A letter to Dzone.com

This is a letter from me to Dzone.com concerning their apparent blocking of this blog content as being spam. I am hoping to get response to it. Before using the it and the current situation as material for future blog posts about dzone.com and online communities in general.

 DZone.com is an online community and collection of resources for technology professionals. We believe that each and every person can make a difference...and we are here to help.

Regardless of the above promise I found myself writing a  passive aggressive letter to dzone.com  concerning their new moderation system and lack of  public accessible content policies.

Hi,

 A few days ago I found a problem with your UI for submiting links I see today that it has been fixed. But now I see that the links that I thought were being blocked by the buggy UI are actually being blocked by a person/moderator, I am curious as to why since the content is geared towards web development and does not meet any of the criteria for rejection list on your website.

    http://blog.fhqk.com/2015/08/non-programmers-guide-to-how-php.html

    http://blog.fhqk.com/2015/08/10-signs-of-horrible-open-source.html

I now see that links from my site are being rejected out of hand without any explanation and taking more than a week to moderate.


    http://blog.fhqk.com/2015/08/is-internet-of-things-really-thing.html

I find this strange since earlier links with content written in the same manner from the same site go through within minutes of submission. So it is my opinion that it is not the site or the content but the moderators that are at fault. Is it they are judging the content on their personal tastes or knowledge? I thought the reasoning behind human interaction was to cut down on spam links. Do your moderators have another agenda? One that is not made public an definitely not one that is fair to all that use dzone. They judge wether content is is of interest to the readers, copy edited and proof-read. Which with at turn around period of a week to rejection it seems that they are doing. Also links a being placed in a permanent rejection pile meaning that if the content was re-written to meet some the non-existent guidelines for content they cannot be re-submitted. It would seem that your moderation team is confused by their roles in the dzone team. Further more I believe that they are showing that they cannot separate the social linking section from dzone the e-zine.

 Previous emails concerning this subject have gone unanswered so I have no idea if you are aware of the situation or even if anyone cares. But most assuredly the current status of Dzone and the changes that have been made. Changes which in my opinion have not made the site better. If there is no response to this letter then my next steps will be to take my concerns to the open forum of the web developer community.Ironically via the very blog in question.

Thanks for listening,

Carl McDade 

I am hoping if given a fair chance that dzone.com will make efforts to rectify or at least give some explanations.This is because it is my understanding that dzone.com is a social linking website but recent behaviors lead me to believe that they have become a site where posted content is up for editorial review. A change that if true has gone unnoticed by myself and others that frequent the website.

This situation surprises and is a bit scary because earlier it was ok to upload links to posts with content that is probably considered controversial in nature even mocking about IT development.

If what I suspect is true then developers have lost another (stackoverflow was the first ), great forum for interaction and help to moderation.




But more on this later as I am anxiously awaiting the answer from them.