User talk:Ssh85

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Blacklisting and Spamming
Hi there,

Thanks for your recent message left on the whitelist page (sites to unblock) about Nochex.com and for allowing certain links. As you rightly said I was only removing comments from our Wiki page which were either untrue or biased. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Spam-whitelist#nochex.com). There is one person who seems intent on writing untrue statements on Wikipedia about us and every time I amend something he is editing it immediately - I have no idea why or who he is but what he says is factually incorrect.

Anyway, I just wondered if you could help me on the blacklisting issue as I do not really understand it. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Spam-blacklist/archives/November_2008#MattSEO_and_Nochex_spam_on_Wikipedia as quoted in your comment) I see that we and a number of other related sites are also on this spam domains list. I am relatively new to Nochex and have not been involved in previous activity and equally do not know a huge amount about how Wikipedia works but what I don't understand is what this list means, and when you say we have had warnings - who to / where?

I just want to identify how we would end up on such a list and what we have done in terms of spamming. Bearing in mind we have thousands of merchants who all have links to us on their site - I just cant imagine how we have spammed people.... but then again I have no idea what could be classed as spamming really. We never send spam, all emails we send are 'opted in' newsletters and emails to people who have purchased something through Nochex (a payment confirmation email) which too is an opt in in our terms. Is the spam issue something wider then just email we send out direct?

I do recognise some of the listed related domains, and one of the IP's is ours but I cant understand what has happened. The Directors here are keen to know, and to take action to remedy the situation, so if you could help me understand what we have done wrong I will happily investigate and rectify.

I eagerly await your reply, and thank you in advance for you time.

Many thanks

Ssh85 (talk) 13:34, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Spam in this context refers to people adding links to sites to Wikipedia articles. A link to nochex.com was added to merchant account and merchant account provider by the IP address 217.36.212.109 last year, and it was also linked from CQout by User:Dstymon. I'm sure you'll agree that nochex is not directly related to any of those topics, but might be sought-out by users with an interest in them. In the interest of neutrality, we try to minimise the number of external links on Wikipedia.
 * Does that clarify things for you? Stifle (talk) 13:48, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi again,

That makes more sense, so the list of related websites - how does that affect us?

While I disagree that 'merchant account' and 'merchant services' articles are not directly related to Nochex because that what we do, I completely understand the neutrality issue and would never personally add links to other articles to us for that reason. I wondered if you could tell me how we would therefore become whitelisted as we seem to be paying for someone elses errors. Also - can you tell me what rights we have over people changing our article and adding factually incorrect statements that we might deem to be biased also? I seem to have a losing battle on my hands.

One other thing is: I noted someone had commented on the associated IP's that are listed in the page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Spam-blacklist/archives/November_2008#MattSEO_and_Nochex_spam_on_Wikipedia and one of the IPs is a university - it seems (from my investigations) that someone has hacked into their web pages and added hundreds of links to viagra sites and includes our name in one of the links - this has been added to a respectable uni page in hidden formatting so invisible unless you look at the source code - but will this adversely affect us - we are nothing to do with it and nor does the domain owner seems to be - how might this affect our blacklisting?

Thanks Ssh85 (talk) 15:34, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * When I say that those articles are not directly related to Nochex, I mean in encyclopedia terms — certainly, a person who is looking for a merchant account might look to yourselves, you'd pay quite a bit of money to a commercial site for a link like that, and we're not going to give it to you — nor to anyone else — for free.
 * You're welcome to edit nochex or any other article, but I should point you towards our conflicts of interest policy for your information.
 * I think the blacklisting is likely to be a mistake in the circumstances, and I am going to look at delisting it. Stifle (talk) 18:09, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Thats great, thank you. I will ensure we are very careful and fair in anything I add or write in future. I appreciate your help on this matter. Ssh85 (talk) 08:31, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Disturbing persistence in COI editing
If you have a close connection to some of the people, places or things you have written about, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred from the tone of the edit and the proximity of the editor to the subject, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:
 * 1) editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
 * 2) participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors; and
 * 3) linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Spam).

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. For more details about what, exactly, constitutes a conflict of interest, please see our conflict of interest guidelines. -- Orange Mike  &#x007C;   Talk  15:49, 9 June 2009 (UTC)