The account has been unbanned. I really appreciate all of the support and I want to thank theymos for the quick response!
Best Regards,
Kiril Gantchev
CEO of BitLendingClub
Topic: Ban appeal: banned due to unsolicited PM (Read 717 times)
Only theymos can handle the ban appeal. Be sure to send an email to the appeal email address if you haven't already, possibly linking to this thread.
Personally, I feel that you've learned your lesson and had the best of intentions, so I would support unbanning your account at this point in time.
Personally, I feel that you've learned your lesson and had the best of intentions, so I would support unbanning your account at this point in time.
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 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'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!
I had with people that agreed to help me based on the "unsolicited PMs."
And you had people who did not like your unsolicited PMs. If there weren't any, I wouldn't even know about your PMs, because the only PMs we (Global Mods; Admins have access to the db so they can see all PMs) can see, are those that are reported to us by clicking "Report To Admin".
I have sent you a message to stop sending unsolicited PMs, and because your account wasn't new, I decided to give you a chance, but it seems someone wasn't as patient as me
Reported posts are sent to Global Mods and Admins, so maybe one of them remembered you committing other infractions.
I'm not arguing that the I didn't PM people or that some people didn't view them as unsolicited PMs. I think I received your PM to stop sending unsolicited PMs just about the same day that the account got banned. I was going to respond and tell you that I'll take immediate action, but by the time I got online to PM you it was too late. I think you're right, somebody must have thought that I'm trying to abuse the system.
Like I said, my intent was not to spam people nor was I soliciting anything in particular. I can even show you the conversations I had with people, most of them were about 20-30 minutes long and in all of them we really dug down at all the problems people had with lending. All of their feedback was instrumental to the new features I linked to (which were positively received by the community). I had people personally contact me, one of them requested that BitLendingClub act as an escrow for his loans due to the developments resulting from those conversations.
In several of the PMs I even outlined the specific questions I had so people knew exactly what I was going to ask them. This community is very important to us and I want to make that clear. It was an error on our end, but it wasn't a malicious error nor were we doing anything to harm the members we PMed. And I want to make it clear: I'm not trying to argue or anything, I'm just trying to explain to the best of my ability that it was a sincere misunderstanding. We will refrain from PMing people in any mass efforts to get feedback or anything of the sort.
I just hope that the moderators review this case and consider the facts at hand. We're a Contributing Sponsor of Bitcoin2014, we want to be a part of the Bitcoin lending community and the Bitcoin community as a whole. Our lapse of judgment was not excusable, but again, our intents were purely to help the community. We take this forum seriously and I will personally make sure that if our account is reinstated, we will not be using PMs in an abusive manner.
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 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 had with people that agreed to help me based on the "unsolicited PMs."
And you had people who did not like your unsolicited PMs. If there weren't any, I wouldn't even know about your PMs, because the only PMs we (Global Mods; Admins have access to the db so they can see all PMs) can see, are those that are reported to us by clicking "Report To Admin".
I have sent you a message to stop sending unsolicited PMs, and because your account wasn't new, I decided to give you a chance, but it seems someone wasn't as patient as me
Reported posts are sent to Global Mods and Admins, so maybe one of them remembered you committing other infractions.
Hi, my main account is BitLendingClub: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile
I recently got a PM by malevolent to stop sending unsolicited PMs, then I got banned. I sent about 20 PMs which were targeted people that have previously made Bitcoin loans. My goal was to chat with them and find out about the problems they've been having while lending. As a business owner, there is an important factor when trying to find out what's worth developing and that's done by speaking with your customers directly. In those PMs and in the conversations that I did have with people who agreed to help me, I didn't solicit anything. We only talked about the problems around lending BTC and possible solutions. I have chat transcripts which I can post here to show the type of conversations I had with people that agreed to help me based on the "unsolicited PMs." From the chat transcripts it's pretty clear that I wasn't soliciting or selling anything, but strictly trying to learn about their problems with lending.
In my last two PMs, I specifically messaged two people who were advertising that they want to lend BTC and I told them about the benefits of using BitLendingClub as a lending platform. Those are the only ones that I think were actually close to soliciting my website, but to each of the two people I pointed out that we have some of the features that they were already looking for.
This community has been very helpful in developing our business. The conversations I've had with the people who we've PMed have lead us to come up with some great things, like a brand new loan rating system and we've started to provide escrow services for loan collateral. Both of these things were positively received by the community.
Please let me know if there is any way I can appeal the ban, I would be very thankful if we can get unbanned. I've already emailed theymos, but I didn't get a response. We're new in the Bitcoin ecosystem and the forum has been critical to our success. It's important for us to be a part of this community and we'll work hard not to break the rules. BitLendingClub is a Contributing Sponsor in Bitcoin2014, so I hope that this shows we're serious about Bitcoin, our business and this forum. Again, I apologize if we inadvertently broke the rules.
Best Regards,
Kiril Gantchev
CEO of BitLendingClub
I recently got a PM by malevolent to stop sending unsolicited PMs, then I got banned. I sent about 20 PMs which were targeted people that have previously made Bitcoin loans. My goal was to chat with them and find out about the problems they've been having while lending. As a business owner, there is an important factor when trying to find out what's worth developing and that's done by speaking with your customers directly. In those PMs and in the conversations that I did have with people who agreed to help me, I didn't solicit anything. We only talked about the problems around lending BTC and possible solutions. I have chat transcripts which I can post here to show the type of conversations I had with people that agreed to help me based on the "unsolicited PMs." From the chat transcripts it's pretty clear that I wasn't soliciting or selling anything, but strictly trying to learn about their problems with lending.
In my last two PMs, I specifically messaged two people who were advertising that they want to lend BTC and I told them about the benefits of using BitLendingClub as a lending platform. Those are the only ones that I think were actually close to soliciting my website, but to each of the two people I pointed out that we have some of the features that they were already looking for.
This community has been very helpful in developing our business. The conversations I've had with the people who we've PMed have lead us to come up with some great things, like a brand new loan rating system and we've started to provide escrow services for loan collateral. Both of these things were positively received by the community.
Please let me know if there is any way I can appeal the ban, I would be very thankful if we can get unbanned. I've already emailed theymos, but I didn't get a response. We're new in the Bitcoin ecosystem and the forum has been critical to our success. It's important for us to be a part of this community and we'll work hard not to break the rules. BitLendingClub is a Contributing Sponsor in Bitcoin2014, so I hope that this shows we're serious about Bitcoin, our business and this forum. Again, I apologize if we inadvertently broke the rules.
Best Regards,
Kiril Gantchev
CEO of BitLendingClub
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