Comments on: StumbleUpon Banned Me

By: Geoserv

Geoserv — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:28:23 +0000

I also was recently banned.
I had 7000+ thumbs up. A member for 2 years. I had thumbed up my own stuff a dozen timesd, normally I waited until someone thumbed it up before I did.
I did however use the send to button in THEIR toolbar.
Thats the mistake, never send anything of yours to your SU “friends”.
By doing that you are SU as a social networking site, which they are not, or are they. They claim to be but apparently are not.
Isn’t social networking and SU about sharing things?
They started out so good and have ruined a great service.
Anyone have $20 million they want to donate to start a new “SOCIAL” service?
Remove SU links and buttons from your blogs!!

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:29:03 +0000

They seem to be very active now. They suspended me yesterday, although I stumble just 2-3 sites a week.
Maybe a wrong one was included. Okay, I don´t mind, my time is over there …
Looking back my own stumbles have been pretty useless, on the other hand I own a site which gets a lot of stumbles and traffic from them – without doing anything.
Alexa Traffic for stumbleupon is 63 % down, so they seem to further shorten the number of users.
Lets keep them coming closer and see the number of users further melting down !

By: Alex (Blogsessive)

Alex (Blogsessive) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:39:28 +0000

Ian, there’s no point in getting upset about this.
You’re not the only one banned out of the blue.
I too have had my account frozen 2 weeks ago.
I even submitted a ticket to SU.
Got a simple answer from their community manager, quoting some ToS bulls**t.
I obviously replied, and after 2 weeks, still got no answer.
As every other user involved with Social Media, I might have crossed the line a few times, but I really doubt it that it was such a big deal. Real spammers still reside on SU, sending 20 messages per day asking for votes.
How I crossed the line? Probably by voting on my friends’ submissions repeatedly. But hey, that’s why we call this thing social networking? Else, why would they be my friends if I wouldn’t enjoy their submissions.
I too am sick of their attitude, and hardly keeping calm, after “promoting” their service wherever I could.
In the end, they don’t care about it. Or they care as much as only sending you a simple ToS quote, without a further explanation.
Initially I wanted to write about it, as you did here, but guess what? If they can’t give more than a s**t about their users, why should I give them one more link?

By: Matt Ridout

Matt Ridout — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 08:24:10 +0000

You’re right, you will never hear from them again.

By: Mike B. / Sbuzz

Mike B. / Sbuzz — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:40:46 +0000

Sux Ian….I would be pretty darn P.O.’ed if my account got dinged!
Approaching 10k quick and it’s my favorite network.
Thanks for the heads up I will be monitoring my stumbling patterns more closely.

By: FFB

FFB — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:39:27 +0000

I too was banned. I got a less informative first email from them. It just said my account was under review. I did get a response after emailing them and they told me I violated their TOS for promoting a particular site. I pleaded back but haven’t heard anything since. Yes, I did self promote. But I don’t feel like it was overboard. I promoted plenty of other sites as well. Many more than my own. What gets me is I asked what particular site I promoted but I was given no answer. It could be that they didn’t like that I thumbed another site that I liked. I had noticed that the site’s user had been banned as well. So here’s the lesson: Don’t like any one site too much!!

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:09:07 +0000

Keep us informed on this! Let’s hope StumbleUpon doesn’t join Newsvine, NowPublic and Wikipedia in the axis of arrogance.
Their email to you may have been opaque, but it at least wasn’t as snide and some communications from these other sites.
I understand the desire of social networks to keep out spammers, but you, Ian, are no spammer.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:35:24 +0000

If a member can’t use the site in the way you’ve been doing (99% general contribution and a little self-promotion), then the value of the site is greatly reduced.
I see people on SU who hardly seem to do *anything else* but plug their own blog. What’s up with that?
Cue sneaky members enlisting friends though outside channels to stumble their stuff…

By: Daren

Daren — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:49:19 +0000

Haha..poor Ian. How about getting another new account? Does that work? Your office uses fixed IP?

By: Vascabruta

Vascabruta — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:46:44 +0000

Same thing happened to us. No really sure why we got banned, two of us sharing same IP. We were doing the same things you talked about, nothing really out of the ordinary. Tried to contact them, never got an answer back.
It did affect the amount of traffic we got to our sites after that but in reality the length of time stumblers spent on our site was not long at all, so I’m not sure we lost much.
There is life after Stumble upon…:)