The Next Web

Interesting way of dealing with users, tell them to f*** off

Written on June 26, 2008 – 10:29 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

After a hectic day of moving to a new office, I found the time to check my a-list of RSS feeds. Checking those top blogs always gives me tons of inspiration - for example, I’ve now learned a new way of dealing with annoying readers. I’ll just tell them to get the hell out of here.

At least, that’s what Faceparty did - one of the UK’s oldest social networks. It’s a network with an attitude, trying to be exclusive by only allowing invitees to join. Why?

With our doors open to everyone, this site was attracting too many spammers, fakers, pervs, liars, haters, nobs, pedos, over-50’s-using-it-as-a-dating-site- cos-they-have-to-pay-for-match.com’s, and most of all… too many friggin’ moaners! We’d spend all day deleting them, but alas (aarrggghh!) they’d only return the next day. Not anymore… problem solved. Hooray!

However, if you’re not subscribed to this network, you can still browse around a bit. I’ve drawn one important conclusion: looks like you’re not allowed to wear a shirt on you profile picture.

Anyway, the Faceparty team organized some sort of “fancy dresses” competition last week and something went wrong there with handing out the prizes. Users thought they wouldn’t get them anymore and became pretty pissed of. So they started leaving messages like, “you should get your f*cking act together”. This caused some discomfort by Faceparty, and what did they do? They typed an angry message, shut down the site, and took off to listen to other animals at London Zoo. Seriously.

The site was down on Tuesday and my fellow European tech blogger Mike Butcher managed to make a screenshot. Here’s a part of it, see the whole pic on TechCrunch UK. Perfect marketing… I gotta say.

I hope you like that post!

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faceparty, marketing, social network, social networks, united kingdom, users