Post by: ozone - Thread: Pralaya Yoga & Acro Yoga videos

Staff Reported Posts
#21

He replied. Can we do anything with his request to delete his profile and email address?

yes most forums have this sort of policy, they just dont use/abuse it so recklessly, and with out good reason. they use it when people post offensive material, not things that are on topic.

if its not too much to ask, I would really appreciate it if you can delete my account and remove my email from your lists at your convenience.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Techne
Thank you for your reply. You’re right – according to our privacy and moderation policy any link or post could be taken down without notice. I’m sorry this was a hassle for you; best of luck in your pursuits.
Techne

Quote:
Originally Posted by ozone
I’m glad you got back to me, as far as specifics, this is all ill say…

I don’t work, my life basically is practicing yoga, and to keep my self a little more busy I’ve been making videos with my friends and teachers. I get precious little from doing the videos for the amount of time that they take, but I enjoy it and so far people seem to like what I’m doing so I keep doing it. Which is why I said what I said in the job thread. To me is just seems like who ever is moderating this incident, is all upset that I’m excited to share my videos with you, which makes me sad.

I understand you have a problem with spammers, but its not just your forum. Every forum has these problems and using it as an excuse to be silly to regular old forum users like me makes them feel like the whole experience is a hassle.

Honestly I feel like some one could have PMed with what you just said to me, and let me know what was going on instead of flat our deleting my post and moderating all new posts while accusing me of commercial gains. The commercial gains thing is just silly, I have a hand full of views if you look at the channel. It doesn’t even have a single add and I link it to my personal training blog on twitter. I can and will go to other places on the net to find feedback and support and I will. I dont need this yoga forum or this headache.

thanks for getting back to me though, at least now I know what I did that was judged wrong.

I think who ever is doing this needs to reconsider the end user experience, and work on the communication process if they are going to continue to decide what people can post, how long their posts should be, how many times they have to post to make a link, and what can be posted in links.

For me, for you :stuck_out_tongue: if i new it was like this, control freaky, I would never have registered here and I’m on a lot of other forums on a great deal of subjects so I have plenty of forums to compare this one too.

in the end im thinking, If i share my videos here they may be taken down with out notice, and im not willing to make that deal.

#22

if he would only have participated on the boards in such a passionate and interactive way, then he wouldn’t have appeared like a spammer.

this is a too-bad kinda situation and learning experience for me. keeping the forum spam-free and not having our members directed off site to every blog and youtube channel out there is important to me.

it is a fine balance.

still, his simple posting of one-liners and comments like, “maybe bone cancer?” to members writing it about asana and neck pain won’t be missed.

there are a variety of yoga forums out there, so with his desire to post his videos and tangential comments, he should easily be able to find one to suit him. at least for now, i am trying to hold a tiny corner for the rest of us who are looking to invest a little more and share more from others.

techne, i am going to reply to him myself. i cannot remove his profile without deleting his name and the system would sub the name “guest” for his posts. i find his request dramatically unnecessary.

edit i will send him a pm at some point this evening. i need to log off for a few hours. i will update the thread with my pm. :slight_smile:

#23

[quote=Techne;25403]OK – big assumption check time –
why do we think that him posting his links is more a benefit to him (taking from the forums) than it is to us (offering to the forums?)[/quote]

i am sorry i missed this before. i had an article due at midnight last night and have been really busy with my trip beginning next week.

i am here now.

i need to frame my answer a little differently than you posed the questions to be able to answer. here you go :smiley:

i deleted his linking post because i thought it was spam. i still consider it spammy, but i see his point of view on it all.

i thought it was spam b/c the following reasons: it was his 16th post, the content of his previous messages, and it followed the modus operandi of our other recent spammers.

i also deleted this linking posts because the linking option was never intended to send our members off site for another forum, product, blog, excreta; the linking possibility is intended to support and enhance discussion here. linking in the signature was a bonus to our contributing members. now we can change this certainly, as i think it good to be discussing why we are doing anything that we are doing. is keeping the links “rules” as they are serving our community or inhibiting, controlling it too much? we should really look at this and make a mindful decision on how we want to move forward from this not-so-good situation.

#24

OK, my two cents.

  1. I would likely have yanked the post and sent a PM that the links were under review because of it being post 16 etc and then reviewed them at my leisure. Likely my next step would have been to put them up and PM him again saying they could stay but that could he please not flood the boards with such things. What happened next would be up to him.

  2. He has stated that his “job” is creating yoga videos. This is a red flag that he is looking for feedback on the videos he has created so far and might begin spamming our members with requests to produce video etc. Its a form of advertising or drumming up business. I’m not saying that IS what he was doing, but it appears that way to me.

  3. My feeling is that he was doing a sly job here of trying to get business from our members. I have no basis for that other than my gut.

  4. So the difference is that it was post #16 after 15 rather “fluffy” posts. While the links themselves might NOT have broken our rules, it was suspicious and doubly so from his reaction to same.

Nichole, tell him that his account will be inactive as long as he chooses not to post but all that he has posted to date must stay up. Posters are welcome to leave whenever they wish, that is all that is required for their account to become inactive.

Finally, this guy did a CLASSIC triangulation on us. He didn’t get an answer he liked from me so went to Techne. Played a bit nasty to me, and poor pitiful me, to Techne. Its very important that we stick together as a team and reiterate that decisions are made by a team. (Yes I know we make individual decisions all the time, but its important to be considered a team) We did a great job of backing each other up even though we all felt a little uncertain about what we were doing. Good work all!

#25

Hello Eric,
First I would like to apologize for my handling of your deleted thread. We do normally send private messages in situations just like this, to explain why something was removed from the boards. I personally dropped the ball on getting that message to you as soon as I removed your thread. It was Saturday morning when I deleted your thread, and my husband had made blueberry pancakes for breakfast. I logged off to eat with him and I when I logged back on 2 hours later, you and Alix had already had your initial exchange on the community help forum. I know that it is no fun to post something and then to have it removed without a reason. Please accept my personal apology on leaving you questioning on that.

I know techne and Alix have both been sending PMs back and forth with you, so I will try not to repeat them. We have been getting hit with a tremendous amount of spam lately. The modus operandi has been 1-2 sentence postings and on the 16th-or-so post, they link to their blog, product, videos and the like. Your posting thus far had followed this MO exactly, and so you appeared like a spammer, this is what Alix was speaking to when she said “commercial gain” in her response to your question about your thread. To be clear, she did not say that you specifically were seeking commercial gain, she spoke in general terms about this being an issue, because it is. I did removed that exchange between you two, as it all should have been handled by me in a proactive PM. I also removed them because you seemed very concerned that you were being accused of trying to make money on your videos. We understand clearly that your YouTube channel does not currently have ads on it.

Now let’s talk about your video thread that I deleted. You were spot on about the linking begin turned on after 15 posts, but the intention of the linking resource is not to redirect our members to off-site projects, whether they are blogs, other forums or videos on your 16th post. We offer linking as means to support and deepen ongoing discussions here. Members will link to references, to news stories, one recent member sang some chants to help illustrated a discussion on mantra, the energies of the words and pronunciation. This is usually respected, but sometimes it is abused too; this our fine line that we are trying to balance and moderate on.

Our greater intention for this small forum is not to have our brand new members put down 15 one- and two-lined posts and then redirect our members off this forum and onto their videos, their band, their product, their charity, et cetera. Even if it is all Yoga related, it really becomes an undesirable burden on a forum this size. And more to the point for us, we know that there are numerous yoga forums where any and all types of participation is welcome and encouraged–they have this population covered. I hope that you will respect that we are hoping to hold onto our little corner of the internet here in our own way. And this sometimes means that when new members post in way that follows the MO of spammers, we may welcome them to stay on, but that their posts need to be OK-ed for a short time before going up to keep the spam off the boards. Two posts of yours were removed along with Alix’s response, b/c you felt that you were being falsely accused on the open forum and I wanted to remove that bit of concern for you all together. And to reiterate, Alix did not accuse you of a single action, she said your future posts needed to be reviewed before going up because your posting style raise some suspicion, which it did based on our experience.

I understand you are frustrated from the initial mishandling of your situation, but the name calling (control freaky), misrepresenting Alix as “yelling” at you and your global presumptions of our “silly” moderation here leaves something to be desired on my end. I offer you my good word that Alix’s voice is kind. I have also read her messages to you, and she was consistently polite and direct with you. It is my feeling that you were simply not in agreement with our position that she was representing.

I think there may be one still unresolved point, and that is to why your posts needed to be OK-ed before going up. This was not due to the content of your video, it was because we initially thought you were spamming our forum and we wanted to make sure that your new posts going up were discussion posts, not more posts sending our member off to your YouTube channel or something else. Then when you referred to being under moderation in your reply to another member, we left you on to see what else you were going to post. To offer you some context of how little intervention we do with our members, you are the only member on moderation currently. I have been here for going on 5 years, and I have only seen 4 members before you whose posts needed preapproval.

I understand that you consider this “control freaky” and “silly” but our long-time members thank us constantly for the unique niche that this forum holds on the internet—that it is essentially free from other member’s constantly redirecting and linking to their commercial and private endeavors. There are 100s of other yoga forums that allow any type of contribution, I know you said this is your general experience with other forums as well. I am grateful for those other forums, b/c goodness knows, we are all hoping to find a place that we belong. We consider this forum special and are looking to maintain our little corner of the internet as it is now.

This may all be beside the point now, as you have made a request to dissolve your profile. I have not done this before, but if that is your request I will do my best to honor that. Please let me know if that is truly your wish and I will get into the admin tools and figure out how to do this for you.

As Alix and techne have both extended to you, you are very welcome to stay on, to read and to post. I understand if we may not be the forum that you were hoping for, and if that is so, I wish you the very best in your life and in your blossoming Yoga practice.

Warm regards,
Nichole

#26

I could not just “delete” his membership, because all of his posts would then go from being authored by [I]ozone[/I] to [I]guest[/I] and that is not so good for the boards.
In the end I just banned him (for lack of a better tool that I was aware of) and the reason that he gets when he is logging in, [I]closed membership account per member request[/I].

#27

Holy cow Nichole, I think that is the BEST PM I have ever seen. You are obviously a writer, I am not worthy. After all that, he still “didn’t get it” which leads me to believe we may be correct in where he was headed with all this.

I’m sorry you had to ban him. There really is no other option for “deleting” an account. On other boards I just tell them I’m sorry, its not possible and then in the Admin board go change their password to something weird or just leave it alone. Then its on them to “close” their account.

And thank you for the clarification of my words to him, very much appreciated.

#28

well, thanks. and you are welcome.

i am tired of this much pm’ing. and i am tired of this much moderation being needed.

and even if this guys is not a commercial spammer, which i can see he is not, he is still spammy and would unlikely have stayed on here long. we are just not his type.

and simply, i do not have enough time and effort in my at the moment to to attempt to nurse this guy into understanding that his 7 months of excited new practice is 1000x more worthy of a contribution here than his wobbly videos.

posting his videos was always his intention for membership here, b/c as he finally shared, he sees them as his only valuable contribution. he doesn’t see himself. he doesn’t see us. too bad.