Update 5/12/2009 – Today I realized that the AblakeForum put up the banned message based on the IP address…but I moved to a new area and switched my internet provider since the last time I logged in there…meaning that the “banned” message definitely wasn’t directed towards me.
However, there’s still a great lesson in all of this, so I thought it would be useful to keep the rest of the post about my AblakeForum mishapp.
Update: 5/11/2009 – Note: I still highly recommend the AblakeForum – especially if you can read posts by Mike Young the lawyer there and Chris Elliott the copywriter and of course Anthony Blake himself.
However, an interesting thing happened today…I haven’t logged in since I posted this recommendation of the Ablake Forum. I tried to login today and was greeted with the following message:
If you can’t see the image, it says:
“An Error Has Occurred! Sorry Guest, you are banned from using this forum!
Because you’re a fucking spammer. Claim yourself ASSHAT! We warned you, now you are banned and nuked.”
Since I haven’t even logged in for months I’m not sure how I could have spammed the forum, so the message is puzzling at best. But it’s a good lesson to not worry about things that are out of your control AND to always be aware what things ARE or aren’t in your control.
In this case, it’s not worth the time to even find out if there was a legitimate reason for being banned (i.e., maybe someone I hired to do some work decided to post my link in their forum even though I specifically don’t allow people to do forum postings for me).
For some reason I haven’t logged into the AblakeForum in a long time. I don’t know why. It’s a very good forum and I just noticed they have an section about online legal issues for internet marketers.
I used to hang out there all the time before they moved to the new forum format, but somehow when they switched it didn’t stick.
Anyhow, I do recommend it as a good place to visit on a regular places. You’ll find it’s a quite different atmosphere than the WarriorForum, although it’s hard to explain what that means exactly.
- Click here to visit the Ablake Forum.
- Click here to visit Chris Elliot’s CopyWritingRush.com
- Click here to visit Mike Young Law
Addendum: The ABlakeForum ban had the unexpected consequence of finally explaining why long ago one of my messages at Michael Green’s HowToCorp forum was flagged.
I had posted a question there asking people how they thought the site HomeStarRunner was monetizing their site…and apparently the site had changed since I last looked at it, so it so some of the ways were fairly obvious.
I was puzzled as to why my post was flagged as possible spam as I’ve never had any monetary interest in the HomeStarRunner site.
However, it dawned on me today that just as I prohibit anyone else other than me from posting in forums or on blogs in my name or my site’s name that is not true for everyone…meaning…
That Michael Green from HowToCorp may have thought I was either trying to build links to their sites, or just drive traffic to their site as a paid “forum spammer” neither of which was the case.
You can see the original post from 2004 – yes…2004!