Dear BHW sellers, stop doing this

Hi all,

I am not sure if this is the right place to post this but, here we go.

It's getting a bit annoying now. 3rd time this month I get contacted via Skype without asking and people are pitching their SEO services. I know they sell here (their Skype name is giving it away and it's not hard to find out after doing some digging).

If I never asked you to contact me, please don't. I am sure other members also get contacted. Why am I not going to buy from you if you contact me without my permission?

Simply because your service is probably not selling enough. In my eyes, if you have to bindly contact people to sell your shit, your service is probably not selling well (because it sucks??). If your service was selling well, you wouldn't have time to hunt buyers/potential buyers.

Yeah, hate when people contact me on skype offering services. I will never work with anybody who does that.

Is it random people or people who's already on your contact list? If it's in the message you receive when they want to be added, just block them.

3rd time this month, so you get 1/week roughly. It's not that bad, that you can't keep up with blocking them. Honestly i can't see any chance for this to be changed, if you share your Skype publicly.

If you've not posted in WTB/HAF, then I would say they are breaking the forum rules:

3.6 Advertising to, or solicitation of, any member to buy or sell any products or services through the unauthorized or impermissible use of the Site such as PM solicitation. (Note: If you have something you want to sell on this forum, post it in the For Sale section).

They know that if they do it via PM, they will get an infraction so they are circumventing that rule and using your Skype address.

I don't think it's acceptable for Market Place sellers to scrape Skype addresses on BHW then spam their services.

@BassTrackerBoats @Apricot

HoNeYBiRD said:

Is it random people or people who's already on your contact list? If it's in the message you receive when they want to be added, just block them.

3rd time this month, so you get 1/week roughly. It's not that bad, that you can't keep up with blocking them. Honestly i can't see any chance for this to be changed, if you share your Skype publicly.

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You don't have to share it publicly.
That's the problem.
Some sellers here apparently share their skype lists with other sellers here.
I've had a few sellers here message me when there is no way they could have ever gotten my skype legitimately.

Soucha said:

You don't have to share it publicly.
That's the problem.
Some sellers here apparently share their skype lists with other sellers here.
I've had a few sellers here message me when there is no way they could have ever gotten my skype legitimately.

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Guys, report them - Simple.

I've had 3 people email me on a dedicated email used just for here, promoting seo services and linking back.

Also, another thing that used to be a bit annoying - after buying service, they keep your either PP or report email and then spam with their discount. I mean, it's fine to announce promos and stuff but I also want opt-in box where I check it if I want to get news from you ... also, unsubscribe button is also desired. Now there are some sellers that still email me and there is no way to unsubscribe unless you email them ... and it does not always work. Lucky, I don't get this too often anymore ... probably because of GDPR or something.

mzonas said:

Also, another thing that used to be a bit annoying - after buying service, they keep your either PP or report email and then spam with their discount. I mean, it's fine to announce promos and stuff but I also want opt-in box where I check it if I want to get news from you ... also, unsubscribe button is also desired. Now there are some sellers that still email me and there is no way to unsubscribe unless you email them ... and it does not always work. Lucky, I don't get this too often anymore ... probably because of GDPR or something.

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I mark them as spam afterwards, so I never see it

MisterF said:

Guys, report them - Simple.

I've had 3 people email me on a dedicated email used just for here, promoting seo services and linking back.

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Why would you use a dedicated email in a public forum dude? You know there are people that can scrape details anytime.

Sephrata said:

I don't think it's acceptable for Market Place sellers to scrape Skype addresses on BHW then spam their services.

@BassTrackerBoats @Apricot

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Not much we can do if someone scrapes Skypes/emails from the site and tries to sell... we can only control what happens on BHW to a certain extent.

Not getting political but in the States if you put yourself out in public you can be filmed legally and if you put your Skype/email on a public forum you are going to be a market target. In fact there is a shitlist thread in queue that @MisterF and I are working with where the guy had his skype out there, was contacted by a guy who does not have an upgraded membership and got ripped off for over a grand.

We cannot trespass the eyes/scrapers.

mzonas said:

Also, another thing that used to be a bit annoying - after buying service, they keep your either PP or report email and then spam with their discount. I mean, it's fine to announce promos and stuff but I also want opt-in box where I check it if I want to get news from you ... also, unsubscribe button is also desired. Now there are some sellers that still email me and there is no way to unsubscribe unless you email them ... and it does not always work. Lucky, I don't get this too often anymore ... probably because of GDPR or something.

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That bothers me as well and if a guys does not have something like I use on all my sites as indicated below I let them know that I do not want future mailings after the order process and before I am a target.

EternalFun said:

Why would you use a dedicated email in a public forum dude? You know there are people that can scrape details anytime.

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I mean it's a free email that I only use on this forum.

EternalFun said:

Why would you use a dedicated email on a public forum dude? You know there are people that can scrape details anytime.

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Really? You've answered your own question

MisterF said:

I mean it's a free email that I only use on this forum.

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Oh, I see. When you said dedicated, I assumed dedicated biz email for this forum. My bad.

And speaking of scraping, many new advanced scrapers are being made almost quite often. I hope this scraping thing comes to an end for good.

One of the reasons why I'm not using Skype for about probably 8 or 9 years already.

You are right if their service good enough they weren't going to spam people on Skype or emails. Good service sells itself easily, and if people need you they will search for you.

Soucha said:

You don't have to share it publicly.
That's the problem.
Some sellers here apparently share their skype lists with other sellers here.
I've had a few sellers here message me when there is no way they could have ever gotten my skype legitimately.

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That's true, but both OP's Skype and email address is in the open on his website, publicly available, it's out of the hands of BHW entirely. Even worse, none of them is protected from crawlers, when it's literally a few clicks and you can make them into an image or there are plugins to deal with the obfuscation.

Is it really that bad, if you receive one of these spam messages per week? If it is, you might be in the wrong line of business. If you receive a couple of them per day, that's when i can imagine, it gets really annoying. It can act as a layer of protection, if you share your Skype, email address with your buyers exclusively and have only a contact form on your website for queries, like the OP has that too.

Spamming the PayPal email is another issue, fully working preemptive solution to that is similarly non-existent, other than marking them as spam after the fact, if they manage to hit the inbox at all. There's a cool plugin for pretty much any inbox called unroll.me, if you unroll messages from a specific sender, that removes every future message from that sender from the inbox right in the moment it arrives, it goes into the trash (where it's still available for a month), regardless whether there's an unsubscribe option or no. If there's no unsubscribe option or it doesn't seem to have any effect and they keep hitting the inbox, it's a pretty neat tool to keep your inbox clean.

If you want a somewhat spam-free environment for yourself, there are things you can do besides just expecting others not to spam you.

What's your skype?
Just kidding...

After you buy some expensive SEO packages, your skype messenger will be full with guys asking to buy his service. At least it is for me. Hate that they do it. I like how some guys have started to send emails with discounts like once per month.

Have never been skyped but am aware of emails from here with people selling even when am not interested