Last Blogger

Well after a lot of back and forth with the PayPerPost support team I finally figured out the resolution to yesterday’s issue with PayPerPost. They define post as the title of the post, body, tags and any associated comments. They also define obscure as detract which are, in the English language, two entirely different words. So my previous layout was not ok:

This minor modification made it comply with the terms of service.

So I now have a resolution to my issue, but I’m still left with a lot of concerns overall. PPP keeps changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Sometimes we get notice such as we did with segmentation, sometimes we don’t as in the sudden harsh clampdown on Adsense.

A lot of things could have alleviated the difficulty that people like myself have had with understanding the new rule enforcements. A head’s up to the community via e-mail with a detailed description of the specifics would have gone a long ways towards averting the problem altogether. A proper set of definitions for post vs page so that I could have properly interpreted the following statement:

Unfortunately, there are still advertisements within the post, which make it ineligible for the opportunity. Please remove them and resubmit.

Unfortunately I can’t think of a polite way to say this, but they should also invest in a dictionary so that they can properly interpret or re-write their terms of service. Obscure does not mean detract. Detract does not mean obscure. This caused me a great deal of confusion because I could not see how I was possibly breaking any of the terms of service. If you were to replace the word obscure with the word detract or even obscure or detract, I would have been able to figure it out on my own and saved the support team lots of time and saved myself lots of grief.

The lesson of the day? Words matter, especially in something as global as a terms of service document. That’s why many of the ToS we read are 3 pages long and written in legalese. They’re not always easy to read through, but they are 100% accurate. But the words alone won’t cut it. Communication matters just as much. If you’ve got a community of your own that’s depending on you as a webmaster, you have to keep them up to date on what’s going on.

The god news is that after PPP blew up their software, they hired someone to take care of their QA. So although they seem to be learning a lot of very old lessons anew, they seem to want to fix their mistakes. So perhaps this will be yet another time where they’ll take the lumps and fix it so that it doesn’t happen again.