Scribd.com Hoses My Docs, Is Your Content Safe There?

As more and more of us put our neck out there by putting our information and documents on the Internet, it becomes more of an issue that you simply down OWN your own work anymore. We have Scoble’s recent banning from Facebook (he has since been reinstated). And today, I got banned from Scribd.com.

Scribd.com is an online document storage site with a social media component. I thought it might be an interesting site to try, so I uploaded a couple of documents a few days ago. One was an article entitled “How To Make a Powerful Blog Post”. It was geared toward webmasters. The other was a take-out from one of our recent weekly rants from our PCMech weekly newsletter. Well, this morning, I get the following from Scribd.com:

Dear pcmech,
One or more of your public documents has been repeatedly flagged as an advertisement by the Scribd community. It is against the Scribd terms of service to upload public advertisements, and because you have persisted in doing so, your account has been terminated and your IP address has been blocked. If you believe this termination to be in error and wish to have public access reinstated, please email us at support@scribd.com.

I was sent this message by Snowmaker, another Scribd.com user and a member of their staff apparently.

There was no email asking me about it from Scribd. I doubt this Snowmaker guy even looked at the documents. Why? Because neither of them was spam. The article on blogging was submitted by me to an INTERNET MAGAZINE to be published! Do you think a magazine is going to publish spam? The other was a rant published in our newsletter. For any of you who get our weekly newsletter, you know that the weekly rant is not spam. Its just an editorial.

Both of these documents did contains links to PCMech, and the blogging one probably linked to Webbyonline. Basically, very short little “about the author” stints at the bottom. Is this what qualifies as spam now?

In the meantime, you can surf around Scribd.com and find numerous examples of documents that are ACTUALLY spam. I have found “free ebooks” on this site for various “making money online” schemes.

So, this, of course, begs the question: Is your content safe?

Robert Scoble gets his entire social network unplugged by Facebook. On a much lighter scale, I get banned from Scribd.com. Many people today (including me) are making routine use of web-based services. We don’t own the servers, and many of these sites have terms of service that likely clearly state who really owns the content you put up on their servers.

It would be nice to know that real PEOPLE actually check these things before deciding you’re violating terms of service. The way the email from Scribd.com was written, I am to assume that I was banned because of the Scribd community. That is mob rule. And without somebody actually checking the validity, it risks making mistakes like this one. And as for the “you persisted in doing so” thing – please! – I uploaded TWO documents. Both within 5 minutes of each other because I was playing around with the service.

It is clear to me the staff at Scribd.com is inept at best.

If you are putting any documents on Scribd.com, I guess be sure you don’t put any URLs to your own website in there. These idiots think that is spam.

Update 1/13/08

This morning, I got this in my email in response to my inquiry on why exactly they banned my account:

Due to the rampant abuse of Scribd’s free services by Internet marketers, we employ a zero-tolerance policy for spam, advertising, and search engine optimization (SEO) on Scribd. We have ascertained that one or more of your documents fall into one of these categories, and under the policy we have permanently blocked your account. We will not make exceptions for any misunderstanding or ignorance of Scribd’s Terms of Service, for “non-profit services,” for the redistribution of advertising found in “free e-books” and elsewhere, for “inadvertent uploading,” or for other “mistakes.” There have been well over a thousand of these “mistakes” in the past month alone, and each one one puts our search engine rankings, our partnerships, and our long-term existence, in jeopardy.
We regret this course of action, especially if you’ve been the recipient of bad advice. It’s important to be acutely aware of all Terms of Service that you agree to.
Scribd does not provide backups or download access for documents uploaded before an account is blocked.

So basically, he’s telling me this is MY mistake and “tough luck”. At this point, I wouldn’t upload anything to this service. They’d probably label granny’s casserole recipe as an attempt to spam.

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http://unknown David M
I think the whole concept of relying on someone else to store something important is insane. This is especially true when you can buy hard drive storage for as low as 20 cents per gig as well as being able to burn a 4.7 gig DVD for as low 50 cents.
LloydJones
Your story on Scribd launched me into checking them out before I determined whether I would ostracize them from my list of useful,worthwhile sites.
After scanning their FAQ pages and comparing their Do and Don’ts against what you described about your two documents, I’m led to believe their “user flagging system” (their words) and/or API must have some strange sorting criteria. One point: They permit only ONE link in the writer’s profile … so maybe that triggered their flagging App.
Check the following excerpt from their FAQ: Can I include links in my Scribd documents? No. Due to abuse from search engine optimizers and internet marketers, we have adopted a no link policy. You may place one link in the website field of your profile page. You may not add HTML links to documents on Scribd.
By the way, while there I had to frequently close interrupting pop-up advertisements from all sorts of companies, advertisers appearing over SCRIBD’s pages. Strange, strange …
Suggestion to potential users: Be cautious, the site seems to be a bit inept, maybe just somewhat naive?? about the Internet world. Could it be “start-up” bugs? I think their intentions are good perhaps meritorious.
pogomcl
I ws “invited” into Scribd some time ago and zapped the invitation after browsing about it. It seems just to be another vanity site where you are free to upload your content, but they profit off it and leave you with nothing. When you are skilled with specialized knowledge of some field, there are many legit sites looking for legit bloggers who will pay real money rather than just profiteer off your back. So I’d rather be poor and alone than mess with any of the “social networking” scenes which basically benefit only the owners and advertising of the sites… for someone of your knowledge, there are probably dozens of places that will pay you per article for your writing and additionally for any indepth linking you do. Writing is hard work, so why bother with such trash.
Gather is the same way– you can’t link to your own pages… and they do all kinds of bs over there to harass good writers.
http://www.zanzig.com/ Mark Zanzig
Am I the only one who finds it a bit weird that Scribd actually cares about links in profiles and valid documents? Shouldn’t they be rather scared about the massive copyright infringements performed by their users? Hopefully some big publisher sues them to hell for what’s going on there.
Mary
Yeah I just got banned too. The funny side to is it that I have no idea what I did wrong and they banned a very large legit company access to their site. Surely blanket IP bans can not be good for traffic when ISPs use proxies?
Paul
You know David, when scribd ban me I just said whatever – so many avenues out there to get content out – I am not going to get gray hairs over it