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Re: Ban appeal: banned due to unsolicited PM
by
kgantchev
on 06/05/2014, 16:46:37 UTC
The PM sounded way too canned to be targeted. If you want to avoid issues like this, one thing that can help is to individualize each PM by specifically quoting the person where they mention that they could use your services. If they report it, you still might get banned anyway, but you're much less likely to be reported in that case. We also might be more lenient about that as well, depending on how individualized it is.

I don't generally take action on PM reports (too many chefs and all that...), but by reading your PM out of context, as we see it, I can see why you were banned. The PM was completely canned in terms of its content, and with no way for us to know how many people this was sent to, we could only assume that based on that content it was sent to between 10 and 100 people.
I agree, I think that I misused the PMs. I'm a proponent of the Lean Startup Methodology and the methodology requires that I do customer interviews. This means that I have to contact many people and ask them to spare some of their time to conduct the interviews. The PMs are generally the same, but we specifically targeted people that have lent out BTC before. I asked them to take 20-30 minutes for an interview in which I asked them 9 questions about their lending patterns and the problems they were facing. Again, I wholeheartedly agree that my PMs looked spammy and I'm not questioning why I got banned.

I'm just here to appeal the ban because I understand the mistake I made and because we never intended to harm people with our PMs, nor did we harm anybody (aside from some of them getting annoyed I suppose). The results were that we build things that the community approves of and they were happy to see that our business offers those services. We posted threads with the things we build and we received positive feedback on the new rating system and on the fact that we're offering an escrow service for loan collateral.

I am genuinely sorry for the error on my part. I applied the wrong methodology to the wrong medium of communication, it was my mistake and I would really appreciate it if the moderators review this case. I hope that they consider the circumstances at hand. We're really glad to be a part of this community and hope to resolve this issue!