Tagfoot fines $5, but does not explain why…
Friday, April 9th, 2010
The tagfoot "your account is restricted" message
I am always a little suspicious when people start trying to punish me without explaining why. I am even more suspicious when that punishment involves a fine.
So, when I recently tried to use Tagfoot and got a message that my account was restricted and pointed to a help page that said “You have broken a rule, or rules, as outlined in the Usage Guidelines. To immediately unlock your account, you will need to pay a $5 fine” that set off a lot of alarms. Looking around, it gets even more interesting as I found a post by someone who paid the $5, but still couldn’t figure out why she was fined and they would not tell her (and no “you figure it out” is not a decent answer). It is even more suspicious when you realize that they previously had a bug that was marking users as restricted when they were not…
Well, in light of this, I sent the Tagfoot support a request for clarification and an explination of just what I have done. I have had this account since soon after they started and had not even seen when they released these guidlines and fines.
A while later, I got this very turse form message with a couple of links, but absolutely no real explanation…
Why is my account RESTRICTED and what does it mean?http://tagfoot.com/help#Why%20is%20my%20account%20RESTRICTED%20and%20what%20does%20it%20mean%3FYou’ll also want to make sure to read tagfoot’s usage guidelines: http://tagfoot.com/support/news:.E68423EB-4A17-45AD-8263-CB404D59D0D0
Thanks.
Seriously? Now you are fining long term users without any real explanation? This seems similar to the police mailing you a ticket for $100 and telling you to look in the traffic code if you are unsure when or what it is for. I figured that I might as well try to get a straight answer one more time and see if they got the point (I figure that my account is lost by now unless I do anyways). I replied that I wanted to know what the specific issue is, but no answer. It turns out that they block replies to support by restricted accounts. So, now I have to jump through hoops to find that I can still send support a message from the support user profile page. What a pain. I replied that I had seen the usage guide but wanted to know just what I was specifically fined for. Still waiting for an answer…
So, currently I am left with the choice of:
- abandon Tagfoot
- pay a random $5 user fee and just hope that they don’t just ding me again…
Since I really like to know what I am paying for and why, I guess this is the end of my Tagfoot usage (at least under that login). Hopefully at some point they will consider improving their support and the definition of their rules and actually start explaining to users what they did wrong and how to fix it. Otherwise, their fines just look like random user fees to me.
Frankly, at this point using Tagfoot just does not seem worth the $5 random usage fee, I mean “fine”.
Tags: scams, social media, Tagfoot, Tagfoot account restricted, TagFoot fines, tagfoot support, Tagfoot Usage