Suspicious Activity!

No Solicitations, Please.

Section: 

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to give folks a friendly head's up since this is the second time in the last several months that long-time community members have been solicited to post sponsored content on the site.

GWJ is essentially an online co-op space that is ad-free by design. We do not accept paid postings for this site. We do not take money for ads or sponsored articles.

Many of you flag coffee grinder posts that are fake comments with links to product sites so we can delete those posts and zap the accounts (thank you so, so much! It's truly appreciated, please continue). We ignore/decline dozens of daily solicitations that roll through the gamerswithjobs.com email addresses for the same reason. Even if we don't reply or acknowledge, we do see them.

It might be possible that community members are being mistaken for site admins, and these solicitations are a simple error. However, if someone has reached out to you with an offer to pay you to put threads, articles, or other content on gamerswithjobs.com as a user, please feel free to forward it to me (amanda at gamerswithjobs.com), and I can respond to it directly. You can also politely invite them to leave you alone.

If you are a known and established forum member and start posting paid links and adverts on our site, it's likely your fellow gwjers will flag your post out of concern that your account was hacked. It's just as likely that we'll remove the posts, lock your account, figure out what occurred, and get it back to you. If it turns out you've been accepting money to create posts, your account will remain locked.

If someone has been soliciting you, there's a decent chance they've already tried reaching out to us. If you're willing to share anything you've been solicited for, we'd appreciate hearing about it so we can keep track. This would also help us share our experiences with other communities so they can be on their guard or get an idea of what's going on if they're experiencing something similar.

All the love and thanks as always!
A

Comments

I will pay you $20 to let me post stupid sh*t on the front page.

It never occurred to me that my GWJ habit these last 15 years might one day reap financial rewards.

From now on members of the GWJ strategy club can bribe me to select the next game. Bidding starts at $1000 - I want the big Roblox streamer money.

*Legion* wrote:

I will pay you $20 to let me post stupid sh*t on the front page.

Honey, I already let you do that for free.

Unlurking just to approve this message.

That is an odd strategy from marketing to get the juicy SEO.

anyway...

Have you heard about RAID shadow legends?

Huh.

I’m surprised that after all these years, there is so little marketing spam that finds its way here - and so deeply grateful. Thanks to everyone who makes it happen.

Amoebic wrote:

I just wanted to give folks a friendly head's up since this is the second time in the last several months that long-time community members have been solicited to post sponsored content on the site.

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/Ces0zM8hZErBK/giphy.gif)

Genuinely surprised. And dismayed.

trueheart78 wrote:

Genuinely surprised. And dismayed.

There's still potentially room for an honest mistake, so I'm not wanting to name and shame at this time. (I work in marketing, I know how these types of marketing blasts happen). However, if folks speak up about receiving solicitations from any reps, I'll be more likely to share the names of the folks and their businesses so we can inform others of these kinds of tactics.

I sent a clear and professional message to the media rep to never contact us or our community again by replying to one of the messages from them that I ignored before they contacted the most recent gwj'er a few weeks later (also forwarding a copy of the email sent to the gwjer). So they had a point of contact that was correct before they started hitting up someone's gmail with a similar message, but decided to choose chaos instead? It seemed like a desperate move.

If anyone else has been contacted in this way, please shoot me a DM. Repeat occurrences speak to intentionality.