what's the point?

Yeah, the fuckers... they totally changed their TOS (or at least started cracking down with it).

There will be other options in the future. We're growing and testing things. Everything has an associated cost. How much have you been paying to use our service?

SH

well i'd be less bitter if my sidebar wasn't blowing up or if you guys were just a tad bit consistent. work on that before adding new features? k? thanks!

Why not just try being less bitter? It might be fun!

Thanks for your insightful comments.

Well, its not really about being bitter is it? Its about levying a fair and even, lets say consistent approach to your users - the main thing people want is ease of use, and textamerica doesnt really deliver this. Secondly, by including in your TOS, that you OWN everything that hits your servers is to marshall cotempt against your own user base.

Mobloggin should be fun your right, but Textamerica has a heavy hand, and in fact, if it wasnt for your attitude to it, we would never have created mobloguk.

Our terms have not said we own images since January. We are a private site. Our terms are very liberal. The agenda here is pretty obvious. [end]

Just the fact that your terms *ever* said that was enough to make me wary of continuing to use your service. I don't think anyone is trying to hide any agenda. Some people didn't like the service you offered, so they created their own where there would be no worry of someone else exerting control over their content. I see no problem in the creators of that service being proud of what they've done. I'm sure you're proud of what's been created at TextAmerica. If you start to see a massive outflux of users (which I somehow doubt will happen), you'll have nothing to blame except your hostile attitude towards your user-base.

Excuse me very much, but current terms and conditions state the following :

14:Textamerica.com may use, sell and/or share with its affiliates any information provided by you on this website, including your name, e-mail address, usage patterns, and uploaded images and text.

17: Textamerica.com and any images and comments on this website are intended for personal use only and may not be used except by Textamerica.com for commercial purposes.

so tell me again that textamerica doesnt have the right to exploit my images commercially and I do?

actual /end. QED.

Another entity, site, person, etc. cannot come to TA, take your image(s) and use them commercially. If you take a picture of the sushi you had for lunch, we want to be able to copy the post to http://sushi.textamerica.com without you going legal on us for doing so. Of course, this only promotes your moblog site, exposing it to far more viewers and does nothing for us but increase our bandwidth usage (we spend money and make none from this) but someone could actually go legal over something like this if our terms of service were not worded to protect us in this way.

We would never be able to prevent you from using your own images for any purpose. Although the wording of #17 above does not include "you" as having the right to use YOUR IMAGES, this should be assumed.

On #14 above, while we don't actually do anything at all with your information at this time, we reserve the right to make money like every other site you visit on the web. Hello?

You are excused (very much). Now I am going to adjust my hostile attitude toward our user base by deleting more pornographic images posted by users who have removed links back to textamerica.com and post rants about us on their blogs about dead topics that make almost no actual difference in anything but the small minds of those ranting.

I only see one person ranting here. Hello? I guess we know who has the small mind.

...yeah, I did post "end" before, didn't I? Well the point is obvious and it is not that TA is bad or wrong in any of this but I never expect some people to acknowledge this, but what's really good about that is that it really doesn't matter. No rant, here. Best wishes.

I just found this thread, (months after it appears to have died) but I have a few things to say.

Initially I loved TA. I still think its a great service, and I've even learned to live with the ads. I understand they need to make money somehow. I have three mobs w/ TA: a personal one, a public one, and one that was sort of a fanmob. Over the past year or so, I've been contacted serveral times (usually by Shawn), concerning my public mob. Being that it is public, people post things on there, and I generally have no control over what they post. The site used to make you approve public postings, but that feature (like oh so many others) seems to come and go. I don't spend 24 hours a day monitoring the page, but if i see something inapproriate I remove it asap. I'm not deliberately setting out to piss off TA. The problem is, I do happen do other things in life, and attitude TA takes when it is contacting me about a problem is generally very hostile, acusational, and threatening. I've actually had my account frozen after 1 attmept to contact me,- i guess i didn't respond fast enough for them, so they froze my account. I don't mean they sent an email and a few days later they froze it, we're talking a few hours. One time they emailed me about an image i had no idea was on there, stating if it wasn't removed they'd suspend my account, so i spent all day trying to find out what the hell they were talking about, because A) they didnt tell me what the image was, B) I didn't see anything suspect. When i finally contacted shawn, he said "I already deleted it. I'm busy, i don't have time to listen to complaints about your mob, if it keeps happening its getting deleted" (paraphrased) It just seems like every contact i have w/ TA is hostile and uncomfortable.

Like i said, I like what site does, but due to the "bully" attitude the folks behind the scenes take with people, or at least me, I've been shopping around, for other options.

Well, let me be the first to recommend you try out MoblogUK. It's a great site run by great people.