Tagged www.tagged.com Review

“I've read a lot of reviews about how much spamming...”

Written on: 27/08/2010 by MrSUPERUSER (1 review written)

I've read a lot of reviews about how much spamming goes on at Tagged. This is a bit of an unfair observation usually remarked by newer users.

I joined the site a year ago and also noticed there was much spamming activities, and suspicious mail items in my Tagged inbox, but this is very easy and fast to completely avoid.

Towards the end of last year I made a few adjustments to my account settings and since then I have not received a single piece of advertising material of any kind in any of my 30 accounts.



You need to go to account settings from the link at the top right of almost every Tagged page, set the contact privacy to "only accept mail from friends", and the comments approval to "auto-approve from no-one", that's it problem solved.

Those are the main options to filter out all spam and scammer contacts.

You can also set your profile to private, only friends can view, and you can choose so no one can find you using the Search and Browse service.



Your identity is not an issue either, on sign up you only need to provide a name (invent one if you're shy), a date of birth (anything above 18 years old will do, tho 14 is the minimum age for the site, the underage accounts have

restrictions/limitations on the functions of some of the site services, like an adult cannot add a underage member as friend unless they know their email or name, and they are not found in Search and Browse unless the searcher is also underage.

2 check boxes for choice of gender, (hermaphrodite is not an option)and an email address for confirmation. (make a new email if you have any reservations, but in the year I've been a member I have never once received any emails or promotional materials from Tagged. The only mail you will get from them is the confimation email with the required security code, and if you misbehave and violate their terms of service you will get a mail with a violation warning, or if your account has been terminated for repeated breaches of their terms. All other email notifications can be disabled easily. Learn to spot a spammer, they all have the same actions and characteristics, the main most obvious - they will usually send you their alternate email addresses for yahoo or msn for example in their very first message to you. They also always broadcast their email addresses on their profile. No genuine user does this. And if they have thousands of friends after just one day of joining, they are definately spammers or scammers.

It's also possible to block other users from any contact or further requests, block requests from groups that send repeated requests. I've blocked 2 groups, in my year using the site, and I'm pretty sure they were not spamming, one was a group for wolves, and one was something about religious topics for religious folks, and I'm not interested in either. After a second or third request to join their groups, I block them from further requests, and I never hear from them again.



The interface and navigation may appear daunting at first, but on further exploration and practice, it's one of the simplest and well organised navigation systems of any social site I've played with.



Profiles are almost fully customisable, within the bounds of their layout manipulation interface, but I would have liked the ability to enter my own CSS script for the layout. I need to use a local CSS file only for my browser to see the site the way I like it, like removing the ads and over 20 other things I found unnecessary, changed a lot of font sizes and colors and moved many things to better locations, to enhance the end user experience. Most users don't care for changing anything, but I use the site enough to warrant customising how I see and navigate it.



I've set up a basic page on my web site with a couple of screenshots and one of my scripts with instructions for noobs on how to apply the style to your browser. FireFox browser instrutions only. Seems like the most involved of all popular browsers.

The url below is the page with full details....



http://mrsuperuser.brinkster.net/tagged/newpets.htm



Tagged doesn't like my layouts designs of their site, or they envy my work and don't wish anyone else to see as they keep removing my screen-shots that I post in my photos to display my designs there, apparently due to some violation of the TOS, and as I don't wish to lose any of my accounts for showing off, I will use my own domain for demonstrations from now.



There's only one thing I don't like about Tagged that is of some concern to me, they seem to be notorious for deleting accounts for reasons they cannot even explain, or for reasons not even included in their own TOS, and I've heard of quite a few users accounts being deleted by accident, as if Tagged have some sort of automated screening deleting system that makes a huge amount of mistakes in it's decisions and terminates accounts for seemingly no reason, and without warning.

Sometimes they will ignore your query mails regarding the basis for being deleted, sometimes they realise a mistake was made and reinstate the deleted account, this can take from a day, to up to 5 or 6 months. But it's not uncommon to get a quick excuse that usually makes no sense, and ends with...

"We will not reinstate your account."

"Sincerely

Customer Support"



These deletions are not rare isolated incidents, hundreds and thousands of accounts get terminated daily.

Consider this latest action for your own evaluation that something is amiss with their motives for account deletions... Just 3 weeks ago a standard Tagged user created a group to protest about the increasing amount of accounts that were being terminated and to hopefully bring to their attention that something needs to be changed and maybe help generate some ideas and solutions from their own users for their screening methods to eliminate removing accounts unfairly or wrongfully. The new group generated much attention from members and it grew to 6000 members in 7 days, and in just under 14 days of the group being conceived, they had reached well over 10,000 members, which as far as I know, may have been the fastest growing group in Tagged history.

The only acknowledgement from Tagged admins regarding the existence of this new group, was to delete the group on day 14. Their motives are puzzling.



These actions have definitely done Tagged a great disservice, in the interest of high-end social networking sites, deleting users indiscriminately is in no way helping with their business, where the numbers of users and amount of site user traffic are what dictates the sort of revenues they can demand from their sponsors. Though they haven't and probably never will publish their financial business, advertising would be their main profits producer, equaled or followed closely by their Pets game, which generates huge amounts of profit when people pay real cash to buy their gold currency, which players can then convert into pets cash to help them progress in the game. From my time with the site, chatting to friends and associates, and reading much documentation, bulletins, forum threads, I'd guess close to half the users Playing pets has at some time payed Tagged for their gold to play pets, many do it weekly, some invest $20 a week, some much more. I've known of players who have invested well over $20,000 just to be big in the pets game rankings. (and these are just the ones I know of)



There is also an option for VIP membership, which is $31.98 USD a month for a few extra fetures, which consists of being able to see all your profile viewers and contact them, being able to see if a message you sent has been opened by the recipient, 25,000 gold credits every month, which is worth around $15 to purchase on it's own.

You also get a pretty little VIP tag on the corner of your profile photo, and the ability to give luv 10 times a day rather than 3 for standard users. (luv is basically a bar meter on everyone's profile, other users can click on your "give luv" link to give you one unit of luv, once 20 of luv has been given to your profile, you are full of luv. Each unit of luv lasts a week. It's like a mini popularity contest, but it's pretty pointless even as just that because it's full at 20 luvs and can not go any higher.

I assume that VIP members don't receive any of the product ads placed on the pages, but this is just speculation based on other social site practices regarding their paying/premium members. I haven't yet enquired about that detail.

Regardless of whether you're a VIP member, for one month or 5 years, or how much of your cash you have invested in playing their games, it has absolutely zero bearing on the account deletion practice. VIPs get treated the same as free members when it comes to random, accidental, or wrongful deletions.



Cheers.



JoN.