Hey there I'm Robert MacEwan the author of Ideal Absolutes. If you're new to macewan.org, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.

In my previous post I ranted on Izea’s decision to create a new forum. I see now that I was incorrect and would like to apologize to Ted & his crew at Izea. I stand by the forum posties.us because it represents a counter balance of sorts not only for the posties of Izea’s PayPerPost but for the Smorty Posties, LoudLaunch Posties, ReviewMe Posties, Sponsored Review Posties and others to follow. The posties.us forum was never meant to bash Izea. Instead we hoped that it could serve the purpose of neutral territory where all posties were involved in the governing of our community. Below is Ted’s response to my previous rant.

The decision to disallow advertising of Posties.us through the PayPerPost system has nothing to do with censorship. The fact is that you have created a forum designed to directly compete with the board that we operate as a company. This causes confusion of the behalf of Posties and creates additional challenges for our customer love team. We do our best to answer concerns and listen to feedback. The existence of two boards makes this process extremely inefficient and fragmented. It also disrupts and creates cliques in our community which I am not in favor of.

You are more than welcome to create whatever site you like. However, just because you create a site doesn’t mean we have to provide a conduit to promote it.

I believe that we are one of the most open companies on the Internet today. We invite our customers to participate in conversations on our boards, blog and in town hall meetings. We show you what happens behind the scenes in RockStartup and have an open door policy to visit our office. Many Posties have my cell phone number, email address and IM. 1/5 of our staff is dedicated to Customer Love and education. We have invested heavily in monitoring, quantifying and acting on customer feedback. To suggest that we don’t care or ignore calls for help isn’t really a fair statement.

While there have been some isolated incidents of over-zealous moderation on the boards which I fully acknowledge, as a company I would say we do a pretty good job of listening to our customers and allowing open conversation. In fact, the majority of complaints that we receive on the boards are not about IZEA team members, rather they are about other members of the boards that we do not employ.

Still, there is room for improvement and we are making changes to the boards to address concerns that you and others have voiced.

Ted Murphy