Our posties have been complaining for some time about the banning feature in our system. The effect on tack ratings, the mystery of why a ban is placed, and the irreversible nature of the bans were cited as problems. We listened, and came up with some new functionality that we hope will quell the frustration.
We are proud to introduce a new feature called “benching”. This is similar to banning in that it will prevent a blogger from taking opps, or conversely will prevent opps from an advertiser showing up in a blogger’s opportunity list. When a bench is placed by a user on another user, it does not affect their tack rating. The bench will expire in 30, 60, or 90 days. This will prevent the same bloggers from taking an advertiser’s opportunities over and over again. It will also give the blogger a break if they’re tired of seeing the same opps in their list.
In addition to this, we have added functionality to allow users to remove bans and benches that they have placed on another user. Now you can go back and undo the ban or bench if you have a change of heart. This change also includes a viewable listing of bans and benches that were both placed by you and placed on you. We refer to them as “sent” and “received”. This is going to demystify the bans because the reason associated with it will be displayed. It will help advertisers to communicate with individual bloggers about why they didn’t like a post, and bloggers can add the reason that they don’t want to see the opps an advertiser has created. We believe this will foster better blog posts and better opportunities.
As if that’s not enough, there’s also the fabulous new AutoBench feature. When creating a new opportunity you now have the option to automatically bench any posties that take the opportunity for a period of time. This is great for advertisers planning on creating a series of opportunities who want to get the maximum exposure across our network.
You can access the summary of your bans and benches from the account info page as an advertiser, and from the My Blogs page as a postie.
Now, a word of caution. We have noticed that some posties and advertisers really didn’t understand what “Ban” meant. Some thought it was a way of sending compliments to people:”Hey, fantastic job! you’re banned” etc. We debated in the office what to do about this. There are a lot of bans in the system and it would take far too long to go through them all manually to weed out the errant ones. We could have automatically converted all bans to benches, and that would certainly make all the posties out there really happy since tack ratings will bounce upwards, more opps would be available and so on. On the flip side though, Customer Love do a lot of work with advertisers weeding out undesirable posties. Since advertisers are our, and your, source of income, it doesn’t make much sense to throw out all the bans completely or make advertisers sift through them to unbench/re-ban people. So, we decided to leave the bans as they are.
If you find that you have bans that are just wrong (i.e “Great job”, “Excellent work”, “You rock”), then just let Customer Love know and they’ll help get the ban removed.
