{"id":641,"date":"2011-03-12T08:50:55","date_gmt":"2011-03-12T13:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=641"},"modified":"2011-03-12T22:42:01","modified_gmt":"2011-03-13T03:42:01","slug":"patsy-says-her-site-was-ruined-by-wot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/patsy-says-her-site-was-ruined-by-wot\/","title":{"rendered":"Patsy says her site was ruined by WOT"},"content":{"rendered":"

Patsy says her site was ruined by WOT<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n

I was given a bad, red circle rating on my site because i \t\t\t\tkept posting questions on the WOT forum. The reason i kept \t\t\t\tasking questions (there were about 4 or 5 questions i asked) is \t\t\t\tbecause i didn’t know i had received a reply, as the posts get \t\t\t\tlost in the thousands of posts on there. So, for punishment, \t\t\t\tthey rated my site terribly. One member even said ‘bad customer \t\t\t\texperience’ and wasn’t even a customer of mine. I couldn’t do a \t\t\t\tthing about it, even when i asked them to remove unfair comment \t\t\t\tratings…nothing!<\/p>\n

As a result the website i paid one yrs hosting for has had to be \t\t\t\tshut down due to it being useless to me. Who the heck is going \t\t\t\tto go on there with a red circle?<\/p>\n

I am looking into doing something about this, as i cannot help \t\t\t\tbut feel it is not only unfair, it is disgusting. I was abused \t\t\t\tin the forum too, i was spoken too like i was an idiot. I was \t\t\t\teven called an airhead.<\/p>\n

I’m not the only one to be abused on there either, i read \t\t\t\tthrough posts and found others accused of this that and the \t\t\t\tother.<\/p>\n

I had a new business and now i don’t because WOT members decided \t\t\t\tto do this to me and why? all because i didn’t answer questions \t\t\t\ti never knew i had! <\/span><\/p>\n

The questions I asked were. \u2018Could you rate my site please?\u2019 I \t\t\t\tput that twice as like I said, I didn\u2019t know I’d got a reply. Oh \t\t\t\theck! that\u2019s when it all started to go very wrong for me.<\/p>\n

All my life I have never been unethical ever!!! and now they \t\t\t\tmade me look like that, that\u2019s why I shut the site down, well \t\t\t\talmost down, I need to ask Go Daddy my host to shut it down \t\t\t\tproperly. I\u2019ve just removed all posts and pages etc at moment.<\/p>\n

All this happened within the space of a week, just today, I \t\t\t\tclosed my site.<\/p>\n

(Site URL removed at Patsy’s request.)<\/p>\n

Our answer
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s too bad that your site and your small business were harmed in this way. Did you try contacting WOT? If so did they offer any kind of remedy?<\/p>\n

WOT\u2019s site ratings are subjective. If you look at their community you\u2019ll see where a handful of individuals make a large percentage of the posts. Users who have nothing better to do than post negative comments (one person had made well over 50,000 posts when I last looked) are able to decide for tens, perhaps millions of users which sites are good and which sites are bad. I don\u2019t imagine that it will be too long before sites who don\u2019t buy into WOT\u2019s badge program (i.e. don\u2019t contribute to WOT\u2019s coffers) will be rated negatively.<\/p>\n

As far as we\u2019re concerned WOT cannot be trusted to give accurate, unbiased information. We\u2019ve published newsletters and articles asking for WOT to tell us how they arrive at their ratings \u2013 but so far, as of today no answer from WOT. It\u2019s funny, when we were recommending them when they first started, they were in contact with us all the time. But when we recognized the how serious this \u201crating\u201d game is, and how it could be used to shut down or seriously damage good sites, we stopped recommending WOT. And we considered how services like WOT could also be used to promote or denigrate political agendas, software developers, or businesses which may sell products or services which compete with WOT, or products they don\u2019t happen to like. Services like WOT could too easily be use as censorship tools to be used against sites which have content that WOT finds offensive to them, or whose content may be in contradiction to their agenda or beliefs.<\/p>\n

We stopped recommending WOT and all so-called safe-surfing toolbars. There\u2019s too much room for chicanery and promotion of personal agendas and points of view. The fact that such toolbars could be used for censorship and promotion of whatever products or agendas WOT or its community decided to promote makes us even more skeptical. We will continue to try to educate people about the potential dangers of allowing communities of unqualified, anonymous users to judge web sites.<\/p>\n

Besides all the other doubts we have about WOT and safe-surfing toolbars in general, the need for such protection has become questionable at best anyway. All current versions of Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Chrome have excellent fraud and phishing detection and protection. The things we should be concerned about and focus our attention on are fraudulent sites, sites that distribute malware, and phishing sites. We don\u2019t need to go back to a time when a small group of fanatics decide for us what is acceptable and what in not. Anytime anyone tries to tell you what you are allowed to see and what you\u2019re not \u2013 there\u2019s a danger lurking \u2013 it\u2019s called censorship and that is a danger and a risk to us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patsy says her site was ruined by WOT I was given a bad, red circle rating on my site because i kept posting questions on the WOT forum. The reason i kept asking questions (there were about 4 or 5 questions i asked) is because i didn’t know i had received a reply, as the posts get lost\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[442,438,439,440,437,441,21,23],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":643,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions\/643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}