Rating SPAM, Comments, Approval inconsistencies, and Disabled Accounts

Hey all,

As of late, we've seen a dramatic increase in Gallery SPAM, Comment SPAM, Rating SPAM, and harassment on Widgetbox. As a result, we're working to implement a few changes to resolve this and restore some order to the Widgetbox gallery. I just wanted to take a moment to explain some things, as well as to create a thread to redirect some of those users to when they come here to ask/complain about being banned from the site.

A note on our TOS:
You can view our Terms of Service any time you like here: http://www.widgetbox.com/info/legal/t.... It's full of legalese (legal speak), but there is one section may be of particular interest to the topic at hand. Under the 'Prohibited Conduct' section, these are a few items listed:

BY USING THE WIDGETBOX SITE YOU AGREE NOT TO:

• “stalk”, harass, threaten, or defraud other users;



• send, post, or make available pornographic, threatening, embarrassing, hateful, racially or ethnically insulting, libelous, or otherwise inappropriate messages to other users;



• make unsolicited offers, advertisements or proposals; or send chain letters, unsolicited email, SMS, “spam” or other junk messages;



• transmit any worms or viruses or any code of a destructive nature through the Widgetbox Sites or any Widgets posted thereon;



• impersonate another person or access another user’s account without permission;



• fail to deliver payment for any purchases made on the Widgetbox Site;



• share Widgetbox-issued passwords with a third party or encourage another user to do so;



• misrepresent the source, identity, or content of information transmitted via the Widgetbox Site, for example, claiming a created work as your own that is not yours;



• use the Widgetbox Site for any illegal or unlawful purpose;



• interfere with any security-related features of the Widgetbox Site or otherwise attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Widgetbox Site, or any part of them, other accounts, computer systems or networks connected to the Widgetbox Site, or any part of them, through hacking, password mining or any other means or interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper working of the Widgetbox Site or any activities conducted on the Widgetbox Site;



• intentionally interfere with the operation of the Widgetbox Site or any user’s enjoyment of it;



• post inflammatory statements to get responses;



• use the Widgetbox Site in any manner that in our sole discretion could damage, disable, overburden, or impair it or interfere with any other party’s use and enjoyment of the Widgetbox Site; or

Deleting and Flagging comments:
Now I'd like to be as clear as possible in saying that we do not delete comments (or Get Satisfaction posts for that matter) to prevent you from speaking your mind, letting us know how you feel, offering suggestion on how to fix issue, or otherwise communicate with us at Widgetbox. When deleting comments, the above criteria are what we use to determine whether the comment needs to be deleted. We review every comment submitted to support, which occurs when you click the flag icon to flag a comment as inappropriate. If a comment violates the above sections of the TOS, we need to remove it from the site to attempt to maintain the experience for other users.

Rating SPAM
In the last few weeks, we've seen a big increase in rating SPAM. This is the act of boosting your widget's rating by rating it highly with a number of accounts as well as rating competing widgets lower using the same technique. There are really only a handful of offenders here, and we are implementing tools to identify them as well as functionality to prevent this activity. Without going into too much detail until this is implemented completely, please be aware that we're working plenty of extra hours to up the policing of this activity until the features are implemented. This behavior is most commonly seen with affiliate widgets. It's not that we don't want you guys to make money in affiliate programs, we just don't want you to degrade our site in the process.

Disabled User Accounts:
During our policing of the above sections, we've increased our willingness to ban user accounts, especially fake accounts use solely for SPAM. If your user account was disabled, we don't currently actively message you to let you know. When you attempt to log in, you'll be shown an 'Account Disabled' message. We'll be looking to add some messaging here in the future to let you know why, but in the meantime, you're always welcome to e-mail support@widgetbox.com and I'll talk you through what happened. Admin disabling is not the only way that your account can be disabled. If you log in and go to the MY ACCOUNT section of the site, canceling your account will have the same behavior.

Approvals and Rejection inconsistencies:
We manually review all widgets submitted to the gallery for TOS violations only. In the process, we sometimes find functional issues, which we may: inform you and request that you resolve before submitting to the gallery (e.g. sizing, other widget wrappers, etc.), correct the issue for you (e.g. unused config params), or inform you about but approve your widget regardless (e.g. spelling, description text, etc.). Since we do this manually, you sometimes will see inconsistencies. Some are related to changes in the terms of service or policy after another widget was previously approved, and others are simply our error. This is another hot topic here and we're working to make this consistent and transparent.

The correct answer when your widget has been rejected is NOT to SPAM the gallery, harass users or Widgetbox employees, or otherwise attempt to degrade the site. Rather, for better results, try contacting me in support. You can just forward your rejection e-mail with your questions to support@widgetox.com and I'll be glad to spell it out for you. There are plenty of times where I've approved previously rejected widgets and communicated the policy to the team internally. Other times, I'll simply elaborate on the potentially vague rejection message.

I hope this helps to clarify some things.

Dave