zcommodore

It looks like the results, for me anyway, are in.  Last Friday, I posted that I saw payments pending on 4 of my loans in various stages of lateness.  Today, the results of those attempts are evident.

One of those daggers disappeared later that same day, Friday.  I think the dagger was there in error since the loan shows that it is in "Bankruptcy".

Two more of those payments disappeared a little while ago since it appears the payment attempts failed.

One of those four has a payment showing as "pending" in my account activity page.

Bottom line, for me, Prosper's attempt to get payments when borrowers had money in their accounts due to paydays at the end of the month resulted in 1 of 4 tries.  In all fairness it probably should be 1 of 3.  I wonder how other lenders payments turned out with this experiment by Prosper.

I sent a message to Prosper Customer Service yesterday after seeing a lot of lenders saying they saw payment attempts (single daggers) on loans yesterday. I asked if something had changed and this is the response I got:

Prosper has done analysis that shows ACH withdraws are more successful on paydays. Therefore, Proser has initiated ACH withdraws from some late borrowers accounts to begin processing on 11/30/07. New actions taken by Prosper will never result in negative actions to our lenders.

It appears these payment attempts are actually a new idea on Prosper's part to collect when borrowers are more likely to have money in their accounts. My only question is whether there is a TOS violation here. I haven't exactly memorized the various terms-of-service agreements but I do know previous policy was that late borrowers would have payment attempts at 10 and 22 days after the initial payment was due if earlier attempts failed. I'm not going to complain but I've known other people to do so when Prosper doesn't follow their TOS to the letter of what they say.

It will be interesting to see how many of these clear. If this helps late borrowers catch up and keep up, I'm fine with it myself. Frankly, I'm glad to see Prosper mixing things up a bit rather than staying in the same old rut all the time regarding lates.

Most mornings, especially when I'm expecting to receive payments in my account as I was this morning, I check my Prosper account.  This morning while I was checking my account, I noticed the amount of payments pending in my account had jumped significantly so I went to investigate.  I expected one of my current loans must be making an extra large payment or something to that effect.  However, to my surprise, no less than 4 of my 11 loans in various stages of lateness had initiated manual payments.

Of the loans making payments, one of them who happens to be in my group had passed 1-month late earlier this week and is listed as in "Bankruptcy".  I'm guessing that if this is really a bankruptcy case, it's a Ch. 13 since she had been involved in a Ch. 7 only a few years ago.  I had hoped this one would recover but since she hasn't responded to any of my inquiries I figured it was a lost cause.  That one will certainly make me happy if it gets caught up.

Another of the ones catching up is one that went late on his first payment and is officially "Late".  Previously he had had two payments pending but they both failed.  I had contacted him asking why there were two and he said there was a mistake made where Prosper initiated an automatic attempt and he made a manual payment about the same time.  Hopefully this one will go through and everything will be fine after this.  Yes, I know.  I'm just too much of an optimist for my own good.

The other two that are catching up are both <15.  One just caught up from over 1-month late earlier this week and appears to be catching up the rest of the way.  The other has been late at least as often as she's been on time so seeing her catch up is not really a surprise but still nice to see.

I'm still frustrated with how the official forums on Prosper are being run but it's nice to see something positive to talk about as well.

Every so often, I get "the bug" and go read a few posts in the new forums, usually when I'm logged in to my account for other reasons.  Occasionally I try to post.  Every time I post I get the message that my post is "pending moderator review" or something to that effect.  That is just so lame.

In addition, yesterday, on Prospers.org, it came out that any time someone posted a link that mentioned that website, it was changed to Prosper.com.  After much wailing and gnashing of teeth by forum participants, apparently this was changed to just edit links to use "***" so they wouldn't be real links.

I don't know who is behind all this nonsense that is the Prosper forums but they have some serious issues if they think this will become acceptable.  People who care are going to care less and less if this keeps up.  Prosper is going to need to do some serious PR repair pretty soon if they can't get their act together.  Lenders who are pulling out will have months, if not years, to be constantly reminded of why they don't like Prosper.  They will be telling a lot of friends and family, to say nothing of opportunities to broadcast their displeasure in various places on the internet.

Prosper really needs to find a way to reach out to these people and stop this foolishness they've embarked upon.  Prosper is going to lose if they don't I firmly believe.

I really don't like the new forums.  I mentioned yesterday that they are very slow and that seems to be the case for most everyone who uses them.  In addition, most posts appear to need to be specifically approved by a moderator before they are actually posted.  This is cumbersome and impedes any sort of conversation.

My new complaints include the fact that I have to be logged in to even read most of the posts.  In the old forums, I frequently would lurk as a guest and read the posts I wanted to read when I had a few minutes to kill.  Now, I have to go through the login process every time I want to read something since I get timed out if I stay gone too long.  That is just annoying.  The only board I can actually read if I'm logged out is the Announcements forum and it is only updated once in awhile.

Part of the problem with all this is that if someone new wants to check out the site, they would have to actually create an account to read most of what is posted.  That's just dumb.

Combined with the slowness of the board to load pages and the fact that I have to log in to read them, I don't see myself spending a lot of time there anymore.  It's just not worth the trouble.