Probably the #1 complaint I’ve heard over the years about Wealthy Affiliate is from people that get “blocked” from communicating with other members. If you have had your write access removed from Wealthy Affiliate then this post is for you! In this post I’d like to address WHY you might have had some privileges suspended and how you can get them back.

Maybe It Was A Mistake!

There’s a distinct possibility you didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t know, but I’m assuming that if too many people marked that “spam” button for whatever reason, your write access might have been revoked automatically, by an algorithm.

WHY your activity was marked as spam we’ll discuss below, but for now, if you really can’t imagine what you did wrong just assume it was a mistake. Contact Kyle (I’ll give you a link at the end of the article), and let him know your username, and that you had your write-access removed but you don’t know why.

BE PATIENT when waiting for a response. Kyle reads all his emails, but sending 6 emails over the course of 24 hours will not help your situation.

• Before you do that though, let’s brainstorm what might have gone wrong.
• Did you have an argument with someone in live chat or in the comment area?
• Did you post a link to an outside website that may have been considered spam?
• Did you post a link to your own website which may have been mistaken as self-promotion or attempting to generate traffic/sales from the community?
• Did you post a rant or use profane language?

If not, again. Chill for a bit and this will get solved. You can also continue to work on your website and move through the training! Remember, you weren’t banned from Wealthy Affiliate. You have just lost the ability to communicate with other members for now, but all other features are still available.

Reasons Your Account Might Have Been Locked

I touched on the basic subjects above, but want to dig in a bit deeper so you understand the reasons why people get their write access removed from the community. Understand though, that I am not an owner, and do not have any inside knowledge into this stuff, so am just giving my opinion based on the official rules and my own personal experiences.

Rants!!!!!1!!!!!11

Rants are OK! It’s fine to be frustrated and to write about your experiences in your Wealthy Affiliate blog. However, when you start using abusive language, or target specific people then you start to cross the line.

WA is a family-friendly, positive zone. You don’t have to blow sunshine up people’s butts 24/7 but treat it like a workplace, not the bar.

Personal Attacks

This isn’t YouTube, so chill out on the insults. If you say anything racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever other anti-type-of-person thing you can think of you are probably going to have problems.

If you have an argument with someone over something, know where to draw the line. It’s totally fine to have some discussions and have different opinions. It’s even OK to be passionate about your viewpoints. But know where to cut it off and agree to disagree.

Spam & Solicitation

The #1 reason people get write-access removed is for spam. Spam can be intentional or unintentional, and there are a lot of things which can fall under the umbrella of spam.

Most of the time people have issues with posting affiliate links to products or services. INTENT is everything in my opinion. If you have a legitimate question about whether or not a company is legit or have a question about how they set up their website because you want to do something similar, then go ahead and post the link! Just be up front that this is not a solicitation and 100% clear what you need to know or want to share about the website.

Recruiting is not accepted in any form or fashion. You should even be careful about linking to things like email lists which offer “free reports” or courses because those are used to promote products.

It’s not even acceptable to promote plugins, themes, or other website software via your affiliate links. If you have a genuine recommendation, that’s fine. I recommend Studiopress themes all the time. But I don’t use my affiliate link, and I don’t tell people this stuff unless they specifically are looking for that type of information.

Trying to drive traffic to your website can also be considered spam. Again, intent is important. If you are looking for feedback or help, that’s great! This is what the community is for. If your intent is just to boost traffic to your site or try to sell stuff to WA members then that’s a no-no.

Do you think this is the reason you got privileges revoked? It’s not the end of the world. After you get community access restored just me clearer next time about your intentions of posting the link.

Posting Political or Religious Content

This one is pretty simple. No one wants to hear about your relationship with Jesus or your stance on Obamacare. This is an online business community. It is OK to post personal stuff as it relates to your business, and to be fair, a lot of non-business related stuff is discussed on the site.

Personally, I try to focus just on online business related topics or personal topics in relation to my business. Other folks may lean more towards the personal side of things. Just try not to lean too far.

Once you start posting political or religious content however, you have already crossed the line. Then, it’s not about what’s OK or not OK to post, it’s about what content is caught by moderators and what isn’t.

‘Rallying The Troops’ For A Mob

I see this from time to time where someone gets it in their head that they want to rally the troops for some kind of anti-WA mob. For example, someone tried to prove once that no one at WA was making money. Another time a guy tried to prove that Kyle and Carson were scammers. Once in a while someone gets it into their head that the only people earning from their websites were the ones promoting WA.

All of these are false. Posting a blog about it INSIDE Wealthy Affiliate is pretty dumb, because it’s going to get deleted and get your account blocked.

I mean, would you walk into an Apple store and start shouting that Steve Jobs was an A-Hole and that Apple is a scam company because they pay Chinese manufacturers low wages?! (These are views that some people really do hold)

NO! They would kick you out!

So why would you sign up for a company then try to publicly slander them on their own platform? Doesn’t make sense.

How To Deal With Getting Write Access Removed

This is where people usually lose the plot, and in part this is what inspired this post.

When people get their write-access revoked, they FREAK OUT. I guess that means they really enjoyed WA to being with because they can’t seem to live without the ability to communicate with other members.

Actually, I think mostly they are insulted and frustrated by realizing that they are not in full control. I have a high rank in WA due to the amount of training I create and time I spend answering questions, so somehow, that makes me a target for frustrated folks to send me emails and their complaints.

Despite what some may think, I’m just a regular member and have no ability to remove or reinstate your access, so making me the go-between or assigning me the task of figuring out what’s wrong with your account is not something I do. Sorry.

However, I have some steps you can take to work on getting your write access given back to you and full account restored!

1. Be An Adult

Yes, this is meant to be a bit of a smart-ass response, but this is something you really need to have sink into your head.

How old are you?

Are you really going to send email ranting and raving because a freakin’ website won’t let you talk to other members or post blogs? Take a chill pill, man.

The more you rant and rave, the more you are going to look like a crazy person. Take a deep breath, realize that insulting people or making empty threats is not going to help the situation.

It’s like grabbing someone’s arm when they won’t listen to you. Do you really think that’s going to help?

2. Realize This Is NOT America

American’s forget that ‘free speech’ is not as all encompassing as they might want it to be. Wealthy Affiliate is not a country, and does not have a bill of rights or constitution. It’s a company.

And like any other company, if you break the rules, intentionally or unintentionally, they have every right to kick you out.

No, it’s not a human rights violation to do so, as one person that emailed me recently.

There are many laws which restrict what you can say based on the situation, yes, even in good old ‘Murica. Free speech is not the ability to say whatever you want, wherever you want. Here is the definition, including situations where your freedom can be restricted, and why.

Freedom of Speech: To express beliefs and ideas without unwarranted government restriction.

A business is not a government. But that’s not even the point. It is NOT your god-given right to say whatever the hell you want. Go ahead and try that in any public place and see how people react. Wealthy Affiliate is a place of education and place of business, so the rules are no different.

Even talking about the internet in general, people get banned from stuff all the time. Actually, if you are banned from a forum, many times they will ban your entire IP address, meaning you can’t even access the website! You can also have your YouTube account banned, and even have your Gmail access revoked if you break their Terms of Service.

In case you were wonder, here are the Terms of Services you agreed to when creating your account at WA.

NOTICE

Article 2.3 lists a bunch of stuff that WA is required to do for you as a service that you signed up for. These are listed in the (i), (ii), etc. They are no longer required to do these things if you break the rules which includes, and then a bunch of stuff is listed as (a), (b), etc.

They also clearly state in article 2.5 they can suspend your access due to abusive practices.

2.5 Fair Use Policy. Wealthy Affiliate may suspend your access to the Services for abusive practices that degrade the performance of the Services for you and/or other customers of Wealthy Affiliate.

3. Contact The Owners

Ok, now that you’re calm, and are ready to deal with the situation in a cool, collected manner, contact the owners.

Here’s the link: http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com/contact

Just send them an email with your username and email address. Let them know that you had write access removed, and would like it back. If you know why it was removed, explain what happened. If you don’t know why, you can say that too.

My suggestion is do not DEMAND anything. Whether or not you were in the wrong, consider that it’s in your best interest to just ask nicely.

Ok. Now you’re done. Depending on how egregious your infraction was, full access may be restored quite quickly. I have seen some people I personally would like permanently removed from the community come back with full access, so anything is possible if you are just polite and patient.

4. Keep Working On Your Business

You still have access to a lot of things, so what are you so butthurt about? You can still access your websites. You can still participate in live trainings. You can still go through your regular training, and post content to your website.

Actually, maybe this can serve as a wakeup call to getting rolling on your business. Instead of spending so much time in the community jibber-jabbing about stuff, why not post some content to your website?

Some Other Things To Consider

After writing this post, I have been contacted by quite a few other members inside the community who expressed their appreciation and agreement with some of the things I've said here. I just want to make the point that the whole WA community enjoys having a spam free, family-friendly zone to learn about online marketing. You may think it's unfair what happened to you, but consider the fact that people who pay to be a part of this community are actually happy to have a filter that keeps out some of the junk you find in other places like the Warrior Forum, BlackHatWorld, and DigitalPoint.

The one part I kind of disagree with regarding this whole situation is that when you are blocked, you also lose the ability to contact hosting support. If your website goes down for some reason, you're essentially in a complete blackout. I don't really think that is fair, since if you plan to use WA's training and resources to build your business even with limited access to the site, hosting functionality is important.

So far that reason, if you are my referral, I'll still try to help out as much as possible via email until you get your access to hosting support restored. If you are not my referral, you will just have to make the decision to either start paying for outside hosting and still use the training resources in WA, or wait it out and hope for the best. If you are building a business, an extra $100/year or whatever it costs for a cheap hosting package isn't that bad.

Worst Case Scenario

I realize that by now, I probably haven’t convinced that you did any wrong. Maybe you didn't! Not everything I said in this post will apply to you, and I'm just offering ideas of why this might have happened.

But to be perfectly honest, from what I’ve seen, most of the people that have been suspended deserved it (most, not all). This is often proven by the tirade that follows of angry emails and irate blog posts calling Wealthy Affiliate a scam or ripoff.

My question at this point is, “What’s the big deal?” If you really are that pissed off, then just move your website to another host and be done with it. If you dislike WA so much now, there’s nothing stopping you from getting your training, hosting, and support somewhere else.

But if you truly value the community and what they offer, then just admit that somewhere along the way you broke the rules and try better to not do it next time. No big deal right? No reason to cut your nose to spite your face here.

Here's a personal story that happened to me a few years ago:

Back in the day the training used to have us post articles to Street Articles for backlinks and as a traffic source.

I posted articles every day to about 10+ websites that I owned at the time. Then, one day, I discovered a popup that would improve my opt-in rates for list building. I installed it on all 10 websites at once.

All of a sudden, I started getting error notifications from Street Articles that my article wasn’t approved because I linked to a site with a popup. I didn’t know that was against the rules!

The trouble was that I had 10 articles going to 10 websites, so in the span of 2 days I had 10+ violations. I then got a personal note from the moderators that one more violation would cause not only my access to be revoked, but all of my 200+ articles that were already published would be removed too!

I freaked.

I stopped publishing any articles and contacted Kyle to complain that I didn’t know I broke the rules and bla bla bla. It took him a while to respond, but he eventually did, and just told me to be more careful next time, as it was a rule they were strict about for quality reasons.

I slowly started publishing again, very carefully, and never had an issue again. End of story.

I broke the rules. I apologized. Then I manned up, and kept building my business. Will you do the same?

A Postive Outcome

Recently, another member posted a blog within the community which she thought was totally fine…but turned out not to be. She discovered one morning that she was unable to write comments and respond to people on the blog!

A few days later, here was her response in a new blog post (access restored!)

Notice a few things:

• She admits breaking the rules even if by mistake
• The owners responded personally via email
• They only deleted the offending post, and restored everything else in just a few days

Simple! This is an excellent example of how someone had an issue, dealt with it positively, and moved on.

Related to this situation, I found this comment from Carson, one of the owners. Read it and see if it makes sense to you. I think it explains a lot!

Also, this is some insight to understand that just because the message you get says that your access was revoked by “admin” it doesn't necessarily mean that it was one person who made the decision. It may have been a community decision…or perhaps 10 people in league as part of a conspiracy theory? J/K lol

Invitation for Comments

I realize that some of you are going to want to vent a bit after reading this article. That’s fine. I’ll open up the comment area to post your thoughts. However, I have my own rules that you must adhere by because this is my website.

• #1 Rule: Do not use abusive language
• #2 Rule: Don’t shoot the messenger (me)
• #3 Rule: Know when to quit. I’m not going to go 10 rounds with you over and over again discussing the same topic. If I feel your comments turn from discussing to harassment, I will start blocking you.

So, what's on your mind?