic.
The holiday season was quite busy for me, which was a bit odd. As an atheist, I don’t celebrate anything and rarely go in for the irreligious events either.
Of course, if you shove a turkey my way, I’m not gonna pass off the food.
Anyway, I was busy with my eBay sales in the 4th quarter. I did some good sales volume and was able to finish the year at a break-even on my Excel balance sheet.
| Month | Ads Served | Avg CPM | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| October | 33,274 | $0.15 | $5.00 |
| November | 33,556 | $0.20 | $6.87 |
| December | 64,570 | $0.11 | $7.05 |
The site traffic seemed to hit a plateau in October and November, and I figured I had found my sweet spot between the wind and waves. I was a bit miffed at the lower CPM in Oct, as you can see it dropped to $0.15 and I lost $1.05 in revenue earnings compared with Sept.
November saw a return to better numbers despite no change in site traffic. I was starting to see a confluence of visitors on three posts in particular, though.
The Game of Vampires Wiki page I had created was getting some really good numbers and had been edging close to the top of my traffic list for several months.
I was still seeing steady traffic on the Game Guides for Puzzles and Chaos and some other high-value offers. I think it was around this time when some of the offers started going into the four-digit range and the Reddit folks were going nuts.
In December, I received around 7k more views than the previous months and 2,440 more visitors. The CPM went down drastically, but I did see an increase in my site revenue. I think many of the extra views were from repeat customers.
Sept’s top post was Puzzles and Chaos, for Oct it was the Game of Vampires Wiki, but come Nov, both were supplanted by the Top Girl Wiki. The game had gone through a couple of rebrands as the Alpha and Beta releases were cleared away.
I think writing a “Wiki” instead of a game guide made the difference.
Honestly, the Fandom-branded (Wikia) sites are all covered in terrible, unsafe advertisements. I can understand why someone would prefer to come to FWR instead.
There are many sites with guides, but few that claim to be a wiki, and that is what people are searching for when they look for guides. They type in “game wiki” or “game Reddit” to find info on whatever game they need help with.
The traffic to Top Girl Wiki tripled between November and December.
I also realized that the page I had thrown together was loading slowly on mobile devices and that the majority of my traffic was from cell phones. So, I added separate posts for a lot of the content, and I started using Pages instead of Posts.
This allowed me to set the wiki page as a Parent Page and the associated articles as Child Pages. The hierarchy makes for a more structured design format. Basically, it’s easier to navigate.
That will be all for this quarterly report on Wordads. I will try and remember to write another one in April 2025.
See the previous post in this series.
Earlier this year I made the decision to upgrade my WordPress account from a free to a paid plan. A big part of my decision was being able to monetize the site. I have tried my hand at affiliate marketing but have not had any success so far.
In the previous post, I detailed the costs of the upgrade and the discounts that I was able to apply to my purchase. My average cost per year is about 66 USD and so that has been my goal as far as revenues from the advertising on the site.
Divided by 9 (I started in March) it brings my monthly goal to 7.33 USD for ad revenue.
As you can see, my earnings have not yet reached that goal. April marked my first full month of advertising on the site. The FAQ page in the WordPress help files said that it would take up to 3 months for advertisers to fine-tune their presence on the site.
You can see there was a small drop in ads served after April, but this went up noticeably once June was finished.
Above you can see that I only published 3 posts for the period of June 17th through June 23rd. My visitor traffic was only 975 with total views of 1,720 pages.
The CPM was 0.26 USD which yielded revenues of 1.78 USD for that period. This was a large portion of the earnings for June.
I think the increased ads served came from completing the Daily Writing prompts.
These writing questions will often get a lot of traffic in the WordPress Reader and posts can garner Likes and Reblogs. On days when I complete a writing prompt, I will see my visitor traffic swell.
I still need 53.63 USD to break even this year on the cost of the upgrade. I am still hopeful that my site traffic will increase over time. My gaming guides continue to be the main source of site traffic.
I have tinkered with the idea of migrating over content from my other blog which gets more traffic, but I am concerned that it may not fall under the “family-friendly” guidelines for WordAds. This site received 15k views from April to June while the other site gets 17k+ each month.
Anyway, I will continue to track my progress and post another update for quarter three in October. Thanks for reading and have a great day!
See the next post in the series.
As you have likely heard by now Adobe, the software company, is facing yet another scandal.
A simple search for “Adobe” on Google or YouTube will bring about a long list of negative articles and videos showcasing the many failures of this firm.
The FTC, an American regulatory organization, has charged Adobe with deceiving consumers about early termination fees and inhibited cancelation of services.
They are now saying that company executives hid those fees behind multiple layers in contracts, in small print, and charged as much as half a years worth of subscription charges as an early cancelation fee.
AI is the new camera,
this headline was another recent blunder by Adobe staff.
It was such an unfortunate expression considering the vast majority of Adobe users are photographers and filmmakers whose livelihoods are being threatened by the rise of generative AI.
Changes in the terms of service for the software have suggested that Adobe intends to use the personal photos and other media that users have stored on their cloud accounts to train its new Firefly AI software.
This betrayal and theft of data has enlarged the outcry by customers and pundits of the industry.
Before that, in 2013, Adobe was hacked and at least 38 million creditcard numbers were released. It was found during the investigation that Adobe had used the same encryption password for all of the accounts.
Then there were the kickbacks to federal employees, 3 million (USD) to employees to get them to choose Adobe software for their computer systems.
The more recent scandals have shaken the confidence of common users of the software and has led to a mass drive to cancel and calls for a boycott.
Despite the online shame, Adobe’s stock price has not seen great losses and shareholders continue support the embattled company. Since it’s early IPO at 17 cents (USD) to today’s 533 dollars per share, investors remain confident.
It likely will not end with this action by the FTC. Consumer led lawsuits are on the way. Although those rarely lead to a beneficial return for affected users.
If you have suffered a loss or feel you have cheated or defrauded by Adobe your best bet in my opinion would be to send a demand letter.
You can find guides for demand letters on YouTube. Demand letters are often used to extract funds from nefarious robo-callers.
There are sure to be more scandals on the horizon unless the administration of the firm see’s a restructuring or a change of the guard.
As time will tell, bad actors make for bad leaders.
Do you use Adobe software? What do you think about this current scandal.
Do you plan on switching or sticking with Adobe? Drop me a comment.
Fat Wallet Refugee 