One of the Top 5 Social bookmarking website - Stumble Upon a website which offers you to Connect, Meet and Share, has now started banning all the websites which are trading in exchanging votes/ stumbles etc. I just found that they have banned http://suexchange.com/ from stumble upon now because they mainly deal in stumble exchanges only.
As per the TOS of Stumble Upon :
Are incentive programs allowed? Someone asked me to rate their web-site?
StumbleUpon does not allow personal accounts to be used for the purposes of incentivization or promoting sites. This would be considered a breach of our Terms.The practice of sending PM’s encouraging or inviting other stumblers to rate/review sites in exchange for reciprocal reviews/ratings, monetary, or any other form of reward is strictly forbidden.
The practice of actively soliciting a rating or review for a site is also forbidden. Should you receive a PM, or encounter forum postings that breach this rule, you are encouraged to report this via feedback.
Accounts participating in such practices will be deleted and banned, and the related sites deleted and banned from the system.
Suexchange used to offer points for stumbling others websites and in return you get back stumbles, though i dont understand what is the use of stumble upon because one of my fun[humor] related website gets around 4000 uniques/day from stumble upon but not even 0.01% stay more than a couple seconds on my website and just move on, which just leads to waste of bandwidth for my website and lots of useless impressions.
Screenshot of the banned page when you try to stumble suexchange.com
This clearly shows you should never try to fake some system which can deliver you great results when used legitly. Learn How to Stumble a website
November 4th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Yep , now Digg will be doing the same.
November 4th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Digg has already done this long back and banned many forums because there were many exchange votes threads there in.
November 4th, 2007 at 11:13 am
Yes this was going to happen, Good that they are now banning accounts. But there will always be other ways possible.
November 4th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
How many sites will they ban? there are billions of websites and its hard to track everyone.
November 4th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
It is not hard to find the big offenders.
This blog is my homepage
My favourite website :D.
November 4th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
It’s very hard to track all. We can see stumble exchange threads daily at DP
November 4th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Thats the reason DP is banned from stumble Upon too.
November 5th, 2007 at 7:01 am
DP banned from stumble too
Uff… My user name is also banned from DIGG still running in Stumble… Hope it runs forever…
November 5th, 2007 at 8:20 am
yes amit you are right i get no clicks on my websites adsense though i get visitors from it.
November 6th, 2007 at 12:16 am
SU is useless traffic. I know this as a user of SU. It’s great a timewaster, but I’ll rarely revisit any site I find with it or look beyond the page SU takes me to. GHHQ DP is a major SU/Digg exchange. They could just monitor the many threads created there daily to collect sites to ban.
November 7th, 2007 at 8:22 am
Digg also shut digboss…actually no problem in exchanging stumble n diggs as black marketing is not illegal always.
But using words like stumble digg SU etc in domains are the main reason for suspension
March 27th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
On the one hand, it feels good to see the big offenders getting kicked out. On the other hand, what about smaller sites that just want some exposure? Should every single attempt to incentivize people result in a ban? What about friends?
July 23rd, 2008 (5 weeks ago) at 9:50 pm
Although StumbleUpon has banned suexchange.com from being stumbled, the sites that are stumbled from being placed on suexchange have never been banned. It was very easy to StumbleUpon to ban suexchange, however, it is not easy for them to ban the sites being stumbled in the exchange that we offer.