It wasn’t as big as stumbleupon in the least but it was still pretty funny. I took it as a compliment. You don’t know if you have something worthwhile till you get banned.

Alex

This is Darrin & Josy from Mycutepetpics. First off I am glad to see you got the Stumble thing worked out and we hope all is well. Unfortunately like a few people said in here they won’t overturn their ban for almost anybody else, unless they are a monster site like yours. It also helps that you have such a huge following and great readers to back you up. As for the smaller sites like myself I doubt we would get the same treatment.

Our hosting service TypePad unfortunately went down right when we were finally about to break into the Alexa 100k gang. Since our site went down we lost so much traffic from all the social sites. We all figured it was because so many people must of thumbed down our site and reported our site as a dead link for the 6-8hrs TypePad was having issues. Due to that we got removed from Stumble’s homepage and from the popular sites list.

So I wrote Stumble a very kind letter that was truly from the bottom of our hearts thanking them for having our site on the front page and as a popular site. I asked if there was any forgiveness for the time the site was down as far as not counting all those thumb downs during that time and that I could even have TypePad contact them.

So What happened? I appear to be the latest victim and all I did was go popular on their site. One of my posts had around 25k hits from stumbles front page and I had nothing to do with it whatsoever. I only had 10 friends on there and 5 good friends that we all shared stories and photos with, but I am being accused of promoting a website. If that were the case why did I ignore every friend request from users that state in their profiles ” You visit my site, thumb up, let me know and I will return the favor” If I was trying to promote a website why wouldn’t I friend these people or add a lot more friends then just 10 people. If I wanted to be a spammer like those people I would of added my stumble account to my website, myspace, facebook and Digg community and so on.?

It seems that people in here are right and if you go popular on Stumble they either ban you or do what they did to us and ask us for money!

How wrong is that? It’s supposed to be a community driven social site and how can i be blamed or my site going popular on there?! I sit at home completely disabled for life with nothing much to do but blog and chat with my social communities and now they have taken away my easy way of chatting with my other disabled friends. Some that I have been helping with not giving up in life. This is the letter I got from Walter:

Josy & Darrin –

Thanks for your note. We’re unable to address any
of the issues you raised in your email, as we have
a strict policy against adjusting reviews and
ratings submitted by our members.

Additionally, we’ve received complaints that your
account has been used to promote a specific Web
site, a direct violation of our Terms of Service.
Because this account has violated that ban, we’re
unable to restore access at the present time.

If you’re interested in learning about advertising
on StumbleUpon, please visit this page for more
information:

Who were those complaints by? Competitors and our competitors friends I would bet. We know from Twitter and from friends that several sites out there have been stealing our ideas and doing the same as us as far as posting the same exact stories or same topics on the very next day. It’s funny because one of the sites is a monster and everything we seem to do, they do the next day even if they have never spoken on that topic before. So if they are following us there then we imagine they followed us on SU and had their malicious/jealous members and staff make false accusations in order to try and bury our site on Su. Or maybe nobody complained and this is just a ploy to get money from us by StumbleUpon. Money a disabled person doesn’t have. I wrote Walter back and hope I get the same treatment as you did but I doubt it. Maybe one day my numbers will be close enough to yours where they will let me back in but that day is not as close as I would like if it ever even comes.

Darren you know we all love your site and your posts have taught us so much since we first got here. If it wasn’t for you we would of never made it here. Thank you so much for that.

I am so sorry for the rest of you guys in here who have also gotten the short end of the stick. Maybe we can start a union of sorts and stand up for ourselves. Until we are a threat like Darren we have no hope. All I can say is find a new social site that’s not in it for the money or get everyone you know together and we can all stand together against the machine.

God Bless You all.
Josy & Darrin
http://www.mycutepetpics.com

I’ve asked them what I did specifically but have gotten no response. I’d like to know what specific site, product, or service I promoted. I’m not really expecting to be unbanned. It’s real disappointing that I site I’ve had so much fun with and built so many relationships with now feels that I’m not worthy.

I mean, if you took the time to read the blog post above, you’d note that SU removed the ban one hour and fortyfour minutes later, which a: is why you can still SU Darrens posts, and, errr… how, if based on this blog post, do you know that there’s nothing useful or interesting to read? – you clearly don’t read the posts anyway…

Well done!

“Now if only we could pull ourselves together and work so hard to do something that REALLY matters like doing something about poverty or the environment…”

Why not?..

Sime

You can keep your old domain name, but just use the new one as a “pointer”.

I purchased a site for my three sons to work on, only to find out the URL had been flagged by several sites for spam, etc due to the practices of the previous owner.

Every other site, including Google, StumbleUpon and others were willing to work with us to clean things up and have the bans lifted. Digg was not.

I was told in an email that regardless of the sale, the site was banned and the decision was irreversible. I’ve offered proof of the sale, etc. Doesn’t matter… The decision is irreversible.

Amazingly, the previous owner is still active in the Digg community with his other sites! Yet, our site is banned with apparently no recourse.

I doubt they would be foolish enough to manually ban you, especially considering all the praise and traffic you give them.

I was recently banned from Google AdSense. I understand that’s a slightly different situation from being banned from social networking, but I was also angry at the implication that I had manipulated the system. I was not successful in my appeal, but I couldn’t help but think that a blogger of your scale would never have been banned in the first place or that Google would have worked with you (and quickly) just as StumbleUpon did to get you reinstated.

I’d love a post on what smaller bloggers can do in situations like this.