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Permalink Reply by Bill Schultz on March 23, 2012 at 2:17pm

Marie, I have Reid Hoffman's email somewhere.  I'll send it to you ion Linkedin.  I'm sure he'd like to know your plight.

 

Marie said she has questions that need to be answered, and they should be.  

FREE MARIE!!!!!!!

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Permalink Reply by Sandra McCartt on March 23, 2012 at 5:24pm

 

Here you go, it will save a few emails.  There is also a whole section in the user agreement that indicates if you send connection requests to people you do not know and they flag them as spam, they will can your spam.  There is also an option to go read the rules again and click that you will follow them and you may be automatically freed.  It appears to me that the restrictions and suspensions are automatically triggered by IDK's and flags of spam not by some moderator.

 

My suggestion is that Marie serve her 30 days of time out for blowing up the rules and don't do it again.  But if Marie keeps sending 50 requests per day to people she doesn't know, particularly IT types, some will flag them as spam and/or hit the decline IDK and she will be back in the pokey for another 30 days or run out of town.  the IT types particularly get a ton of requests about jobs from recruiters and they know exactly what they are doing when they flag as spam or IDK.

Here is the short form from the user agreement, it's a big binding contract that we agree to when we sign up for the service.

"LinkedIn may restrict, suspend or terminate the account of any User who abuses or misuses the Services. Misuse of the Services includes inviting other Users with whom you do not know to connect; abusing the LinkedIn messaging services; creating multiple or false profiles; using the Services commercially without LinkedIn’s authorization, infringing any intellectual property rights, violating any of the Do’s and Don’ts listed in Section 10, or any other behavior that LinkedIn, in its sole discretion, deems contrary to its purpose. In addition, and without limiting the foregoing, LinkedIn has adopted a policy of terminating accounts of Users who, in LinkedIn’s sole discretion, are deemed to be repeat infringers under the United States Copyright Act."

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Permalink Reply by Noel Cocca on March 24, 2012 at 2:32pm

Marie, thank you for this post.  Not everyone knows the ins and outs of Linkedin and this serves as a notification and reminder.  Linkedin has been reshaping how it works and I think we will see more restrictions in the future.  

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Permalink Reply by Sandra McCartt on March 24, 2012 at 11:57pm

Not harsh Marie, just accurate.  My point was that if you are sending 50 requests to connect per day you are probably going to continue to get a lot of IDK's and many people particularly in IT get a ton of them so they have started flagging requests from recruiters they do not know as spam.  You made it clear that you think the rules are ridiculous.  I think it's ridiculous that i can't drive 85 miles an hour down the freeway but guess what the rule is 75 miles an hour so if i break the rule I am going to get a ticket.  If i get several tickets i lose my drivers license.  If you break the rules  on linkedin you get your account suspended.

 

Noel is correct there are going to be more and more restrictions  so if you think the rules are harsh or ridiculous you have the option to find a different free service or pay for a linkedin account or just take it offline.

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Permalink Reply by Sandra McCartt on March 25, 2012 at 2:33pm

We can only respond to the information we are given. In an earlier comment you stated that you need to send out "50 messages a day and that is the low end."

If you have had your account restricted both paid and free I think it would be safe to assume that you have been warned and have ignored the warnings. Now your account has been suspended.

It seems to me that you want LinkedIn to do more than publish dos and don'ts , terms of service, help center etc. etc. so people that you send a request to connect to that you do not know will not click "I don 't know" and cause you a problem. I realize your LinkedIn account is important to you as you indicate in your headline that you have over 4500 connections. If a service is that important to any of us it would seem prudent to make every effort to know what actions we might take that would cause our accounts to be restricted or suspended.

With a worldwide membership of 150 million members and total number of employees worldwide just over 2000 expectations of fast customer service might not be a reasonable expectation. Perhaps they should beef up customer service. They made 522 million last year so about 3bucks per member before tax and g&a.

I am not trying to indicte you or cast aspersions on what you do or how you use a web service but if the purpose of your post was informational let's be informational and not confrontational.
If any of us send a lot of requests to connect to people we don't know it only takes 5 -7 IDK's to automatically trigger a warning or a restriction. If any of us view a large number of profiles a day it will automatically trigger a restriction to keep bots from downloading profiles. One of the latest red flags is we can only have our names in our headlines. If we have our name +lion/xnumber of connections/email it will trigger a suspension.

If we don't want to read and abide by the rules, then google "my LinkedIn account is suspended" a fast way to find out what will get us suspended and what to do about it.

My take is we all have to be responsible for our own actions. If you didn't break any of the rules, didn't get any warnings, read the rules and have followed them, you certainly have a bitch and I will be the first one to help you scream to the heavens. If that is not the case, well.. I will rest my case. When I got the warning my account was nearing the threshold of IDK's I sort of figured they just might be serious about that stuff so paid account notwithstanding, I cut that out. My account is important to me too.


LinkedIn has 150 million members worldwide

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Permalink Reply by Russ Cole on March 25, 2012 at 7:41pm

I recently got 2 "you are reaching your idk limit" messages, and being green at LinkedIn, continued inviting folks, not knowing what the warnings really meant.  then I got a message which said either click the "I agree" button to stop inviting people and keep your account, and if you don't your account will be closed.  So now I pick and choose who I invite and always send a personalized message explaining why I am inviting them to connect and giving them and out.  Like you Marie, I find it ironic that LinkedIn actively promotes a culture of "get more connections", pushing new connections at every turn, and then expects you to have personally met each one of 5,000 connections?  huh?  So, I have recently upgraded my account, thanks to my employer, and can utilize in-mail when necessary, and the search function is so much better and effective at identifying possible connections with the most relevant experience. 

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