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Banned To Unbanned At StumbleUpon

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Popular blogger falls out and in StumbleUpon's good graces

ProBlogger enjoyed significant traffic from bookmarking site StumbleUpon, until the site declared ProBlogger unwelcome at its domain; thanks to social media, that changed fast.

One can't blame Darren Rowse at ProBlogger for being upset. Instead of his readers being able to bookmark and vote for his pages on StumbleUpon, they received a message that their site of choice had been banned for abuse.

"I’m a little put out that as someone who has actively promoted and used their service and even encouraged my readers to advertise on them that they simply banned me," he said upon learning of the error page people reached at StumbleUpon, which said ProBlogger had either been banned for abuse or upon request.

As we have seen many times, such events no longer live in a vacuum. Rowse's readers contacted StumbleUpon, and the story also spread through other services like Twitter and Digg. Before long, someone at StumbleUpon had contacted Rowse about the problem.

Then the happy bit: an hour and 44 minutes after posting about ProBlogger's ban, StumbleUpon retracted their action against the site.

StumbleUpon likely did this based upon some type of algorithmic judgment, as it's hard to believe a person looking at ProBlogger's content could reasonably think it abusive. Our conversations with StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp on other topics never led us to believe the company, which is part of eBay, would treat a well-regarded blogger this way.

"I’ve never seen first hand what a blog community can achieve like this so quickly," said Rowse in wrapping up the whole kerfuffle.

7 Comments

Props to the ProBlogger Community

I agree -- It's great to see bloggers rally for a good cause.  I think the fact that the ban was lifted after such a short time shows the power of the blogging community.  Was the reason for the ban ever disclosed?

Ebay Paypal Google is run by a bunch of drones.

Another example of how Ebay/PayPal along with Google have lost any hope of being humanistic or even human. 

I personally believe that if I went to their home offices, I would find fully automated machines running everything from the office cleaning to customer service. In other words, all humans have left the planet at Ebay, Paypal, and Google.

Darren gets things done

We've been reading darren's blog for quite some time and never have we seen anything that could be classified as "abusive" .
 

Surprised as to what the reason for banning was not discussed here. Anyhow glad everything worked out, and yes the blogging community does get things taken care of :)

more imformation please

This article could have done with a bit more substance.

Why was he banned? what was the specific reason .

Cheers MICK

Not surprised considering the source

Figures it would be an Ebay company.  Paypal has no accountability for arbitrarily suspending accounts, and customer care is totally anonymous.

Wow- it's surprising that a

Wow- it's surprising that a little fact-checking didn't happen prior to the ban. At least everything is back to normal. Kudos to the blogging community for speaking out and righting an injustice so quickly. Ditto for stumbleupon for correcting the mistake.

I didn't know something like

I didn't know something like that could happen to an established site liek ProBlogger, even if only for 44mins. I guess this shows the power of having a strong community of readers for your blog.

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