Beware of Thieves offering Gifts
Posted by admin on 01 Feb 2008 at 06:34 pm | Tagged as: General
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Every once in a while, we stumble on those less desirable people that lurk on the Internet looking for new ways to take advantage of the system. Today, we would like to offer a warning to our users about one such dishonest group of people that call themselves, www.webdesignvalidation.com.
They offer you to submit you contact details and your web site information for a chance to win a new design for your site. We entered one of our sites into their contest at the beginning of the year with the chance to win a newly designed web site using Web 2.0 technologies. We thought, “Hey that’s a good idea. Let’s see how good they are so we can recommend this to our readers”.
So we complied with their rules. We put up a badge on our web site that let’s people click through to their site and vote for our site. Pretty simple … or so we thought.
They sent us a notice that on the 19th, our submitted site had been approved for submission as a “Non-Web 2.0 site”. Good news! On the 20th, they notified us that they were offering more rewards for their users. And a small note that said “a 3-plan membership was added in order to create a profile”. We weren’t sure what that meant. Nothing ever stated in the rules about a membership but we had already joined and been approved so we mistakenly assumed we were already members. But nothing was said about changes to the rules since we had joined.
On the 21st, another email about 3 new rewards. They were the same rewards as mentioned the day before. There was another mention of membership but again it was not obvious. “We have updated our awards for your category and added 3 membership options”. Ok, so what. Are we supposed to do something? No call to action in the email … no reference to rules changes for those already entered in January’s contest. We’re good to go.
But, out of caution, we decided to logon to the site and see how our submitted site was fairing in the ratings. Good news again, our submitted site was in first place with plenty of margin over the second place person. No worries then.
On January 31, we heard from one of our loyal fans that the badge on the homepage of our site was taking them to an error page (Error 404, page not found). We thought that was odd so we checked it out. Sure enough, no voting page. So we went to the home page at WDV and there was a notice that their system was down for scheduled maintenance and would be back online on February 1. Ok, we can wait.
On Feb 1 we received this little gem in our email exactly as quoted:
We have upgraded the Rating Part.
You will find a Chat option, a Forum where you can find web 2.0 design tutorials, download resources and many more.
Also the awards have been changed. You can win a free hosting account, a SEO package optimizer and many more.
Please visit us at www.webdesignvalidation.com/vote and create a new user account in order to access these features.
Thank you
Wait a minute … we already have a user account. And to prove it they have addressed us as “Dear Member”. Now they are telling us that they have upgraded the site and we have to create an account again. What happened to our old account? What happened to our first place rating?
So we checked …. no account, no first place rating, all of the old pages resulted in “Page not found” errors. We sent an email asking what was going on. The following email was received the same day (copied exactly with spelling errors included):
Though we are not obligated to give any extra explanation for our actions, we will make an exception for you this time and explain the process.
Referring to our old Platform, the upgrading announcement was made 6 days ago before we went upgrading.
Another Announcement that we made was of the Membership, Awards and Rules changing.
First of all the users should buy a Membership in order to receive the specific awards. Also the User email must match the domain name in order to receive any awards, even if he gets the highest votes.
I know that you will find these rules reasonable and absolutely normal.
Regarding to our New Platform, we received requests for all the features that the new website has to offer, like a chat, forum and so on. A free 7-day trial membership was added in order for our users to discover the new features.
We can assure you that we did not stopped the voting system because you had the highest votes. We could of downgrade your votes very easily from our system, but that is not on our interest. Our Web Design and SEO sponsors can handle every project that the member wins for free.
So encourage you to sign-up for the new rating part to have access to all the new features. You will discover in time how to even re-design your website, yourself.
Also please not that the voting code has been changed due to the SEO statistics. You can the modified code at www.webdesignvalidation.com/rateme.html.
If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact us.
Obviously, we did not hesitate to contact them.
It is amazing the methods that some people will use in order to build a contact list. While we did not loose any money on this, we do apologize as we did ask some of you to cast your vote for the site we submitted to understand how this was going to work. But we were most put out by the fact that they promised something to the web community, and then changed the rules to seemingly avoid delivering on the promise.
If this is how they treat their members, I am certainly not going to give them money as a registered member to be treated this badly. Obviously not a lot of gray matter exists in the heads of the people over at WDV.
We want to offer our sincere appreciation for your effort and we apologize for this inconvenience. Now we know that the people at WDV are not desirable business partners. We warn our customers not to use their service.
Wow..What can i say….
I represent the Web Design Validation team and found this on Digg.com.
Should i paste here the nice “F.. You” email we received from you?
Did you forget to mention that we have posted a notice that all ratings will be erased due to platform upgrading?
Did you forget to mention the 7-day full trial membership offered to browse the new platform?
I am sure that this comment will not appear but i would suggest you to stop posting blogs that are not real.
I am happy though that you have posted the full email received and hope that people will realize that we are right.
Second of all we had any right to suspend your account without any notice. Have you read the Terms and Conditions where it’s stated:”If your website email is other than the domain name we will not give you any award EVEN if the website gets the highest votes. The user must change and validate the domain name email.”
Your website was different than the email domain name that you have submitted.
I would suggest again to stop with these blogs and email us( without swearing) if you find our actions not justified.
We can post the same thing about your company on over 1000 blogs and directory articles..It’s really going nowhere.
Please allow me to step in and moderate at this point.
I have approved your comment as it is only fair our readers see both sides of the story.
Our blog admin and our research person have provided me with the evidence stating their case. In reviewing the information, I found the following:
1.) Yes, the language at the end of the email to your company was not appropriate and our staff have been properly reprimanded for their action.
2.) No notice of ‘clearing ratings’ was posted on your site or in any email notifications our team received from Web Design Validation. Perhaps you can provide us with a URL.
3.) We have not been able to locate anything on your website that indicates a FREE 7 day trial. Can you please post the URL for this offer?
4.) We have not been able to locate any requirement, on the registration form or elsewhere, that the email address and web site address must be from the same domain. Had we seen this we would have complied fully.
We appreciate the time you took to post your comment. I hope you understand that our purpose is to find USEFUL Web Services and Tools on the Internet for our customers. You guys obviously have some work to do with your service if you are to be considered credible in the industry. Our team felt that they had fully complied with your rules and that your team changed the rules in the eleventh hour without proper notification.
In the future, we would be happy to offer constructive comments on ways to better package your service without seeming to mislead customers, while protecting yourself at the same time.
I hope this helps.
Best regards,
Editor, Web Services & Tools
Siam Communications Group
It seems that you are not the person who wrote that email and i am glad to talk to you here.
The rules regarding the email domain name are written in the Terms and Conditions page, and you can find a link when you sign up, like on every other site. We have especially bolded it in order to make it a clear rule.
Due to many bugs that the old platform had we were unable to restore any logins from the database..Indeed our mistake.
We added the Memberships because as you might know SEO and SEM costs a lot and our sponsors are only dealing with Web Design.
So..from my point of view i guess we should stop this “so-called fight” because it’s getting nowhere.
If this will help you understand our good intentions about this Web Design Validation project i am willing to offer you the Silver-membership for free which is valid for 3 months, and if you get the highest votes than you will get the award accordingly. I will take this action of yours useful for the project development, because negative thoughts can improve a project development.
If you are interested on this offer please send us an email. Also the title ” Beware of Thieves offering Gifts” is really really childish. Why?
Take a better look over the internet and you will see really big Thieves, not us who had a problem with the last platform which caused some errors in the system.
Thank you again for posting this.