So, we're spammers, eh?
There's nothing like get nailed for having good intentions.
I got an e-mail the other day from a reader who was blocked from visiting OnMilwaukee.com because his corporate firewall used a product called siteadvisor.com to determine which sites are work-friendly. Apparently, siteadvisor.com, a McAfee product, has deemed OnMilwaukee.com as "somewhat spammy."
Awhile ago our "e-mail this to a friend" feature had a bug in it. This bug would randomly cause some people to get many identical e-mails over and over. It was a tough bug to fix but we eventually re-wrote the whole system to take care of it.
Unfortunately, there's no way to change that rating on siteadvisor.com. There's a link for the owner of the site to leave a comment defending his or her Web site, but that doesn't resolve the problem. It also doesn't update the rating once the problem was rectified (in our case, months ago).
Quite literally, this Web site is interfering with our business operations, since we rely on visitors to drive page views that display ads. If it's not illegal, it's certainly unethical to brand us like this. We don't serve funky cookies, we don't display third-party pop-ups or pop-unders anymore, and most importantly, we NEVER send spam.
That's not to say we don't send e-mail to our nearly 38,000 registered users. But they must double opt in for newsletters like the Weekend Preview, Daily Digest, Sports Digest, Movie Newsletter, Movie Update and Kids & Family Roundup. They opt out with a single click of "unsubscribe" at the bottom of every newsletter. This couldn't be anything farther from spam.
But apparently, it took just one surly user, "GrandpaShaggy," to make us "somewhat spammy." Gramps, apparently, has posted 46 other ratings on Web sites, from porn sites to MSN. He seems to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, or at the very least not very Web-savvy, for if he thinks we "ettempted [sic] to place 99 cookies" on his machine, he's just plain wrong.
What can you do? Post your own comment at this disturbing Web site, letting other users know that we're not spammers -- we're just trying to tell great Milwaukee stories to our 1.2 million monthly readers.
If you like getting the Weekend Preview and our other great free offerings, please do chime in. Because if siteadvisor gets its way, you may find yourself blocked from OnMilwaukee.com in the future.
As always, thanks for your support.
Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.
Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.
Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.
