First, I’m aware this is a beta feature and I’m not at all bothered by there being issues with it, even persistent ones. Neither Brave nor the volunteer community here owe me anything and I don’t mind in the least posting the issues I run into, if it is helpful.
That said, I am getting a bit frustrated by this one. I posted this issue a month ago. There was an aborted bit of follow-up that didn’t resolve anything (no problem there, I completely understand). I found a few other folks with substantially similar reports and encouraged them to cross-post to get some additional attention on the issue (now weeks old and off the front page). Unfortunately this was followed up with some very reckless merging. A statement was made that the problem was that the claims in question had expired. Which was obviously not the case, as would have been very clear to anyone who actually read my initial report. The issue was then closed within a few hours of 2 people reporting it had been resolved for them.
The issue persisted for me, in exactly the same form as I originally reported, before and after the issue was closed. It is now un-testable on my end as the option to claim rewards has disappeared for me along with the update to 1.3.118
So I’m re-posting it. Here’s a detailed timeline in case it helps.
mid-Jan: I activate brave rewards on my desktop installation and start receiving ads as desktop notifications
Feb 5th: first rewards ‘claim’ shows as available, the ad settings menu indicates I should receive a few BAT (~6, I don’t really remember). When I click the ‘claim’ button, I’m given a captcha, but no amount of dragging the BAT icon produces any result at all. No change of message, no progress, nothing.
Feb 6th: I post the issue here
sometime mid-Feb: While the thread is still active, and through at least one updated version of Brave, I occasionally try the claim again. At some point it changes from doing nothing at all, to producing the “Ooops, server is not responding” or similar message. Perhaps this is because the claim had indeed expired at that point?
this week: I tried the claim a few times again and the behavior was back to no change at all. Moving the BAT icon and releasing it over the appointed shape did not bring up an error message about the server. Like it had originally done, nothing at all happened.
today: I updated to 1.3.118 and the option to “claim” is no longer available.
So I’m back to waiting until March 5th to see if the issue has magically been resolved, but there is absolutely zero indication that it has been. It seems that the rewards that I couldn’t claim (due to the inability to pass the captcha) have simply expired. The issue I raised has been pre-maturely closed, despite the fact that I could easily demonstrate the issue hadn’t been resolved for me (and would have done except that the thread was locked when I returned to check on it … again, mere hours after the 2 users reported a fix. I was checking the stupid thing daily and still didn’t have a chance to report the persistence of the problem).
Anyway, I’ve wasted enough time on this issue. I reported it in good faith and have provided all the relevant details between my initial thread and this post. I hope Brave finds a way to improve its handling of bug reports. Relying on a community website isn’t a great start (the in app help link actually points here, so it seems this is as official as support for Brave gets). But the extremely limited response, non-existent follow-up, evident unwillingness to actually read the reports thoroughly before exclaiming an explanation, ill-advised merging of non-identical issues and the ridiculously quick closing of issues without any effort to confirm resolution are serious impediments to providing legitimate technical support.