Arthur Webster   Just plain honesty
I have just finished having quite an interesting experience on the web with a fairly well known membership site.

I was enrolled by a friend who is building a web site for me because he thought what they were offering was just what a newbie at internet marketing might need. Even though I have spent over two years on the periphery, looking in, my knowledge did not provide me with the experience I needed to survive in this membership site. I suppose I was like a person swimming with big fishes - not realising that some of them were sharks.

Initially I was very pleased with what I received but soon discovered that the much vaunted support system relied almost entirely upon other members providing answers to problems. That was neither too bad nor unexpected. What was too bad and totally unexpected was that if the members did not know the answers - you were simply left floundering.

I am a straight talking person who likes to feel that even if what I say is against what the reader believes, the reader will, at the very least, send me a reply to tell me what an idiot I am. With a supposedly 'professional' outfit, I foolishly believed that the concerns of members would be of some importance and that the owners were grown ups able to defend their product if I was wrong.

NOT A BIT OF IT!

I got no responses to genuine concerns about template stability and flexibility and other matters, nor did I receive confirmation that a sum of money paid for an advertising co-op had been received or allocated properly (after nearly three weeks). Where other people had voiced similar concerns to myself over matters, I added my own comments.

In an effort to see what other people had managed to create for themselves, I looked at a forum stream where other members were looking for reviews of their sites. In five sites that I looked at, not one of them was built on a flexible template that could adapt to different screen resolutions - at a screen resolution of 800 (still very common in Europe) all of the sites required a scroll bar to enable viewers to see the whole width of the sites.

My own site could not be viewed in Firefox very well because it broke up - and it was based on the standard template.

What was the response to my genuine concerns and honest opinions - I breached their TOS and got myself banned from the forum!

I can only assume that the owners or moderatiors of this membership site are not at all concerned with answering questions or providing assistance and that the rule of PMA was imposed rigidly.

In other words, if you need help from this site, pretend you don't and post a happy message to the forum because, as you know, PMA will cause all problems to disappear and by demonstrating PMA, they might let you continue to post your happy little messages.

This experience has been a salutory one because now I can sympathise with people who feel that they have been ripped off and lied to - because that is exactly how I feel now.
Apr 1st 2008 05:48