Sunday, January 22, 2012

Windows Seven Forums: Banned!

I was trying to get an answer to a question about Windows 7.  I went to Windows SevenForums.com.  When I tried to log in, I got this message:

You have been banned for the following reason:
spam
Date the ban will be lifted: Never
I had gotten that message previously, and had twice asked them why I was getting this.  They had never replied.

As one comedian put it, "It's funny, I haven't even done anything yet. How did they know that I'm going to spam?"  The answer seemed to involve backlinking.  I was not entirely sure what that was, and therefore could not say whether I had ever done it -- though it seemed unlikely, since I had only posted one message on their forum -- a message that I could not now examine, to see how it might have erred.

This time, when I tried to use their contact form to ask them what was going on, they just kept giving me one Captcha after another.  Some of them were really hard to figure out, so I had to click on the recycle button to get a different one.  I didn't realize they might just be playing games until I got this one:


It did seem unlikely that SevenForums.com seriously expected me to enter or translate that bit of Hebrew.

I concluded, at this point, that my only remedy was to put this item out there for the world to see, so that perhaps someone with some way of getting through to SevenForums.com might be able to persuade them to smell the coffee.

2 comments:

Andrea Borman.

It happened to me last October 2011. I got banned from Seven Forums. The reason, a forum member posted a comment on a thread about installing Movie Maker 6 on Windows 7, that he liked one of my videos. And because I replied back to him on the thread thanking him,they banned me.

True that member was off topic and so was I for replying back to him on the thread.But that is no reason to ban me.Yet he is not banned but I am.

But the ban message I got was-
"You have been banned for the following reason: persona non grata-date the ban will be lifted: never."

So I have been banned for life from Seven Forums.

But Seven Forums are very strict and I have read about other people being banned for no real reason. So I am not the only one. Andrea Borman.

Unknown

Yeah they banned me too, saying
"You have been for the following reason:
Piracy

Date the ban will be lifted:
Never"
Even though i did nothing.