MyBlogLog Stirs Drama Over A Banning

By WebProNews Staff - Fri, 02/23/2007 - 7:56am.

Shoemoney's Jeremy Schoemaker had posted about flaws in MyBlogLog's service, and when he demonstrated how someone could easily pose as another MyBlogLog user when visiting other websites, he was banned from MyBlogLog.

Anyone who might want to be Danny Sullivan or Jeremy Zawodny could have used a tip Schoemaker published to do that with MyBlogLog. The Yahoo-owned blogging community service used unique and easily located user IDs that could be placed in a MyBlogLog cookie in a browser. That way, when visiting another blog using MyBlogLog, the running list of visitors on the widget would show the spoofed visitor had stopped by for a look. MyBlogLog has since corrected the problem, but they took things a step further and banned Schoemaker from their service. "Since last night every page I visit on their site results in a 403 (Forbidden) error code. I have asked others and nobody else seems to get the error but me," he wrote at Shoemoney. "I can’t really blame them. I wonder if they will refund me my yearly fee." MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer answered that in a comment on Schoemaker's post: "Your Pro subscription is of course refunded." Eric Marcoullier, MyBlogLog's co-founder, added another comment later on:

To be clear — we did not ban shoemoney for posting about exploits. Although we would certainly have appreciated that he email us first, it’s his decision where he would like to publish them. We banned him for publishing other people’s data on the site and urging readers to spoof them. On what planet is that not a bannable offense?

Schoemaker has claimed previously he had emailed MyBlogLog about issues. The response from Marcoullier looks like it played a role in motivating a scathing post from Schoemaker:

I have many friends at Yahoo Search Marketing and Yahoo Publisher Network and they have reached out to me and said the few idiots at MyBlogLog do not represent all Yahoo! Employees. A friend at Yahoo (executive level) tells me that one of there biggest concerns originally in acquiring MyBlogLog is that they were SHOPPING user data and seeing how much they could get for your information. I guess Yahoo offered them a sweeter deal then the guys at freeipods.com or whatever dirtbag place they were going to sell your information to.

The fracas has spread to other blogs. Andy Beal announced he would boycott MyBlogLog until Schoemaker gets reinstated. Tony Hung noted that MyBlogLog does not even have an official Terms of Service, and banning Schoemaker goes counter to something Marcoullier previously wrote about that:

1) We're going to post an official Terms of Service (ToS) and hold people accountable. It's hard kicking people's asses for breaking the rules when the rules aren't posted anywhere.

But that appears to have happened with Schoemaker. --- Add to