Sunday, June 20, 2010

Vending Machine - Part II

Back on April 4th I attempted to deactivate my phillipthe2 account on deviantART, but was met with the standard "You are not allowed to access this part of deviantART because you are banned".  Naturally, I contacted DA support the same day....and waited.....and waited....and waited....

So, flash forward three months....yes, you read that correctly, three months....I finally get a response from them:


spinegrinder, Jun 15 12:43 pm (PDT): 
 Hello phillipthe2,
Since your account is banned, it cannot also be deactivated. If there's any material you wish to remove from this account, you will have to do so manually. :)
Kind regards,
Oliver
---
Oliver Rohrwild
deviantART, Inc.

Uh-huh.  So, it took them 100+ days to not only tell me what I already know, but also to inform me of something that I accomplished nine months ago.  Wow.  That's....incomprehensible actually.


I've been told that DA's support staff is comprised mostly of unpaid volunteers....we're talking roughly 98% here.  Logically, the remaining 2% are paid managers.  Now, personally, I've done unpaid volunteer work on an as-needed basis for the American Red Cross for some ten years now....they call (usually after a major storm / hurricane) and I work.  In a previous life I worked as an full-time (paid) Animal Control Officer for four years, dealing with countless volunteer workers.  I can assure you that if any of their part-time unpaid support personnel didn't at least ATTEMPT to contact a customer within 72 hours, then the line from "There's Something About Mary" applies:

Hitchiker: Step into my office.
Ted: Why?
Hitchiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!

2 comments:

  1. DA is just a fuckig joke, they're a corporation, but want their users to believe they are a community of volunteers. If I were in your situation and had the money, I'd hire a lawyer and sue them into oblivion. They're obviously still making money off of your work through ads and click traffic, but refuse to let you exercise control over it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Raptor:
    No, I came to the realization that they were going to continue to make money on my stuff when I got the boot last year....and then made a point of removing every single work I had on there. They still get a few click-throughs, but that's just from Google Image searches. I made also made a point of adding my blog url on the old DA page....sort of a last "fuck you" from me to them.

    Financially, I'm in no position to get all law suit happy, but honestly I'm rather surprised i haven't seen (or heard of) any class-action suits against them. It's shit like this that'll get them in trouble...a direct quote from their Terms of Service:

    "deviantART does not claim ownership rights in Your Content. For the sole purpose of enabling us to make your Content available through the Service, you grant to deviantART a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, distribute, re-format, store, prepare derivative works based on, and publicly display and perform Your Content."

    ReplyDelete