Excerptz closed on 13th August 2012
This is Ryan, I don't expect that I will able to converse with you on here through this new account for obvious reasons, as it is likely to be banned shortly. Therefore this message will be a long all-encompassing one.
As you correctly noted Excerptz was closed on 13th August, and as others have mentioned there were some technical problems with the mass email. Some people claim to have recieved one, some people claim not to have; I did recieve one to all Excerptz accounts registered under my email addresses (of which there were five or six), probably because I'd informed hotmail that they were not spam. But nonetheless, every attempt was made to contact authors through email, and apologies to anybody who (as of yet) has not recieved one.
It has not been possible to fix the mailing system and resend to members as I've been without an internet connection for two weeks after moving 300 miles northwards, it is my intention to do so - I wouldn't want anybody to lose any content, and the sixty day period will of course be restarted from the point that I am confident that all members have recieved an email. I will send all 900(ish) manually if I am forced to do so.
I'm sure that you will agree that sixty days from the date of sending will provide everybody with sufficient time to reclaim their content for republication. The liklyhood is that the admin access will be maintained for much longer, as I myself have a good three hundred or so posts to rehome.
For the benefit of any hubbers with an account on Excerptz who perhaps didn't recieve the email or didn't notice it within a spam folder (a particular issue with hotmail I believe), these are my reasons for closing the site:
1) My AdSense account was constantly under threat, I had been recieving an increasing number of adsense notifications demanding that I remove content within three days or face a possible termination of the account. As soon as I became aware that I would be without internet for a period it became apparent that the site had to go immediately. Not only to protect MY account, but also the account of the author(s) of the said non-compliant content. The personal regret/guilt that I would feel if responsible for the loss of somebody elses income stream would far surpass any short term discomfort caused by any backlash that I will have from closing the site and causing people minor inconvenience. Here is an example of an email:
2) The site was initially created to serve as a bookmarking site for hubbers to create backlinks to their content here on hubpages, squidoo, and wherever else. It wasn't until Panda came along and many of my former-associates here on HP were bemoaning the unpublication of their content here on hubpages that I transformed the site into one which accepted only articles. That wasn't part of the business plan. There are now far superior alternative platforms out there (built by people who can actually code), perhaps most notably Wizzley.com (which I love by the way). There is simply no place for Excerptz on the market now, particularly with Squidoo so strong, it has become redundant and my withdrawal/neglect of the site can be considered a graceful and humble acknowledgement that you can only build something fantastic if you put the hard work in (I can't, or won't). Here is an Alexa graph showing a correlation between the end of the very short lived Excerptz success and the emergence of Wizzley:
3) I have simply moved on from search engine marketing and SEO, primarily because once per month I'd be going a week without sleep when my sites or clients sites would get battered by the ever-evolving Panda updates and the pesky little Penguin which emerged on the scene. I was spending so much time attempting to find a magic cure for terminally ill properties and content that I wasn't building.... and I just love building. Stuff had to go, Excerptz became a cropper because the things which have to stay are paying for my new mortgage.
4) At the start of the year I was offered a substantial amount of money to sell the site to somebody else named Ryan who owns a few other big properties ($5k basically). I considered it, I really did, maybe he would have turned it into something super-duper. On the flipside, he could also have screwed you all over by ignoring the terms of service agreement and stealing the content, or removing adsense revenue sharing, or deleting your content full stop and flipping the domain into something else (PR2, lots of links pointing directly to homepage, it's common practice). All I want to do is ensure that everybody gets their chance to reclaim the content that THEY own, and I will provide that chance by ensuring that everybody recieves an email a minimum of 60 days prior to the complete deletion of the database (not 60 days from 13th August).
ps. Malware - I'll fix that now that I have internet connection.
Thanks to all those who got involved and again, apologies for any minor inconvenience, best of luck in your writing endeavours on Squidoo, Wizzley, ThisIsFreelance, Xobba, or wherever.
Ryan
WryLilt,
I am however extremely surprised that you have chosen to raise your concerns directly here on the hubpages forum (where you are no doubt aware that I am not permitted to contribute) without making any effort to contact me first. Well, I guess I’m a bit naïve to be surprised there, not like you don’t have form on here, the sharing of confidential information for example, and being outed by Menayan as a post-panda gainer while vigorously claiming to be a post-panda loser (however inappropriately).
I believe (know in fact) that you are connected with me directly on twitter, linkedin, Google+, Wizzley, Hubpages, facebook , (and indeed my PERSONAL account which has just 26 hubpages related connections of which you are one). You also have my personal email address. You have never been shy to reach out in the past, and I would have expected better from somebody who I believe is studying to become a real life journalist and one who no doubt researches their content so thoroughly? You wouldn't run a story in a newspaper without first making contact with the subject? Perhaps you would if you ran a gossip site or wrote for a tabloid, but you certainly wouldn't if you were under the employ of a publication with any degree of credibility (e.g. a broadsheet).
If your first instinct would have been to send me a facebook message for example, I could have explained this to you. This forum thread (which one of the other 25 hubbers on my fb account kindly forwarded to me, via facebook message ironically) was the first that I knew of the malware problem, so perhaps by the same stretch that was a "lovely way to find out" about it. Whilst some people use social media accounts to self-promote or build a brand, I actually use that account to communicate/converse with my connections, so as a result I will consider our own connection completely redundant and worthless. If you were for example to click on my name on facebook you would be taken to my timeline, where you would have seen this:
Maybe you did see that on that your feed? If that was (entirely hypothetically of course) the case then you would be raising the issue on the one place online that you knew I couldn’t respond to it, at a time when you suspected I had no ability to find and read it? Without the courtesy to inform me that you had done so?
Whilst I can only apologize to all concerned for the technical problems associated with the mail out (if this was indeed a technical problem and not an over-zealous email provider identifying a legitimate email as spam, most of my hubpages and wizzley emails go straight to Hotmail spam), many people found out through their participation in various writing communities. A notice was, for example, posted in five or six facebook groups made up of HP and Squidoo writers, and indeed on the forum of Wizzley.com (a site on which you are very active). You were once a member of those communities I believe, prior to the deletion of your Wry Lilt facebook account.
In fact you are now much more active on Wizzley than you are on Hubpages, so I’d be interested to know why you decided to post this thread here, and not post a similar thread on Wizzley – a community full of former hubbers. Is it because you already knew that a thread there existed? This one?..... http://wizzley.com/forum/chatter-away-f … tz-closed/
Thanks for your contribution to Excerptz and good luck out there in the big wide web. I will miss the old Excerptz place, it was special to me for a moment.This Ryankett chap has always been full of himself and uncouth as well. Picks up fight with anyone and everywhere on seemingly minor issues. It's good for the community he finally got banned on HP. HP should be a better place now
- EmpressFelicityposted 11 years ago
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