flickr: Free Accounts Crippled by Anti-Social Features [UPDATED]

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flickr troublemaker virtually admits to being the cause of my second accout deletion

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uploaded by dysamoria

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In my current, third, account at flickr, i was re-friending all my previous friends from my original pro account. i was sending them emails about what happened (mere links to here, actually). Then i got smacked with an "anti-spam" mechanism.

hmmm...

One of my friends emailed me (one of the friends i could not email). Like everyone else, she thought i had just deleted my own account and moved on away from flickr. When i tried to REPLY to her email... i got smacked with THE SAME "anti-spam" message.

"Bonk! You've hit a limit of having a new, free account.

To protect the Flickr community against FlickrMail spam, we place a
limit on the number of people you can send a message to when you have a
brand new free account.

Fear not! You can still write to the 10 people you've already sent
FlickrMail to. (We presume you know them, or like them, and are not
being spammy.)

You can also remove this limit immediately by upgrading your account. If you're not ready to do that yet, that's totally cool - all you have to do is hang tight for a week.

Would you be interested to upload some photos while you wait?"

Ten emails a week? This never happened to me when i started back in 2006, prior to being gifted a Pro account. What gives?

NO, i would NOT like to "upgrade" my account. They still OWE me a pro account until June 2008 (which i paid for, which was deleted September 7th 2007 because i defended a friend and myself against dave sewell and flickr censorship). Why in the world would i want to give them money?

And, NO, i am NOT interested in uploading any photos "while i wait" because my account is NIPSAd (again, for NO GOOD REASON!). No one can see my images unless they are marked as a friend. What's the point?

The point of the NIPSA, as far as flickr is concerned, is that they are censoring my "flickr hates me" image. They don't want the public seeing it. There's no other possible explanation.

Flickr: the anti-social photo censoring un-community!

P.S.: apparently buying a pro account allows you to be a spammer!

UPDATE: i went to Kaitlin's flickr pages and decided to look around and leave some nice or fun comments like a friendly person does... like i did when i originally started at flickr, which lead to meeting interesting people... Just now i got the following when trying to post a comment:

You're posting a lot of comments! To make sure you're a nice, well-behaved human and not a spammy bot, please enter the text 'ton stopped' in the box below.

So i did as instructed. But notice, the instructions stop short of telling you what to do NEXT? i didn't know what else to do, so i clicked on submit comment, since there were only two buttons and they were both for comment submission, which i was ALREADY FINISHED WITH. i was met with the "An empty comment box? That wont work!" which i remember and used to find funny... and this:

You're posting a lot of comments! To make sure you're a nice, well-behaved human and not a spammy bot, please enter the text 'corn ten' in the box below.

This time, i entered the text and pressed the "Enter" key instead of clicking on things. The same thing happened, but the threat/instruction didn't reappear. Did i do the right thing? i haven't tried to post again just yet. i had to report on this stu....

Response to flickr:

This is STUPID. You KNOW that it's as easy as "block this person" to eliminate spammers or obnoxious people. This is just a stupid, mindless and half baked (especially) automatic system you've put in place to solve a problem that does not exist. When are you going to do something about the harassment, intimidation and falsification of your OWN behavior and the abuse my flickr friends are getting at the hands of dave sewell via some as yet unknown flickr trick that is hacking their accounts or somehow getting them sent threatening messages from other flickr users they don't know (different people, exact same wording). This is worth posting a separate article about, but i don't have all the details yet and the investigation could be hampered by publicizing what i know. Granted, i don't think the person doing it cares.

What ya gonna do 'bout that lot, flickr folks???