Must thank you for your thorough effort.

I’ve had a bit of an odd experience with MSE, too. In my pre-SEO life, I worked at a company that operates in a less-than-stellar industry and some of the MSE community took it upon themselves to slag off the company – insulting all the staff, saying anyone who worked then had low IQ, etc. When I challenged it and asked them to realise that these people simply had mortgages to pay and families to feed, they just got more hostile. I think one even suggested that the employees kill themselves! It was awful. Sorry, I guess I’ve gotten a little off-topic but you reminded me of the experience. It’s just a bit of an odd community, if you ask me – and I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who thinks so!

I also had a very similar (and very frustrating) experience to your TA experience – mine being with The Student Room (another one I mentioned above). It was a few years ago and I’d written a post that would help graduates/students to find more jobs using Google. I setup a new profile in order to share it; something I genuinely thought would help A LOT of people. I got banned, and when I queried it, I got a response saying “sorry, you’re not allowed to advertise on our site.” When I made the point that we weren’t advertising (it wasn’t like a random student was going to hire us for SEO anyway!), they ignored me!

Heh, I guess the above would’ve been better suited as an individual topic for discussion in its own blog post, but I couldn’t help myself. Apologies, Jon!

To bring it back on-topic… I guess if you’re doing this type of content, you might have to do it on a) a community you’re already involved with (especially if you’re after particular data), or b) if it’s a community you don’t know too well (e.g. it’s on behalf of a client) then perhaps write about it elsewhere (and maybe even don’t bring it to the attention of the people involved – unless it’s via Twitter or somewhere more neutral).

It’s weird you mention MSE site though as only last week I had a IRL with other finance sector employees who are equally banned from that site because it follows a extreme exclusionary policy towards brand representation on their site. And I mean disclosing an affiliation with a company in your profile and making a comment on their site, no more than that. What I am trying to say is that not all communities are created equally or policed the same.

With Trip Advisor I had an experience whereby when I posted helpful URLs to the community of visitors who were seeking information about a hotel under construction (travel agents did not have info, booked holiday makers were gagging for it), when doing this using a newish profile associated with a company email (not travel related, but a construction company) the moderators manually removed it several times. Eventually the fan trip advisors members contacted me privately and reposted the all the URLs for all to see and the moderators gave up and my little construction company got a bag load of citation links.

Very nice case study!