Probation

Your Account Has Been Placed on Probation
From: quality_control@erochikan.com
To: Ian Rogers
Sent: June 4, 2010

Dear Mr. Rogers,

Our Quality Control Tracking Program has indicated that your entry dated 6/4/2010 is in violation of one or more of Erochikan’s User Guidelines:

1. All Blogger users are reminded that they are now a part of the Erochikan Corporation, and must refrain from posting any opinions that may be considered damaging to Erochikan or its subsidiary companies.

3. Blog entries and comment fields are not to contain links to any website advertising a product or service.

See below for a more detailed summary of the above violation(s):

LYLTY-A01: User has posted opinions or accusations threatening the reputation and/or methods of the Erochikan Corporation.

ADV-M389: User has linked to a website whose content contains a percentage of advertisements and/or product solicitations in excess of the maximum allowance.

In accordance with Blogger policy, your account has been placed on Probation. Users on Probation are forbidden from editing past entries, posting links of any kind, or making changes to material marked as objectionable by the Quality Control Team. Your blog will also be marked with a warning for readers to proceed with caution. Subsequently, qualified Quality Control Team technicians will be actively screening your entries for oversights that may have been overlooked by our automated scanning software.

Blogs on Probation remain as such indefinitely at the sole discretion of the Erochikan Corporation. Please note that continuing to provide high-quality entries in accordance with the User Guidelines will greatly increase your chances of being downgraded from Probationary status expeditiously.

We hope you see this as an opportunity to more closely observe the User Guidelines.

Sincerely,

The Erochikan Blogger Quality Control Team

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Re: RE: Your Account Has Been Placed on Probation
From: quality_control@erochikan.com
To: Ian Rogers
Sent: June 7, 2010

Dear Mr. Rogers,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to your notice of probation. If we understand you correctly, it seems that you are unclear as to the reasons why your most recent entry was in violation of the User Guidelines. The reasons are as follows:

In order to protect its reputation for quality content, Erochikan encourages all users to refrain from posting negative or overly critical opinions pertaining to Erochikan or Blogger. (Of course, positive comments regarding Erochikan are perfectly acceptable.) To aid users who may have overlooked this policy, the Quality Control Team flags overly-sensitive passages for user revision. This is different from censorship in that each user is completely free to edit or not edit the flagged passages as they see fit. And of course, users deciding independently which thoughts they want to express online is a far cry from involuntary censorship, right?

In your case, users on Probation are not allowed to edit entries flagged by the Quality Control Team, and such entries will remain flagged until the user has reacquired the necessary editing privileges.

As to your second point, the website you linked to was determined to be in excess of the maximum allowance for advertisements and/or product solicitations under guideline ADV-M389. The maximum allowance is calculated by taking the total number of words pertaining to solicited matter divided by the total number of words on the website. (For details about how pictures are tabulated into the word count and how different websites qualify for different solicitation allowances, see the complete guide to ADV-M389 on the Erochikan Quality Control website.)

From the general tone of your e-mails and recent entries, Mr. Rogers, I don’t think you fully understand the seriousness of your situation. The User Guidelines are not negotiable and were not created to limit your freedom of expression, but to help users create the best possible blog entries. It is not your place to disobey them, nor to gamble with so-called “creative endeavors” on a blog that is owned and controlled by the Erochikan Corporation. It is important to ensure the well-being of the parent company, and that is why we utilize methods that are guaranteed

Remember that only by producing high-quality content will your account be taken off Probation. We consider the matter closed, and if you have any other concerns we encourage you to take them up with the Dispute Department.

Sincerely,

The Erochikan Blogger Quality Control Team