I received an email from the company below asking for $10 to join. In the small print it says that this is not associated with the school, but it is in very small print. I sent the email below to all of the MCHS classes that are members of Class Creator and Shawe the local Catholic school. Just thought I'd pass this on...K

Dear Classmates,

This is what I consider a fraudulant site. It is not connected to anyone in Madison except that it uses the high school name.

If MCHS graduates want a website for all of the class since it opened, Class Creator, the company we use will do that. There is no individual cost, but a year site cost.

https://www.alumniclass.com/madisonseniorhighschool/login-spr?uri=/madisonseniorhighschool/members/activate

Even classmates.com is not really connected to MCHS. It is a social networking site similar to Facebook or MySpace, but with a fee. I do not recommend that you join it. I joined last year only to try to find classmates.

Thanks, K

All right, thanks for sharing it Karen.

It's really something how many deceptive things are out there in the Classmate industry. Who knew? It's a very big market... It's like those domain name solicitations that show up all the time appearing to be a bill. Pay it, and you're out triple the actual cost, you just signed a multi-year commitment, and your web site goes down in the transfer process to boot. Yet, despite automated notices and reminders of all kinds we've built into the system, people fall for these things every single week and call over here asking for help when their web site disappears.

Thanks again for the post. Always carefully examine anything you receive regarding your web site and your domain name....

So glad you posted this. I have been going round and round with that company for about a year. They have soliciated members from my sites and gotten the 10.00 fee. My alumni thought they were paying me. They have even gone so far as to use our copyrighted logo on their site and changing their colors to match our site.

Finally got an attorney to write them a letter and they have removed our logo.

Not sure what can be done about it though. Beware!

I can't hold back from commenting on the complete ineptness of the entire classmates.com website. Talk about user-unfriendly! Like many here, I joined as a means of finding classmates as I began organizing a 40th class reunion virtually all on my own last year. I found classmates.com cumbersome and downright sneaky as they'd let me e-mail classmates that "appeared" to be already logged in, but actually weren't. Then, said classmate would receive my e-mail but wouldn't be able to access it until they, too, paid classmates.com. It was such a huge waste of my time and energy. I found that simply having a website through ClassCreator and a few e-mail addresses of classmates to notify them of the website was all it took. We had a slogan, "Build it, and they will come." Class Creator facilitated us building our website and after building it, our class sure did come. Our 40th had about 50% attendance---and we hadn't had a single reunion in like two decades! We were able to reach approximately 80% of our class by simply one classmate telling another telling another about our Class Creator site. And when people found out it was free they were totally onboard with logging in and signing up and then passing the word to others.

A Google search for complaints (or BBB rating) should make most people very wary of alumniclass.

I just checked and saw the name of a "recent" member on the list displayed on the homepage. It was very timely since I recently found out he'd passed away NINETEEN years ago. A recent registrant eh?

Brad and fellow administrators:

We also recieved the email solicitating a $10.00 per year membership. Immediately I sent an email to the class warning them about joining and explaining it is in no way connected to our school website.

Howard C

When I was searching for alumni in 2008, I went to classmates.com and sent emails to everyone listed for the Class of '79. Out of 41 listed, only 4 emails have been read (as of today, two years later!). On alumniclass.com, the results were similar, with only 52 alumni TOTAL (for 50 yrs of alumni) who have signed up on that site. If you don't pay on those sites, there is very little you can do to communicate with others.

Since setting up our school alumni site through classcreator, I've had over 350 alumni set up profiles and most come back on a daily/weekly basis to see what's new on the site. The fact that I'm offering them a free site that isn't cluttered with advertisments is a major plus. But also the fact that I'm listening to suggestions by the alumni brings even more value.

Thanks to ClassCreator, this has been one of the most fulfilling hobbies I've ever had!

Thanks Barbara. It was our theory that a system free for Classmates that was clean, usable, and free of advertising would work. So, thanks for proving the theory right.

Just an update to those who may have concerns about the misleading marketing of any commercial alumni class websites.

We have had complaints from our alumni members that they had received emails they thought were from us requesting they pay a fee to be registered on our free alumni website.

We immediately follow up advising them that they never have to pay a fee to join or participate on our all-alumni website or our private class websites, and that the emails they have received are from a commercial for-profit website. For now I'm leaving out the name of this major offender.

Are any of you other ClassCreator websites having similar issues with any commercial sites improperly marketing to your members? I'd like to know if it has been a recent issue for others besides just us.

Our representative contacted the representative of this big alumni-class website (marketing offender) in December 2011 and they just recently responded and claim they are not doing anything wrong. We may take it a step further to protect our members from this type of misleading marketing.

Here is our position:

"Our concern is that the "so-and-so" website leads consumers (including our members) to believe that the website is authorized by and/or working with our association, which is not the case. The company then relies on that false impression to seek payments from our members and others. The fact that the company refuses to include the language we have requested, clarifying that they are not affiliated or working with our high school or our alumni association confirms that the company is fully aware of the confusion created by its marketing and has no plans to change its strategy."

Chime in if this concerns you.

This has been a subject on my grumble list the past two years. In 2010, I am certain my high school had a link to the school page to 'that site'. I looked for it before writing this reply... the link is not on my school site today.

I am a member of the site but did not pay for it.

I noticed a classmate wearing a sweatshirt at one of our events in 2010. Guess where I saw it next... that's right, from 'that site's' store. My guess is that our school had no idea the site would make money from selling us things. Guess they wised up.