Well, the first thing, which I disregarded because publishing is a secondary goal to me, is that their system does not actually publish the top 10% of books submitted and voted on, the way they claim. They choose 10% of the books that survive /several/ rounds of voting and weeding, so the actual percentage of the books submitted is much lower, and they don't pick the highest voted ones, they pick the ones they like best. That I could forgive, really, because there are limits to how many books a company can successfully publish, and when you get 500 books submitted in a 4 month voting cycle, it means you would have to publish 50 books 3 times a year. Too many. But still, the fact that they didn't update their PR material to reflect the actual odds of publishing through them is a bit... shady.
Then I found out that you can get your posts on their forum removed for not breaking the rules, just because a moderator felt like it. I saw a huge uproar over "censorship" when the mods, without ANY prior announcement or warning, suddenly decided to clean up the forums and deleted all posts with swearing in them. Without first putting up a "no swearing" rule, they just removed posts.
Then a mod did it to me. I'd posted in a forum that says "post in moderation" and follows that with a SPECIFIC guideline which my post absolutely, 100% met. But I had posted to that same forum three days previous, and the moderator decided that posting so often was not "in moderation" so even though there is no rule stating how often you can post, he removed my post.
I can't be happy participating in a site where my content could be removed at any moment, on a whim, with no warning or notice beforehand. So I left.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-07-09 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-09 07:11 pm (UTC)Then I found out that you can get your posts on their forum removed for not breaking the rules, just because a moderator felt like it. I saw a huge uproar over "censorship" when the mods, without ANY prior announcement or warning, suddenly decided to clean up the forums and deleted all posts with swearing in them. Without first putting up a "no swearing" rule, they just removed posts.
Then a mod did it to me. I'd posted in a forum that says "post in moderation" and follows that with a SPECIFIC guideline which my post absolutely, 100% met. But I had posted to that same forum three days previous, and the moderator decided that posting so often was not "in moderation" so even though there is no rule stating how often you can post, he removed my post.
I can't be happy participating in a site where my content could be removed at any moment, on a whim, with no warning or notice beforehand. So I left.