Update: Xanga Responds, Sort Of…

By Jonathan Bailey • Apr 7th, 2006 • Category: Articles, Personal Experiences, Villains

Previously I reported on Xanga’s abysmal handling of copyright complaints and stonewalling of copyright holders. Today, April 7, I got my first reply back from Xanga and was shocked at what I found.

The message was a reply back to the follow up letter I had sent on March 22. The letter, which is already over two weeks old, was a follow up to the five DMCA notices sent a week before that and said, in part:

"On March 16th I filed five DMCA notices using your abuse form on your site…. As of this writing, I have not heard back regarding these notices and the infringing works are still up. I am seeking a place to submit my DMCA notices and hope that you will inform me of what it is that I need to do to get these matters resolved"

Xanga’s response to this fifteen-day old letter was not to send me an email answering my questions or explaining the situation. It was to send me an autoreply.

The first few lines of their reply, dated April 7, says it all:

"Thanks for your email about Safety and Abuse on Xanga! We get so many replies to this address, we decided to write up an autoreply to cover the most Frequently Asked Questions."

The rest of the email goes on to list addresses to the various FAQs, which I have already poured over many times before and found to be of no use.

So now, after nearly a month of trying to work with Xanga, the only reply I’ve gotten is a useless autoreply to a two-week old message. Needless to say that I am not amused nor am I satisfied. If anything, I have taken this as an additional slap in the face.

I am continuing work on my letter to them, which will be ailed Monday. I will be sure to post again and let everyone know the reply that it gets, if any.

If there were a ranking lower than "Villain" on my scale, I’d be working to put Xanga in it.  

[tags]Plagiarism, Content Theft, Copyright Infringement, DMCA, Xanga, Villains[/tags] 

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Short URL to this Post: http://copybyte.com/z/5m

Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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  • I'm sorry to hear that this is still happening. I've also found, as you mentioned in your previous post, that Xanga blogs take a long time to be indexed by Google and usually don't rank very well. Perhaps there's a reason for this.

    I've got a blog on their servers, and I get the impression from my experience there that the company may be in some financial trouble. They've recently put new, quite large, ads at the top of the free blogs, and apologized for these ads by saying that they need more money to support the company. The free accounts also don't have much control over the templates. Even the paid Premium accounts don't offer as much template control as Blogger.

    The main reason I've stayed with Xanga is their well-constructed community-building system. I stopped using my account in February, though, since the search engine rankings are so dismal.
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