MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Shutterstock.com => Topic started by: Harvepino on June 30, 2016, 13:49
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Anyone else got this? Me and some other guys I know just did and I have no idea why...
Dear xxx,
We have become aware that your portfolio now includes titles with spammy repetitive words or phrases. Repetitive titles like “orange, orange, orange” and “icon arrow, icon arrow, icon arrow” create a poor customer experience, and are prohibited under our metadata guidelines. These titles are considered spam and are not accepted for publishing during the review process. Editing them in this manner after your content has been published is not allowed.
You are now required to edit these titles to bring them back into compliance. In the coming weeks, we will review our collection again. If you do not correct your titles, or you continue to create repetitive or spammy titles, your account may be suspended.
To learn more about title spamming, please read How is Title Spamming Defined.
I do my captioning/keywording painstakingly, manually and I don't know of any images where I would repeat any words in titles or captions. Besides, all my images go through normal review process and I didn't even know you could edit them afterwards. :o I'll reply to SS and ask them if they can give me an example from my port where I repeat words.
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Got it today.
Very upset since I never engaged into this "spammy repetitive wording" practice and also because now I'm forced to check hundreds of my photos in the port for any inadvertent repetition, if any, since Shutterstock doesn't specify which pictures are on their radar.
Any ideas as to how to streamline this? Would be crazy if they suspend/terminate my account if I fail to identify this suspect pictures and rectify the problem.
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I got this too and am flipping out! It said I have "orange, orange, orange" in my port and I don't! Only one word orange. What do I change?
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Hmm I got the same thing! I also keyword manually very painstakingly, too. I also emailed them for specific examples.
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Looks like a lot of people got that. I went back and double-checked, because I'm very careful of keywording. My keywords have been replaced in many cases with words from the title or description, and now include all single-word keywords, including "the", "on", "of", "with". Maybe they're going to one-word keywords like Dreamstime uses?
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Yes, I just got the same email. I think it must be some sort of mistake as none of my 1900 images have that sort of caption - and I never edit captions after acceptance (unless there is a mistake in the info -such as a wrong date). Looks like they may have just accidentally sent this out to everyone -not just to those it applies to. Gave me an unpleasant moment though >:(
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Wait a second, those are the same keywords they said I have too .... hummm
“orange, orange, orange” and “icon arrow, icon arrow, icon arrow”
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Got it just now too. Immediately replied asking for clarification - I also spend a lot of time ensuring my description / titles are accurate. No idea what they are talking about...
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I got this too and am flipping out! It said I have "orange, orange, orange" in my port and I don't! Only one word orange. What do I change?
and "icon arrow, icon arrow, icon arrow"?
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I just got that mail too, and i never edit the files once are approved and dont have repetitive words :(
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Crazy,
I got the same Mail with the same repeated Titles. I´m sure that I never upload Media Files with Title or Keyword repetitions.
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me too.. I got that email too, but I think I won't do that, and I've already check my photos.... sigh
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Just received the letter...
Very confusing since I've never been using spammy repetitive words in titles nor modified them.
Replied asking them to provide an example from my portfolio where I modified title after content has been published.
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I got this mail too! what??? :-X
I never spam, jesus!
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Looks like a lot of people got that. I went back and double-checked, because I'm very careful of keywording. My keywords have been replaced in many cases with words from the title or description, and now include all single-word keywords, including "the", "on", "of", "with". Maybe they're going to one-word keywords like Dreamstime uses?
You are right. My keywords have changed as well!!!!
Words like "Great Britain" are now "Great", "Britain". "3D illustration" is now "3D", "illustration".
The email could have been an automated message that was triggered by them tinkering with the system.
Why have they not notified us about the change? >:( I wonder what the consequences of this are going to be. ???
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WOW, I'm glad I am not alone!!! My blood pressure is going through the roof. After 11 years of submitting to SS and manually editing all my content I see this email.
I have no clue what they are referring to.
I replied asking for a specific example of one of my images as I have no idea what they are talking about.
It almost looks like a system bug... No clue :o
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Snap - I asked them to send me an example???
Think they need to clear this up.....
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Glad I'm not the only one. Very perturbed considering how many years I worked to get onto SS. I corrected a recent few where I inadvertently used the same description for a set of food photos. Some very slightly different. BUT, I have no repetitive words and I don't spam. I hope they will clarify, because I have over 1000 images in my port...I can't possibly review every one...that was done already when I submitted them!
:(
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I also got it and I make it a point to have clean titles and descriptions, and have for 10 years. I guess I need to respond to contributor relations. My guess is that they accidentally sent this to everyone when they meant to send it to one person.
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If they did such change, then they have to implement elimination of duplicated words, which of course, will appear. But somebody's bad work they put on neck of contributors. With their money to not do such kind of filter? Only to show disrespect to "commodities"
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I think I will now eat an 'Orange, Orange, Orange' for lunch 8)
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I replied that I don't have any files of orange, orange, orange or icon arrow, icon arrow, icon arrow.
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i received it too and dont have any of my 45k files with repeated words in titles
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MAYBE some DOS attack infecting some ours files???
IS THIS POSSIBLE FOLKS??
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i received it too and dont have any of my 45k files with repeated words in titles
Hold * that would be a mess if you had to go back and redo one by one. I have 5000 assets on SS and that would be a pain, but 45k...wow.
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Many years there was a problem with verification and count of keywords. I noticed often changes but never saw it working properly. So this is just a next chapter
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Thank goodness for this forum. I sh*t a brick thinking I was about to get booted from SS! No way I can get through my whole portfolio. I have never edited an upload after approval. I wouldn't even know how!
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Just got the same email:
We have become aware that your portfolio now includes titles with spammy repetitive words or phrases. Repetitive titles like “orange, orange, orange” and “icon arrow, icon arrow, icon arrow” create a poor customer experience, and are prohibited under our metadata guidelines. These titles are considered spam and are not accepted for publishing during the review process. Editing them in this manner after your content has been published is not allowed.
You are now required to edit these titles to bring them back into compliance. In the coming weeks, we will review our collection again. If you do not correct your titles, or you continue to create repetitive or spammy titles, your account may be suspended.
First it's really sad, but not surprising to see how much they care about us: they don't care at all... They threaten to close the account as if we were just numbers (which is somehow true but we pay their salaries so please show respect).
Second you can notice the same list of spammy words that some of you got, which of course I never used.... Seems like they are running a software and it messed up something.... Glad I'm not the only one getting the email... But I honestly don't know what to do... I emailed them... Let's see if they reply...
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I received this as well. Hope it was sent in error, as like most people here, I don't deliberately repeat words in titles. They need to tell us what titles need changing or at least give an example from our portfolios. Threatening to suspend an account seems unfair if we don't have a clue what they want us to change.
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MAYBE some DOS attack infecting some ours files???
IS THIS POSSIBLE FOLKS??
nope :)
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any bets if they will even apologize to us! >:(
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me too, but it addressed me by my first name, so i thought it was a personal email to me, telling me there is an issue with my port, so it is a blanket email to everyone, must be a mistake. i do not use repeated words, i do not edit after they have been accepted, i have every description unique if it is a series, also no examples of my portfolio, so really hard to understand which descriptions they are referring to,
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I got it too, the text was the same as yours but in Russian which is weird as all their mails to me are in English.
Could it be indeed an attack? It came from [email protected] - has Shutterstock ever used this kind of email address before? Usually they use @shutterstock.com
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any bets if they will even apologize to us! >:(
I would rather have them tell us it's a bug so WE CAN ALL BREATH A SIGH OF RELIEF...but a polite sorry would be welcome too. I was sitting outside at lunch, had my headphones on, enjoying the sunshine and music and for whatever reason decided to check email and saw this. I cut my lunch short to run back to work to follow up with SS. They own me a bibbonbop at a Japanese restaurant...lol
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Got it too!!! I never spammed a file!!!
I'm in panic here!
Why?
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I got it too and I want at least one example from my images with repetitive words so I asked them that.
only one example is enough
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I got it too, the text was the same as yours but in Russian which is weird as all their mails to me are in English.
Could it be indeed an attack? It came from [email protected] - has Shutterstock ever used this kind of email address before? Usually they use @shutterstock.com
I asked this:
Quote from: Stockmaan on Today at 14:19
MAYBE some DOS attack infecting some ours files???
IS THIS POSSIBLE FOLKS??
nope :)
Maybe is this some attack
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Wow -- images being deleted because of this now too. (per three reports so far in the contributors forum)
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something is wrong the email is from [email protected], when you click reply it goes to Shutterstock Contributors [email protected] which is their email address for buyers, for contributors it normally is [email protected]
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MAYBE some DOS attack infecting some ours files???
IS THIS POSSIBLE FOLKS??
No.
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I'm banned from SS forums. Can someone go poke their head in and see if admins are chiming in and repost back here?
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I got it too, the text was the same as yours but in Russian which is weird as all their mails to me are in English.
Could it be indeed an attack? It came from [email protected] - has Shutterstock ever used this kind of email address before? Usually they use @shutterstock.com
[email protected] is OK!
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I'm banned from SS forums. Can someone go poke their head in and see if admins are chiming in and repost back here?
There are four threads going on in there on this topic, but so far no admins have chimed in.
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I have received the same mail too and I definitely do not have spammy titles.
Here they give some explanations and examples:
http://www.shutterstock.com/contributorsupport/articles/kbat02/000010523 (http://www.shutterstock.com/contributorsupport/articles/kbat02/000010523)
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Here is a thread in their forum
http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/ (http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/)
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Looks like a lot of people got that. I went back and double-checked, because I'm very careful of keywording. My keywords have been replaced in many cases with words from the title or description, and now include all single-word keywords, including "the", "on", "of", "with". Maybe they're going to one-word keywords like Dreamstime uses?
You are right. My keywords have changed as well!!!!
Words like "Great Britain" are now "Great", "Britain". "3D illustration" is now "3D", "illustration".
The email could have been an automated message that was triggered by them tinkering with the system.
Why have they not notified us about the change? >:( I wonder what the consequences of this are going to be. ???
that issue has been around for years, it is a bug, they never fixed it
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I'm banned from SS forums. Can someone go poke their head in and see if admins are chiming in and repost back here?
There are four threads going on in there on this topic, but so far no admins have chimed in.
Thank you.
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Bloody Shutterstock sending bloody spam
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It's a separate issue - the email is about Titles not keyword splitting.
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I just got this, too, I'm effing outraged. I've never spammed their titles, I've got 5,000 images there and no idea how to review and edit titles. I just can't believe they spam us with their insults. They used to be the best of agencies.
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I'm banned from SS forums. Can someone go poke their head in and see if admins are chiming in and repost back here?
There are four threads going on in there on this topic, but so far no admins have chimed in.
Thank you.
actually the message in the email is the start of thread by a shutterstock admin called kate shutterstock, so they are getting the issue of spam addressed, which is fine, the email must have been an error, and you can still read the forums if you are banned,
http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/ (http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/)
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they ffed up on their end, ignore the email, i am sure its a mistake
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I don't mind if this is a mistake and they apologise but if they seriously think we will all look at every title for every image in our portfolios, they have no idea how much time that would take all of us.
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Looks like a lot of people got that. I went back and double-checked, because I'm very careful of keywording. My keywords have been replaced in many cases with words from the title or description, and now include all single-word keywords, including "the", "on", "of", "with". Maybe they're going to one-word keywords like Dreamstime uses?
You are right. My keywords have changed as well!!!!
Words like "Great Britain" are now "Great", "Britain". "3D illustration" is now "3D", "illustration".
The email could have been an automated message that was triggered by them tinkering with the system.
Why have they not notified us about the change? >:( I wonder what the consequences of this are going to be. ???
that issue has been around for years, it is a bug, they never fixed it
really ? i never got the email. but i do notice many of my new uploads get reduced in keywords and many times have category deleted.
i used to think it was the reviewer doing that, but i am not sure now that you are all mentioning this strange goings-on.
could it be that all these zero dls is due to our description, keywords and category being
"hijacked".
i better start checking my new stuff to see if all my description, keywords, category are intact..
because it could affect the search, wouldn't it???
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btw, does anyone know who avopix is??? (see my new thread)
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For me all this recent situation at SS has the same (you can guess) nature like deletion of essential keywords from selection of images at IS.
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I think this is related to titles. It seems like they used a script to scan through all the titles and find any title with the same word appearing twice. It could be as innocent as "Brown cat playing with white cat".
The word "cat" gets repeated twice and it gets flagged. Looks like I have a few titles that violates it.
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First, I think we all got the same email. The “orange, orange, orange” and “icon arrow, icon arrow, icon arrow” were just examples of spam titles. I ain't got no oranges or arrow icons in my port.
Second, if they really did unleash a tool that breaks up the image title into separate, single keywords and adds them to the existing keywords, then *of course* there will be redundancy in the keywords. What a mess.
I hope they can straighten it out soon without crashing their servers.
My thought is that if that's what happened, and you DID NOT get an email, you are doing something wrong!
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There is no signature at the bottom of the email under the logo (Empire state building... etc.), isn't that weird?
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if they run a script for repeated words, they will find all editorial images, because their guidelines ask us to use the city and month twice, well at least they used to
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Is there an easy way to review your port for title errors? I went an looked at my image port and it does not show titles on my iPad. If I go into accepted images under upload, there are only descriptions but no titles. And this way would take forever to go through each image. At least if there were a way to review your port to see titles as you scroll, that would make it easier....assuming there really is a problem.
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it is NOT about keywords
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They're going after spammers like these:
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-432284371/stock-vector-message-icon-message-icon-eps-message-icon-vector-message-icon-eps-message-icon-jpg-message.html (http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-432284371/stock-vector-message-icon-message-icon-eps-message-icon-vector-message-icon-eps-message-icon-jpg-message.html)
Most of us are caught in the crossfire.
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it is NOT about keywords
Correct
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when you come to think of it, avoiding repeat words is at times impossible..
eg. how do you write in an editorial of something like this?
Boston, Massachusetts, New England, USA. 13 May 2016 Boston New Music Festival recreation of Boston Tea-Party at Massachusetts Avenue, during the performance of Tea Party, pop group from England .
sometimes it is impossible, no matter how you try to re-word it.
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apologies in advance........https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE)
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I don't see where the title is?
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I don't see where the title is?
The description is the description/title/caption.
The thing is we are all in this together. If SS really followed through and blocked or terminated our accounts would they not probably lose 400 or so million images? I don't think they want that to happen. This whole thing is bad for their brand so I'm hopeful they will resolve it or communicate factual information to us shortly.
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when you come to think of it, avoiding repeat words is at times impossible..
eg. how do you write in an editorial of something like this?
Boston, Massachusetts, New England, USA. 13 May 2016 Boston New Music Festival recreation of Boston Tea-Party at Massachusetts Avenue, during the performance of Tea Party, pop group from England .
sometimes it is impossible, no matter how you try to re-word it.
I believe this email is the first step. It's automated. They will review everything case by case when the time comes. Intentional spammers will get banned. Unintentional ones will likely get spared.
I'm actually glad they're doing this. The spammers do this to reach the top of the relevent category. They're leveling the playing field.
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when you come to think of it, avoiding repeat words is at times impossible..
eg. how do you write in an editorial of something like this?
Boston, Massachusetts, New England, USA. 13 May 2016 Boston New Music Festival recreation of Boston Tea-Party at Massachusetts Avenue, during the performance of Tea Party, pop group from England .
sometimes it is impossible, no matter how you try to re-word it.
I believe this email is the first step. It's automated. They will review everything case by case when the time comes. Intentional spammers will get banned. Unintentional ones will likely get spared.
I'm actually glad they're doing this. The spammers do this to reach the top of the relevent category. They're leveling the playing field.
Yup, but I am slightly worried that I am taken down by 'friendly fire'.
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I didnt receive any email. It seems they sent the message to all contributors whose descriptions of images containt some words at least twice... They wanted to address spammers but they took a whole lot of innocent contributors with them. Not the best way to deal with the problem since the real spammers repeat the same words at least five times or more.
Just wait, Im sure they will explain it soon and apologize. I dont think the support team will be answering individually every angry email they are getting now and will be getting in next few hours or days, there will be millions probably...
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Well, I'm glad I read this thread before checking my email. So I could just laugh about it instead of freaking out.
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They're going after spammers like these:
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-432284371/stock-vector-message-icon-message-icon-eps-message-icon-vector-message-icon-eps-message-icon-jpg-message.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-432284371/stock-vector-message-icon-message-icon-eps-message-icon-vector-message-icon-eps-message-icon-jpg-message.html[/url])
Most of us are caught in the crossfire.
And I am ok with suspending actual title or keyword spammers, as well as image spammers. I started submitting in 2005 and the rules for titles and keywords were different back then. I just looked at the first group of images I submitted, and I don't see any of my titles that are spammy. I see keywords that I can clean up, but this wasn't about keywords, it was about titles.
If they reject any of my images and send them back because they think they are spammy, I will be happy to take a look and redo/fix. But I don't think I am going to go through all my images...I don't have nearly as many as some of you do, but I have close to 1000, and that is about 980 too many to redo.
I was very off put with their "suspend your account" phrase. Without even telling me the problem images and just making me go through and guess?
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I'm banned from SS forums. Can someone go poke their head in and see if admins are chiming in and repost back here?
There are four threads going on in there on this topic, but so far no admins have chimed in.
Thank you.
actually the message in the email is the start of thread by a shutterstock admin called kate shutterstock, so they are getting the issue of spam addressed, which is fine, the email must have been an error, and you can still read the forums if you are banned,
[url]http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/[/url] ([url]http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/[/url])
You're right. Gracie.
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this is what I wrote on SS forum about that:
Hi, I received it too and I'm calming down just now that i read all your answers to this thread.
Sometimes I edited my titles, its TRUE and let me say that is NORMAL in my opinion to review some wrong indexing sometimes (expecially for old ones when you was a newbie on indexing), and moreover there is a proper option on SS do to it, so WHAT?
Anyway...I am almost sure I do not have repetitive words in titles, or maybe I have few for mistake? I don't know!
And thats the point: The email was too generic! If you accuse someone to somewhat you need to be detailed imho!
...also because I have a small portfolio, just 510 images (and I can still control one by one if i'm really paranoid)...but I can imagine the anxiety of those who may have more than 5,000 photos or more!
Cmon guys, this is not professional, I hope for a simple 'mass-mistake'!
April 1 has passed for quite some time now and irony of fate tomorrow Is my birthday...But thats not the kind of gift I expected from SS!
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That is absurd that a company like Shutterstock cannot afford a script to automatically checks titles/descriptions for such issues. Especially if they have been altered after approval.
It's a simple precautionary measure which I thought Shutterstock would be able to handle with ease.
Jon doesn't seem to care at all anymore. This usually would be exactly his specialty...
I hope they can clear things up with a message to all contributors.
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They're going after spammers like these:
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-432284371/stock-vector-message-icon-message-icon-eps-message-icon-vector-message-icon-eps-message-icon-jpg-message.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-432284371/stock-vector-message-icon-message-icon-eps-message-icon-vector-message-icon-eps-message-icon-jpg-message.html[/url])
Most of us are caught in the crossfire.
And I am ok with suspending actual title or keyword spammers, as well as image spammers. I started submitting in 2005 and the rules for titles and keywords were different back then. I just looked at the first group of images I submitted, and I don't see any of my titles that are spammy. I see keywords that I can clean up, but this wasn't about keywords, it was about titles.
If they reject any of my images and send them back because they think they are spammy, I will be happy to take a look and redo/fix. But I don't think I am going to go through all my images...I don't have nearly as many as some of you do, but I have close to 1000, and that is about 980 too many to redo.
I was very off put with their "suspend your account" phrase. Without even telling me the problem images and just making me go through and guess?
Me too. Send me links and I will correct. But to guess and to hope you find them is a crap shoot.
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This is bovine feces man!
Some contributers are having images deleted now!
SS has screwed up big time
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:o I'll reply to SS and ask them if they can give me an example from my port where I repeat words.
That's what I did.... I checked all keywords to avoid spamming... Maybe this email is another "accident"...
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Meanwhile the uploader s broken again and I cannot upload vectors. I do wish they'd spend less time sending mass emails and updating the uploader to be uglier and more time fixing actual site problems.
This is the sort of thing I'd expect from iStock. Hate to see SS headed down this path.
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How quickly does the Catalog Manager's port count update after your image has been accepted? In light of this SS email and some claiming that photos begin being deleted, I'm a bit paranoid that my Catalog Manager's count as well as public portfolio's page count is 10 images less than my Contributor's Dashboard count.
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That is absurd that a company like Shutterstock cannot afford a script to automatically checks titles/descriptions for such issues. Especially if they have been altered after approval.
It's a simple precautionary measure which I thought Shutterstock would be able to handle with ease.
Jon doesn't seem to care at all anymore. This usually would be exactly his specialty...
I hope they can clear things up with a message to all contributors.
Exactly. All they need to do is send the offending images back to us so we can fix them. What is funny is that these images were approved by their reviewers in the first place! I understand things have changed over the last 10 years, but how is that something that we should have our accounts suspended for?
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here is my suggestions to SS 8)
1) create /run a report which extract problematic image IDs per customer, it can be a heavy process from performance stand point but contributors cant do it from their side at all unless SS is expecting us to go through thousands of pictures one by one
2) make sure you(SS) validate the title field during submission/update
3) have a postmortem analysis around this Repeated Words communication failure
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This response from SS on their forum:
Hello All,
If you would like more information about which images in your portfolio were identified by our system as being potentially spammy, please write to us at [email protected]. We have a lot of e-mails to go through, but we will get back to you with examples of what our system found.
Best,
Kate
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Hey, Shutterstock. your uploader is broken. AGAIN. It's pulling the description into the title field. That's where your spammy titles are coming from. This place is becoming a horrible joke. In 10 years, I"ve never seen such a mess.
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I was just going to start new post with this strange message that I got :)
It seems a lot of people got the same message !
It's good thing that SS review accounts , and warn spammers.
It's OK too if they send general rules to ALL
BUT , the bad thing is : they talk to me in person (using my name) as a Spammer while I am not !
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Have answered the email and the only answer I get is that my images with the H****y D******n motorcycle has been removed from a S********y event with credentials, and I dont care about that but my question was about the spamming...no clue, Pola*$d dont want publicity either and absolutly no cameras vintage or not...
Asked for what images that I have been spamming, no answer yet.
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The SS admin who started the thread about that 'issue' replied this:
http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/page-8#entry1555234 (http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/page-8#entry1555234)
seriously?
hacked?
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edit
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PEOPLE READ MY POST ABOVE!!!!
No, see my email above. Their uploader is screwing up all of our titles. And since they don't have an easy way to modify or delete, we have to spend a lot of time fixing their screwup.
Here's the explanation
Hey, Shutterstock. your uploader is broken. AGAIN. It's pulling the description into the title field. That's where your spammy titles are coming from. This place is becoming a horrible joke. In 10 years, I"ve never seen such a mess.
If its the case shame on you SS, why not try something in your yoga area before making it public, well it should be intressting to follow this new mess...
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I was at first a bit miffed that I *didn't* get the e-mail, but then I checked my spam folder and there it was.
Typically SS e-mail gets through fine, but I don't have shutterstockmail.com on the whitelist and the content looked spammy enough to my filter.
I have to believe this is a software eff up on their part because I don't do spammy titles or spam keywords. Once upon a time, when I thought SS had ambitions to be the leading stock agency, I'd have been horrified at being accused this way.
But they've automated their ingestion process to handle approving nearly a million images a week, allow repeated dreck (marijuana photos or near-identical icons or vectors with "Best Vector Ever" stickers) with spam that beggars belief, cut contributor royalties on extended licenses, shut the bulk of the contributor community out of the high-value SODs, do nothing useful about the many places offering SS images for free, and are generally slow or unresponsive to emails.
An apology from these tossers would be nice...
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I'm going to go through my images tonight to check all the titles. It won't be fun, but it's necessary.
The "Image Gallery Stats" page allow people to review 20 image titles at a time. I think I can go through it in an hour or 2.
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I'm going to go through my images tonight to check all the titles. It won't be fun, but it's necessary.
The "Image Gallery Stats" page allow people to review 20 image titles at a time. I think I can go through it in an hour or 2.
Well good luck, sounds like you have a small and well organized port:-)
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I'm going to go through my images tonight to check all the titles. It won't be fun, but it's necessary.
The "Image Gallery Stats" page allow people to review 20 image titles at a time. I think I can go through it in an hour or 2.
Well good luck, sounds like you have a small and well organized port:-)
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Really. I'm closing in on 10,000 images. It'd probably be easier to sue them if they suspend my account.
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I'm going to go through my images tonight to check all the titles. It won't be fun, but it's necessary.
The "Image Gallery Stats" page allow people to review 20 image titles at a time. I think I can go through it in an hour or 2.
Well good luck, sounds like you have a small and well organized port:-)
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Really. I'm closing in on 10,000 images. It'd probably be easier to sue them if they suspend my account.
And you think you can check your images in two hours👍
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Well, this is a complete load of horse dung. I got it too and have literally never spammed my titles or gone back and changed any of them.
If it is a malfunction of their current uploader, then I am still baffled why I got this POS threat. I haven't uploaded in over a year, so the current uploader issues don't apply to any of my images.
Looks like this was sent to everyone. Good luck to them suspending all the accounts. No more pictures to sell. Oh well, buyers can find my work on Adobe, Istock, and about a dozen other sites.
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it seems the email is real, my God, this is just too pathetic for words, take on spammers ok, but dont blanket email everyone who has a repeated word or 2
ss admin is completely ingoring all complaints and just telling people to contact them to get examples from your port.
the reply email address in the email is the email address for buyers,
i am with jo ann here, ss starting to look more and more like istock, messing up one thing after the other, which in itself is an achievement,
but at least buyers have a shiny new editor to play with
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Some animal species have latin names in which the first and second name are the same, is that considered spam?
Anyway SS better come up with the files involved, I'm not going through all my files, since I never change my titles after approval. If my account gets suspended so be it, it's not like SS is my biggest earner.
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The only way I can see to even see titles is to go into approved images and click on each individual image. That would take months. I emailed asking for a specific list of images. If it is the uploader doing it this is their fault but my guess is that if they don't have a backup we will have to redo our images ourselves.
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...If it is a malfunction of their current uploader, then I am still baffled why I got this POS threat.
I don't think it is - at least not with regular (commercial as opposed to editorial) files. I've been uploading over the past several weeks and I just spot checked a few recent approvals to be sure the titles and keywords were unchanged. The ones I checked looked just as they do in the original files.
They're lazy (don't provide the list of files) and stupid (the script is apparently broken and they didn't test it adequately to see this).
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I'm going to go through my images tonight to check all the titles. It won't be fun, but it's necessary.
The "Image Gallery Stats" page allow people to review 20 image titles at a time. I think I can go through it in an hour or 2.
Well good luck, sounds like you have a small and well organized port:-)
1900 images. I think once I get into rhythm, I can probably go through a page in less than 30 seconds in most cases. If I run into an offending image, it'll take 30 seconds to fix. I don't think it'll take very long.
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Some animal species have latin names in which the first and second name are the same, is that considered spam?
Anyway SS better come up with the files involved, I'm not going through all my files, since I never change my titles after approval. If my account gets suspended so be it, it's not like SS is my biggest earner.
Could be that! I have the eurpean cranes and I provided the latin name Grus grus...bestseller but maybe delete it from shutterstock...
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I didn't get email.
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probably in your SPAM folder haha
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My mistake on the uploader. I forget with agency populates what. Wish they all would pull from the correct field. I have a filename, a title and a description. My descriptions are much longer than my titles but still aren't spammy.
This has gotten outrageous. Each week, it's a new screwup. There will likely be an apology once someone actually checks in.
time to start contacting board members.
http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362&p=irol-govboard (http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362&p=irol-govboard)
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Blithering idiots. I am with them since 2007 and have 21.000 images in my portfolio. "We found something somewhere, fix it or else" is utter bullsh!t. I sent an email demanding a specific list of the "troublesome" images. I never spammed, not even in keywords, let alone description.
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If their amazing script consider spam repeated words like "the" or "to" anyone here who have an editorial picture with proper caption written in a correct grammar is an evil spammer ;D
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probably in your SPAM folder haha
Nope, haha
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Got the email too, in my "spam" folder'! All my images are 100% with unique title, there are some that have one word present 2 times, like "normal knee versus arthritic knee" - if they call it spam they 'd better delete their entire collection. This is crazy!
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I got this too, and my descriptions basically NEVER have repeat words... NONE. Some lame automatic mailing malfunction...
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Got the e-mail too. I'll wait for more information before wasting time on checking my files. I know I'm not spamming double words so I expect this is a major mistake by SS.
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I was just as shocked as everyone else to get the message. The only thing I can imagine is that there might be duplications in editorial titles. For example, I have some that were shot in Colonial Williamsburg, so they have Williamsburg in the title for the mandatory location but "Colonial Williamsburg" in the description since that is the name of the actual place - it has the name of the city and there is no way to leave it off (and still make sense). I hope a human will look at any accounts to be deleted and sort out that kind of error.
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i got a pm from laurin rinder telling me he had heard that ss is preparing the company to be sold off, this was related to the amount of images they are accepting, so this could be related, having 77000 contributors work for them, cleaning up titles, so they look nice and clean and buffed up before they put themselves in the store window
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Anyone else got this? Me and some other guys I know just did and I have no idea why...
...
I do my captioning/keywording painstakingly, manually and I don't know of any images where I would repeat any words in titles or captions. Besides, all my images go through normal review process and I didn't even know you could edit them afterwards. :o I'll reply to SS and ask them if they can give me an example from my port where I repeat words.
this just happened to me: this is an intimidating and very random letter: there is NO link provided, no list of titles, no files, no evidence; nothing to prove there is a REAL problem. They say they "are aware of".
Some examples, please?
I'm exactly in your same situation! of course this kind of behavihour makes me think these companies have too much power over my work. They could simply say "you suck". And stop me from earn money, without further explanation.
I have LOTS of files. I think they have some kind of not-human automated tool that counts words: suppose you wrote "over and over" ... you repeated "over" twice. This is not spamming. Of course writing "OF" a pair of times in a sentence is possible. This is NOT spam.
Instead of spreading FUD they could check phisical spamming (really repeated icons) ... I'm really frightened: and this is not something you have to grow up with a business partner. You have tu SUPPORT them.
I've read that letter and felt so sad. Because it seems they are not speaking about something they REALLY checked or spotted. They didn't READ titles.
What can I do? What's the problem? WHERE is that problem? SS showed his ... dark side :(
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I was just as shocked as everyone else to get the message. The only thing I can imagine is that there might be duplications in editorial titles. For example, I have some that were shot in Colonial Williamsburg, so they have Williamsburg in the title for the mandatory location but "Colonial Williamsburg" in the description since that is the name of the actual place - it has the name of the city and there is no way to leave it off (and still make sense). I hope a human will look at any accounts to be deleted and sort out that kind of error.
Yes, and that only happens because we have to follow THEIR stupid format for editorials!
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Blithering idiots. I am with them since 2007 and have 21.000 images in my portfolio. "We found something somewhere, fix it or else" is utter bullsh!t. I sent an email demanding a specific list of the "troublesome" images. I never spammed, not even in keywords, let alone description.
definitely.
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I received the same email and I have already wrote to ss. This is very sad. After years working with them, I was shocked to receive such a threat for something that I never did!
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I'm dying to know if the cannabis bloke has had any sort of threat. ::)
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Are we sure that this email is even coming from Shutterstock? I get so many phishing emails from everyone else. This almost sounds like a hack, scam, or whatever. Besides, when did Shutterstock start using titles on their consumer side?
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Are we sure that this email is even coming from Shutterstock. I get so many phishing emails from everyone else. This almost sounds like a hack, scam, or whatever. Besides, when did Shutterstock start using titles on their consumer side?
A Shutterstock employee posted in their forums saying people could write to support to ask for a list of images identified, effectively acknowledging the sad little e-mail with no useful details came from them.
Shutterstock takes the description field from ITPC and uses it as the title (has been doing this all along). So they call it a title, even though that's not the field it came from.
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Yeah, I'm also posting on Twitter and Facebook and they are saying to contact support. Last email to support took 2 weeks to get a canned response. How could that possibly be helpful?
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Yeah, I'm also posting on Twitter and Facebook and they are saying to contact support. Last email to support took 2 weeks to get a canned response. How could that possibly be helpful?
this is great.
I'm going to blog this.
and of course I CAN do THIS in a very spammy way.
And I'm very motivated.
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Are we sure that this email is even coming from Shutterstock. I get so many phishing emails from everyone else. This almost sounds like a hack, scam, or whatever. Besides, when did Shutterstock start using titles on their consumer side?
A Shutterstock employee posted in their forums saying people could write to support to ask for a list of images identified, effectively acknowledging the sad little e-mail with no useful details came from them.
Shutterstock takes the description field from ITPC and uses it as the title (has been doing this all along). So they call it a title, even though that's not the field it came from.
Well, that's just very sad then. I'll wait until they get their act together and then respond accordingly. Considering how much my sales at Shutterstock have dwindled over the years it's certainly not going to be worth wasting my time doing anything about titles, descriptions, or any other metadata in my portfolio - especially when the exact same metadata is being used without complaint by at least 6 other agencies. And while I'm on the subject and unless I'm missing something (as I was with their stupid title creation plan), how the heck do you edit the metadata there? I admit I haven't been actively nuturing and pruning my portfolios at any microstock websites in recent years but from what I remember almost every other site was much more user friendly when it came to editing your photos on their site. I looked just now and maybe it's not easy to find but I couldn't find any link or menu to access the data and edit it.
Okay - just figured out the extremely time consuming, convoluted, and inefficient way to edit the metadata in my photos, not that I actually need to.
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Yes I got this, very strange email and I replied saying "thanks for insulting me". What a joke! I don't spam and i've no intention of wasting my time looking for some innocent title that might have fit whatever witch hunt search they did. pfft. for the pissy amount I make each month I will not waste my time.
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yup, got it too and haven't uploaded any new material in about 3 years.
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Yes I got this, very strange email and I replied saying "thanks for insulting me". What a joke! I don't spam and i've no intention of wasting my time looking for some innocent title that might have fit whatever witch hunt search they did. pfft. for the pissy amount I make each month I will not waste my time.
Waiting for a response for this spam mail from Shutterstock, we had a thing called shutterstock success before or something, have that apartment been kicked? This feels like the dark side of the buisness, to many economic people having things to say and after that happens curves go down.
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Not spam, some contributers have had images deleted already.
Kurvah"
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Got it too - I was thinking maybe titles like Newport Lighthouse, Newport, Rhode Island and possibly editorial captions where some word repetition isn't spamming but is necessary for it to be accurate were flagged by some robo-review bot? Freaking out that it's a holiday weekend and as I'm away, I'll have intermittent internet access until the end of next week when I have a solo show opening - the worst timing possible. Even with 300+ images in my port reviewing them all seems like a time-consuming nightmare, with 1000s and no idea which ones they've flagged it's just unconscionable. Meanwhile ports with 100s of similar pot photos live on.
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I'm going to go through my images tonight to check all the titles. It won't be fun, but it's necessary.
The "Image Gallery Stats" page allow people to review 20 image titles at a time. I think I can go through it in an hour or 2.
I know I am pedantic, but I want to at least have a greater explanation/understanding of why I have fallen foul of their system before working on my portfolio. OK we suspect it is when two words are the same in the title but I feel I need confirmation before embarking on this review.
Also some system to check image details more easily would be to say the least useful.
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Since they don't have an easy way to look at, much less edit, titles, they can fire me before I'm going to go through 11,000 images that they approved trying to figure out what they hell they are talking about.
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I got this email too. Lucky to visit this forum first before checking my images one by one.
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Are we sure that this email is even coming from Shutterstock? I get so many phishing emails from everyone else. This almost sounds like a hack, scam, or whatever. Besides, when did Shutterstock start using titles on their consumer side?
google verifies: it's not spam and is actually from SS
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Maybe this was my offending description: "Rare Brazilian Rain Tree (Pithecellobium tortum or Chloroleucon tortum) in Bloom"
So spammy!!
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Until someone actually gets a response from support, which may take weeks, we are only guessing. And since they said, "In the coming weeks, we will review our collection again. If you do not correct your titles, or you continue to create repetitive or spammy titles, your account may be suspended," those emails may come too late.
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I just did one page (100 images) and it took me 10 minutes. So for my 4,000 images I figure about 8 hours.
And now when I try to move through the pages it will not move! Must be a ton of folks editing now! :-\
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What exactly did you do in 10 minutes? I don't even know how to look at my titles without digging down into the approved images folder and that takes forever.
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What exactly did you do in 10 minutes? I don't even know how to look at my titles without digging down into the approved images folder and that takes forever.
Use the catalog area- you double click on the image
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The "insights -> image gallery stats" is the easiest way to see the title/description I think
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Yeah, not doing that. They are going to have to tell me what to fix.
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Yeah, not doing that. They are going to have to tell me what to fix.
Yes, this is super stupid from SS. If they have detected something, they should be able to point us those. >:(
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Yeah, not doing that. They are going to have to tell me what to fix.
Exactly, I asked for the image ids. Otherwise you might fix what does not need fixing and not fix what in their view needs fixing.
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See my response to them below. If it was a mistake and they sent this to all contributors, they certainly managed to piss a lot of people off. If they are serious and they really have found some titles with repetitive words and choose to approach the contributors with such a nasty mail, then they have damaged their business for a long time to come. I will not hesitate to withdraw my portfolio if they don´t reply to my mail in an acceptable way. If you own any of their stock, maybe you should sell it now...
I am not aware of any such titles in my portfolio, I have NEVER deliberatly repeated words in my titles and I certainly have NEVER changed titles after aproval in order to do so. If indeed there are any such mistakes in my portfolio, it is because your review process failed to catch them, and not because I have modified the title afterwards.
I have more that 5000 files, and I can not and will not go through all of them in search of single mistakes. Also I will not "continue to create repetitive or spammy titles" for the simple reason that I have never done so, and I REALLY REALLY don´t like being accused of it.
You cannot require me to "edit these titles to bring them back into compliance" without telling me which titles tou are referring to. Since you imply that I have done this systematically, it should be easy for you to provide at least a few photo id´s or links as examples. If you fail to do that and still claim that I have systematically spammed my titles, then by all means suspend my portfolio, there are plenty of other Microstock sites.
I will not waste my time trying to fix a problem that in my view does not exist, and my advice to you is to improve your review process so you catch the mistakes already at that point instead of pissing your contributors off afterwards.
Until this is resolved, I will of course cease any further uploads to your site, and I will seriously consider removing all my files from you site, to save you the trouble of suspending my portfolio.
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Great response. I imagine their email server is getting overloaded tonight. What an absolutely bone-headed move.
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....
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Has anyone else noticed a sales drop after the massive email drop?
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Has anyone else noticed a sales drop after the massive email drop?
yup, for few hours nothing been sold
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It CAN'T be titles. I do have combinations like "dance student" and "dance class" in my keywords.
But then again (not a real titke...)... A man and a boy in matching white shirts with the American flag posing in front of the White House
"A" x 2 "white" x 2 "the" x 3. Are "a's" and "the's" our big sin?
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Got the same email and have to say, glad to see it wasn't only me.
I have emailed and asked for more information as it was so incredibly vague and of course, I feel I haven't deliberately done anything wrong either.
This is a scary and sad move by SS - I really hope they can clear this up ASAP for the sake of us all, and their reputation among contributors.
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I didn't get the email and only saw one other person say they didn't get one. I checked spam and even searched emails to make sure it I didn't miss it. Now I am paranoid thinking it was sent and I somehow missed it and I need to check titles. :-\. Just can't trust their system either way.
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I haven't received this email, but this looks like taken straight out of Franz Kafka's The Trial. People are accused of having committed a crime, but the details are not revealed. A remote, inaccessible authority is threatening with a punishment, but how can you defend yourself if you don't know what exactly your alleged crime is? Very Kafkaesque indeed.
A stupid bot has found some supposedly problematic images. Then the stupid bot should have returned their file IDs!
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I got the same email too. Shutterstock doesn't use the Title meta tag only the description, if I am not mistaken. Never less, I don't think that I have any image with repeating phrases. Not even sure how to check if I may have one for whatever reason.
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When looking of what Shutterstock considering "Title Spamming" http://www.shutterstock.com/contributorsupport/articles/kbat02/000010523 (http://www.shutterstock.com/contributorsupport/articles/kbat02/000010523) then I don't think that I have anything like this.
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I didn't get the email and only saw one other person say they didn't get one. I checked spam and even searched emails to make sure it I didn't miss it. Now I am paranoid thinking it was sent and I somehow missed it and I need to check titles. :-\. Just can't trust their system either way.
if that was me you read, ... i did get one but only after i said i didn't.
still i am not going to lose sleep over this, as it is very unlikely they are going to suspend everyone.
this is probably one of those f*ckups ss has been used to making lately.
i would write them to tell them to f***off but they probably think it is a compliment
to being such a f**khead.
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i got a pm from laurin rinder telling me he had heard that ss is preparing the company to be sold off, this was related to the amount of images they are accepting, so this could be related, having 77000 contributors work for them, cleaning up titles, so they look nice and clean and buffed up before they put themselves in the store window
Who will buy SS? Investment company? That would be very very bad for us
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Since they don't have an easy way to look at, much less edit, titles, they can fire me before I'm going to go through 11,000 images that they approved trying to figure out what they hell they are talking about.
Same here, though I've only got about 5,000 images (just checked, it's more than 6,000). I've never changed anything in any of them after approval, so if their "algorithm" says it is spam now their reviewers didn't in the past.
I note that they have replied on their forum, saying they will deal with all the e-mails sent to them and provide examples of what their automated system found from each portfolio. That's not good enough. If they want us to take the trouble of editing the title/caption/whatever then they can provide the image number and a problem description for every bloody one.
I also note that they ask for patience because it will be a big job for them to go through all the e-mails. Well, boo-hoo, hard luck! I'm sure it won't be as big a job for them, answering a few thousand e-mails, as editing 5,000 images would be for me. But they don't even want to do that job properly as they, apparently, don't intend to provide a full list of "spammed" images, just an example. And if the example turns out to be an editorial image following their spammy guidelines (which I objected to from the start) what then?
When iStock brought in their "disambiguation" nonsense a decade back I had maybe a couple of thousand images but it took so long to go through them that I only did about half before I gave up.
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No email for me .
Don't know what to think...
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I haven't received this email, but this looks like taken straight out of Franz Kafka's The Trial. People are accused of having committed a crime, but the details are not revealed. A remote, inaccessible authority is threatening with a punishment, but how can you defend yourself if you don't know what exactly your alleged crime is? Very Kafkaesque indeed.
A stupid bot has found some supposedly problematic images. Then the stupid bot should have returned their file IDs!
actually they're using the same method fotolia uses in their worthless 'rejection reviews' - there's something we didn't like about your image and here are 20 possible things that might be wrong with it. guess which one & correct it'
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This is the problem with crowd sourcing. They can waste tens of thousands of man hours pointlessly because it isn't their man hours. We are the ones having to pay out to fruitlessly search hundreds of thousands of images just because they couldn't be bothered to have a person spend an hour or two to get the script right and specify image numbers. Shows how much they value their contributors.
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http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/page-8#entry1555234 (http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/page-8#entry1555234)
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...I note that they have replied on their forum, saying they will deal with all the e-mails sent to them and provide examples of what their automated system found from each portfolio. That's not good enough. If they want us to take the trouble of editing the title/caption/whatever then they can provide the image number and a problem description for every bloody one.
I agree. That's what I asked for in the e-mail I sent to support earlier today:
"Dear Shutterstock,
I think your software that identifies spam titles and descriptions must be broken. I received the e-mail today that asserted I have spammed titles or descriptions and I find that completely unbelievable.
I’ve been with you since 2004. I take great care in managing titles, descriptions and keywords. I don’t spam. Being told I do without even a single example of that - how hard would it have been for the software that flagged me to provide image numbers to back up this claim? - is just insulting and careless.
Please provide me with a full list of the images you think are spammed.
regards,
Jo Ann Snover
Contributor 249"
It is stupid, lazy programming to flag accounts without giving each a full list of what you identified.
It's lazy or non-existent QA that you don't sanity check the number of accounts flagged in case your code is broken - oh, it flagged 49,999 contributors out of 50,000; perhaps I should have another look at what's getting flagged.
It's asleep-at-the-wheel management not to ask your coding minions to provide some samples of what got flagged, how many accounts, the e-mail, and so on.
It's apathetic supervision by the contributor success team to skip review and/or editing of the rude and accusatory e-mail you send out to so many contributors
It's not a great idea to use a new domain name on the e-mail you send out requiring contributor action (I've never had e-mail from Shutterstock(at)shutterstockmail(dot)com before and it got caught in my spam filters). Sending out e-mail *and* putting a note in the submit area when you log in would have been useful/thoughtful to make sure the information gets to everyone.
To cap it all off, their own forum is awash with people telling them they've made a terrible mistake and the best they can do is say they'll send some examples if we ask? The dismissive tone towards contributors and any issues raised really smacks of a "the peasants are revolting, sire" attitude on their part.
Any goodwill towards them on my part is utterly extinguished. As long as they can manage to sell my images I'll continue with them, but they've grown too big for their britches and appear to have acquired iStock's knack for totally botching software changes. Not a happy combination.
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I know some of you guys are worried and angry, but I don't think SS is crazy or stupid enough to ban unintentional violators. They're not going to go after people with a couple repeated keywords, but they will go after the blatant violators.
The ban hammer will come down and it's going to to be brutal for hundreds of spammy contributors. Those type of spammers probably have tens of thousands of the images and they're all titled the same way. Despite the warming, I don't think many of you guys won't be affected. If you think you have some images that violates their policy, change it. I've already gone through all of my images and made changes to some of the titles.
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I know some of you guys are worried and angry, but I don't think SS is crazy or stupid enough to ban unintentional violators.
Agreed.
The ban hammer will come down and it's going to to be brutal for hundreds of spammy contributors.
If their spam detector flags up just about every account and can't separate spammers from everyone else it is rather hard to see how they will identify the real spammers and close them down.
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If their spam detector flags up just about every account and can't separate spammers from everyone else it is rather hard to see how they will identify the real spammers and close them down.
It'll be easy for them. All they have to do is identify images with a single keywords repeated more than 2 times. They just need to filter out common words like "and", "of" and "with".
If an image title repeats a keyword 3 times, there's a really good chance it's spammer. They can easily pull up a list of all their titles and if they're all titled the same way, they will get banned.
I think this is an opportunity for all of us. By doing this, SS will improve the ranking system and flush out all the spammers from the top of the relevant category. This will lead to better discovery of relevant images. I think that benefits all non-spamming contributors.
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"were identified by our system as being potentially spammy"
How can a one believe in automated system so confirm.
And on top, the system shoots that it will suspend the account.
Man this is crazy, there are lot of contributors who don't find anything spammy and still got the threat to account suspension.
Edit: Sending an automated scripted email without manual search is also counted as spam.
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This is joke. Everyone knows who the spammers. Why not fire up the simple way, searching in the portfolios.
Filtering the spammer by title is another joke. Many spammer have good title:
Example:
http://www.shutterstock.com/portfolio/search.mhtml?searchterm=smartphone&x=0&y=0&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&lang=hu&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&submitter=4359412&photographer_name=mydes&search_group=&orient=&commercial_ok=&show_color_wheel=1&sort_method=popular (http://www.shutterstock.com/portfolio/search.mhtml?searchterm=smartphone&x=0&y=0&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&lang=hu&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&submitter=4359412&photographer_name=mydes&search_group=&orient=&commercial_ok=&show_color_wheel=1&sort_method=popular)
6page = 6k images from one phone icon. Congratulation.
This is spam, or poor design, but the title is ok.
When this contributors fired up, tomorrow sing up again with, friends id card.
Many spammer staring again.
And what about this?
http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-4359412p1.html (http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-4359412p1.html)
He have good titles, but when i see this portfoio i realize this is definitely spam. 17k images from 2016?
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But hey!!
It's free pizza Friday YAY!! ::)
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I do not want to scare you guys, but there seems to be more to it. Like you, I was very happy to find "spammygate" email from Shutterstock in my inbox today. Like you, I claim it is a bogus accusation and a result of some poorly designed bot malfunction because I have never spammed my titles. Most likely, I have some images with repeated words in the title, but those are well justified like many of the examples already posted in this thread. After reading this thread, I was just going to ignore the whole thing, let the dust settle, and laugh at the incompetence of SS bot programmers in the meantime. However, after checking my portfolio in SS I found that it has 10-30 images less now than it used to have just a few days ago (I am not giving exact number here so SS cannot figure out my contributor identity). I am 100% certain of that because I keep detailed statistics after each upload cycle. But I imagine for some of you who have huge portfolios with 10K+ images, losses of 50-100 files could have gone unnoticed. It seems SS not only ran the bot to scan our images for supposed spammy titles, but what is worse, they actually silently deleted some images. And the worst part is that they did not even tell us which ones they deleted and there is no way to figure it out because it is not reported anywhere. I urge you to check your portfolio because this stuff is getting really ugly.
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... But I imagine for some of you who have huge portfolios with 10K+ images, losses of 50-100 files could have gone unnoticed. It seems SS not only ran the bot to scan our images for supposed spammy titles, but what is worse, they actually silently deleted some images. And the worst part is that they did not even tell us which ones they deleted and there is no way to figure it out because it is not reported anywhere. I urge you to check your portfolio because this stuff is getting really ugly.
I get that feeling as well. I have around 5000 items on sale and I upload almost on a daily basis. My numbers keep changing all the time so I don't remember what my actual count was before this email.
Now I cannot figure out if any images have been removed. :P
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I know some of you guys are worried and angry, but I don't think SS is crazy or stupid enough to ban unintentional violators. They're not going to go after people with a couple repeated keywords, but they will go after the blatant violators.
The ban hammer will come down and it's going to to be brutal for hundreds of spammy contributors. Those type of spammers probably have tens of thousands of the images and they're all titled the same way. Despite the warming, I don't think many of you guys won't be affected. If you think you have some images that violates their policy, change it. I've already gone through all of my images and made changes to some of the titles.
Fine words but my problem is that you are asking us not to worry as SS will not be incompetent ... after they have clearly proven themselves to be incompetent.
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If their spam detector flags up just about every account and can't separate spammers from everyone else it is rather hard to see how they will identify the real spammers and close them down.
It'll be easy for them. All they have to do is identify images with a single keywords repeated more than 2 times. They just need to filter out common words like "and", "of" and "with".
If an image title repeats a keyword 3 times, there's a really good chance it's spammer. They can easily pull up a list of all their titles and if they're all titled the same way, they will get banned.
I think this is an opportunity for all of us. By doing this, SS will improve the ranking system and flush out all the spammers from the top of the relevant category. This will lead to better discovery of relevant images. I think that benefits all non-spamming contributors.
Well, it should be easy, I agree - but they don't seem to have been able to do that before spamming us all with their e-mail.
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The same here... Just received the email. It could be that they changed keywords (split them), but the e-mail referring only the titles, which are 100% ok.
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got this mail also yesterday and replied immediately stating that I have never ever changed any single character nor in my keywords, titles and/or descriptions after submission and that I expect an excuse for this false accusation as they accuse us of some fraudulent action >=99% of us have never committed.....
We have become aware that your portfolio now includes titles with spammy repetitive words or phrases
as opposed to before I guess
it would have been very easy for them to investigate as any change in the DB is timestamped to foolproof any date of change up to a milisecond
At least I will not take any action on it nor do I care, as I have much better things to do, there must be a holiday jobber sending out these mails.
To reach the high of impudence this mail is either signed not carrying any ticket number or alike to really follow this back or get a conversation. Calling this "unprofessional" is falling short. It's spam at its very best imho
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This can't of been sent out in error because they would of sent an apology email by now. So I presume they seriously think that people with thousands of images in their portfolio will click thousands of links to check every title? Still can't quite believe that they haven't foreseen the problem.
If they know what titles have repeated words, they need to send us links to those images.
This just makes me more determined to work harder to get away from my dependence on earnings from SS. Instead of wasting time clicking almost 5,000 links, I will work on making new images and other ways to diversify my earnings.
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Same for me, I received it last night !!!
And in the meantime just beafore, one of my last file, a set of two illustrated oysters has been rejected for 'spamming'.
My title was "Oyster Shell" and description "Illustration of a cartoon appetizing fresh and raw oyster shell, full and empty"
Where do you see some spam here !!! :o
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Obviously it is a direct consequence of the Brexit…
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This is the problem!
Check this:
http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&search_tracking_id=U6_2pyTyp6LW1nin2RGoXA&searchterm=website&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color= (http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&search_tracking_id=U6_2pyTyp6LW1nin2RGoXA&searchterm=website&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=)
This is the spamming. Relevant images just icons? Check the titles of this images:
Website Icon, Website Icon Vector, Website Icon Flat, Website Icon Sign,
Website Icon App, Website Icon UI, Website Icon Art, Website Icon Logo,
Website Icon Web, Website Icon JPG, Website Icon EPS
If you do not this, you are OK.
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What is this? My active clips and images decreased now for 2 images or clips :(
No notification, just happened.
Folks check your active clips and images number right now!
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I think I am missing some images, too. I sent them several emails about his.
They must be getting some ten thousand emails now from angry contributors.
Hope their servers break down.
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This is the problem!
Check this:
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&search_tracking_id=U6_2pyTyp6LW1nin2RGoXA&searchterm=website&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&search_tracking_id=U6_2pyTyp6LW1nin2RGoXA&searchterm=website&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=[/url])
This is the spamming. Relevant images just icons? Check the titles of this images:
Website Icon, Website Icon Vector, Website Icon Flat, Website Icon Sign,
Website Icon App, Website Icon UI, Website Icon Art, Website Icon Logo,
Website Icon Web, Website Icon JPG, Website Icon EPS
If you do not this, you are OK.
agree for them as spam, but this could also be a debatable topic.
When at shutterstock you get:
92,071,028 royalty-free stock images / 929,674 new stock images added this week
How can a person be creative, new and non-spammy with titles and keywords..?
You bring a new title, but hey thats already used.
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It's Shutterstock's right to do the housekeeping on their own site, as long as the contributors are made aware of the guidelines appropriately and so they can react and fix issues before Shutterstock feels the need to remove content.
Most importantly I am irritated that apparently content is being removed without sending out notification emails including the image IDs and a link to a thumbnail so we can follow up and check what the issue might have been.
As of now, content is being removed without a notification email nor do we know which content exactly it was and why it's deleted. Cearly, SS's definition of SPAMMING appears not to be the same as what we think it means.
Total fail. :-\
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Deleted.
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http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-2677336.html (http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-2677336.html)
Title example: Sun icon, Sun icon eps10, Sun icon vector, Sun icon eps, Sun icon jpg, Sun icon picture, Sun icon flat, Sun icon app, Sun icon web, Sun icon art, Sun icon, Sun icon object, Sun icon flat, Sun icon app
what can't they at least start by contacting these people directly. I mean that is blatant spamming and it looks like there are some massive portfolios doing it. With this scattergun approach they are making life more difficult for everyone including themselves.
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I'm absolutly sure, that I don't have any picture with repeated words or other kind of spam in title, description or keywords. Nuts! Must be some kind of attack anyway.
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Are they just so scared off offending these factories that they'd rather send emails out threatening everyone than risk offending the people who are really the problem?
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[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-2677336.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-2677336.html[/url])
Title example: Sun icon, Sun icon eps10, Sun icon vector, Sun icon eps, Sun icon jpg, Sun icon picture, Sun icon flat, Sun icon app, Sun icon web, Sun icon art, Sun icon, Sun icon object, Sun icon flat, Sun icon app
what can't they at least start by contacting these people directly. I mean that is blatant spamming and it looks like there are some massive portfolios doing it. With this scattergun approach they are making life more difficult for everyone including themselves.
I hope he also got email about spamming ...
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I still didnt receive the email but I went through my portfolio anyway. I have a bit less then 1000 images, it took me about 3 hours. I found around 5 old images where I had the same word repeated twice in description - not spamming of course :-/, just coincidence. At one point I found myself deleting also twice repeated "a", "the", "and"... and I felt like the biggest idiot in the galaxy :-/ I dont understand what they are actually forcing us to do??
I have such a bad feeling from all this, the way they chose to deal with spamming is so amateur it hurts :-/ We all know who the real sinners are - the huge ports with "icons, icons, icons, icons, background, background, background, background...... blah, blah, blah..... so sick of it!!
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[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-2677336.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-2677336.html[/url])
Title example: Sun icon, Sun icon eps10, Sun icon vector, Sun icon eps, Sun icon jpg, Sun icon picture, Sun icon flat, Sun icon app, Sun icon web, Sun icon art, Sun icon, Sun icon object, Sun icon flat, Sun icon app
what can't they at least start by contacting these people directly. I mean that is blatant spamming and it looks like there are some massive portfolios doing it. With this scattergun approach they are making life more difficult for everyone including themselves.
I hope he also got email about spamming ...
Well if he did then any impact of the email has been completely watered down by the fact almost everyone got it. They aren't going to be scared into sorting their act out as they haven't had any targeted response. SS aren't going to ban everyone from the site so they know they can carry on.
On a side note, I just tried going through some of my images, that part of the site wasn't working, no doubt because everyone is trying to do the same thing, so the real spammers couldn't sort it even if they wanted to, thanks again to the untargeted approach SS has chosen to take.
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Isn't 4th July a holiday in the US? So it is a long weekend and there will be no one available so sort out this mess until Tuesday?
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I think the problem stems from SS themselves. Over the past year they've been uploading huge portfolios all in one day without the images going through review. That opened up the floodgates to huge numbers of spammy titles and spammy images...thousands of identical icons in different colors with "icon" appearing 10 times in the title and keywords.
Then some regular contributors noticed and complained.
So SS, in their wisdom, decided to punish regular contributors for SS's own decision to mass upload spammy ports. Kill the messenger.
I think a few of my images may have been removed, yet these sun icons are still on the site.
That's a big Bronx cheer to us from Shutterstock.
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It's very odd that they would consider e.g Grus Grus as mentioned already, or crex crex or Bora Bora etc etc as spam but don't seem to care about totally inaccurate and misleading keywords which are as rife on SS as elsewhere, made worse by the way their search system splits keyword phrases (also as others do).
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But hey!!
It's free pizza Friday YAY!! ::)
Many companies in the U.S. will close early today as it is a holiday weekend and they are closed Monday. Probably cancelled the pizza party today.
But seriously, with a reduced staff due to summer vacations and likely early closing plus Monday holiday this silence could continue for several days.
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removed duplicate post, see below.
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This is the problem!
Check this:
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&search_tracking_id=U6_2pyTyp6LW1nin2RGoXA&searchterm=website&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&search_tracking_id=U6_2pyTyp6LW1nin2RGoXA&searchterm=website&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=[/url])
This is the spamming. Relevant images just icons? Check the titles of this images:
Website Icon, Website Icon Vector, Website Icon Flat, Website Icon Sign,
Website Icon App, Website Icon UI, Website Icon Art, Website Icon Logo,
Website Icon Web, Website Icon JPG, Website Icon EPS
If you do not this, you are OK.
I have NEVER done that, yet some of my images have been removed. So they are deleting other kinds of titles, too. But i will have no clue what i have done wrong, because i have NO clue what was deleted!
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So - they ran some automated process which I suppose gave them some results - I suppose they should be able to see the difference between a contributor with 5000 images, out of which all 5000 have description where the same words repeats 10 times.
And then you have a contributor with 5000 images, out of which for example 100 accidentally repeat the same word twice!
Cant they check their results better and distinguish between these two examples before sending the offending email to almost everyone? Suggesting that almost everyone is a spammer? Unbelievable and so unprofessional. Who came up with that?
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I do not want to scare you guys, but there seems to be more to it. Like you, I was very happy to find "spammygate" email from Shutterstock in my inbox today. Like you, I claim it is a bogus accusation and a result of some poorly designed bot malfunction because I have never spammed my titles. Most likely, I have some images with repeated words in the title, but those are well justified like many of the examples already posted in this thread. After reading this thread, I was just going to ignore the whole thing, let the dust settle, and laugh at the incompetence of SS bot programmers in the meantime. However, after checking my portfolio in SS I found that it has 10-30 images less now than it used to have just a few days ago (I am not giving exact number here so SS cannot figure out my contributor identity). I am 100% certain of that because I keep detailed statistics after each upload cycle. But I imagine for some of you who have huge portfolios with 10K+ images, losses of 50-100 files could have gone unnoticed. It seems SS not only ran the bot to scan our images for supposed spammy titles, but what is worse, they actually silently deleted some images. And the worst part is that they did not even tell us which ones they deleted and there is no way to figure it out because it is not reported anywhere. I urge you to check your portfolio because this stuff is getting really ugly.
Unfortunately I think you are right about having already deleted images. when i checked yesterday, i had about 878 images in my port. that was bugging me, but i am not good at remembering numbers. but now that you mention it, i think i had 950+ before*. so they already removed some, without even telling us which ones? sounds to me like they might be trying to cull the herd. what do they care if they lose tens of thousands of images, or hundreds or thousands of contributors, even if you have been there almost since the beginning? Acceptable losses.
i am thoroughly disgusted with this company who used to be the best. it is just a matter of time before they all start treating their suppliers like crap, even worse than they already are.
*I will check later
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Yep I got the email too and I never use spam in my titles.
Really upset about all this.
Ive got nearly 10,000 images at SS and Ive never had a problem in the past. Id like to know just how I would even change my titles if they tell me which ones because I cant work out how to do it .
Someone earlier said go into Image Gallery Stats but all I see there are the photos with the description and keywords. No sign of a title at all. Id at least like to be able to look at the titles.
Help please.
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I got this email about spammy titles last night just found this morning. I do not set out to create any spammy titles and am always very careful in how I describe my images. So I wrote asking for clarification. With all these people writing for clarification and specifics of their actual image titles it will probably take weeks to get a response.
I will read their article and go through my images anyway just to be extra careful and safe.
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They must have sent thousands of these emails, maybe every contributor received one, perhaps they could tell us exactly how many of these emails they have sent out, I have found it quite an upsetting piece of communication.
I have just checked the Shutterstock Forum and there are massive amounts of replies and views as there are here.
Looks like somebody at SS have made a big mistake, personally I am really unhappy with the tone of the letter.
It would be good if they could actually tell us which images they consider to have these repeated words in.
It would also be a good idea if they came on the Forum’s to explain themselves.
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Isn't 4th July a holiday in the US? So it is a long weekend and there will be no one available so sort out this mess until Tuesday?
The mess seems to be that they upset us all and perhaps deactivated some files. It's not the sort of thing where a few days delay will make a big difference, it just puts everything on ice.
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I also received the email message.
I'm very disappointed in such an oversimplified negative message; up to now I only received encouragement as "People love this image" and "Send more like this". I'm really not aware of any spam in the title or descriptions of the approximately fully approved (!) 4,000 photos in my portfolio. Meanwhile, I wrote that back to Shutterstock and I asked for clarification and a list of the offending photographs.
Apparently some of us are changing titles retrospectively with spam words. ('Editing them in this manner after your content has been published is not allowed'). If that is the problem, why Shutterstock does not block the editing of the titles by the submitters at all? That must be readily possible.
I also have a solution for the current issue:
-Remove all images with spammed titles and send a message to every submitter with a complete list of the deleted images;
-Block the afterwards editing of the titles, descriptions and keywords;
-Let each submitter optionally submit the deleted pictures again and let the reviewers also accurately look at the titles and descriptions.
That is my contribution to the discussion.
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IMHO with this mail shutterstock is leaving - like many others before - the territory of a reliable business partner. Threaten people for no reason with account suspension is not inly rude, but unprofessional.
Even if someone has titles like this ( I don`t): they changed their policy over night and could simply run a batch script to change existing titles and then threaten people if they do things like this _after_ the policy change came into effect.
Now they changed their policy over night and just threaten everybody.
What worries me is not the title case we have now....but imagine:
Suddeny you receive a mail like " we noticed you have various similar images in your portfolio of one series. This is considered Spam. Remove them or your account gets suspended."
Would be funny, right?
Shutterstock created a crowd sourced Monster and did nothing to educate it. Now it behaves bad and they do not know how to educate it beyond batch punishment. Very poor.
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I received too!
What a disrespect and threat!
ALSO, THERE IS NO SIGNATURE IN THAT EMAIL!
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Are they just so scared off offending these factories that they'd rather send emails out threatening everyone than risk offending the people who are really the problem?
wow i think you hit the nail on the head.
many years ago it was the same thing with mp3 which started as a site to promote "only indie musicians".
years later after these indie musicians made mp3 popular and earned them a lot of money
with a commissions of 0.0004 cts per dl of each song, they suddenly got noticed by some big names
like the dude from Journey,etc.
this dude got jealous because when he joined along with other names like Tori Amos, there were still
not top of the charts, with many indie artists holding the Top 9.
this dude complained to mp3 and mp3 sent nasty emails to warn these guys about whatever they can to get these indie top charters irate. then they said, from that year on, these same indie artists who made mp3 famous , must now paid a fee if they intend to stay , because these named recording artists are now with mp3 and everyone must be treated equally ie. you made us , but we really don't give a r@t$ a$$ . we now have these named artists and we no longer need you blokes.
sounds familiar???
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This is the problem with crowd sourcing. They can waste tens of thousands of man hours pointlessly because it isn't their man hours. We are the ones having to pay out to fruitlessly search hundreds of thousands of images just because they couldn't be bothered to have a person spend an hour or two to get the script right and specify image numbers. Shows how much they value their contributors.
yes, read my comment re music of mp3 site.
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I know some of you guys are worried and angry, but I don't think SS is crazy or stupid enough to ban unintentional violators.
Agreed.
The ban hammer will come down and it's going to to be brutal for hundreds of spammy contributors.
If their spam detector flags up just about every account and can't separate spammers from everyone else it is rather hard to see how they will identify the real spammers and close them down.
talking about flags, does anyone remember that bl**ding issue at dreamscomatosetime
where any blinking idiot who doesn't like your port could flag you for illegal irrelevan keywords.
and you get emails upon emails warnings about you using illegal keywords or whatever?
then you wrote them and they wrote back to say, "if you 're not commiting these offences, not to worry,just ignore these emails . " but they did nothing about those buggers who flood your port with flags.
seems like the brilliant mind who suggested that flagging with dt, is now working with ss
and thus this brilliant idea re spamming repeated words.
as if they need more people going in to clean up their keywords or whatever, after that
attack by the hacker.
seems like ss is intent on slowing down their service by f**king things up consistently
and getting contributors to be angry and complaining at the forums.
remember the mass rejection issue with pages of complaints at the forum???
as i said, there is some blockhead child of a major shareholder who must be running the company these days.
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Maybe we should all cool down, I am sure that someone at SS is having a hard time just now. Give them a day or two to sort this out, fire the person who sent out the rude message and then apologize to all of us. If not, we have the power to seriously damage their business by simply opting out on all our portfolio content, it only takes a minute but will have instant impact on their revenue if enough contributors do it.
But like I said, I´m sure that they will sort it out. Cool down, let them sweat for a while, have a rest, eat an orange, orange, orange and keep uploading to other sites.
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An hypothesis : it's july, they hired or outsourced a new team of inspectors for summer holidays totally new and unaware to the business, and applying the rules with way too much zeal. Maybe in the admin interface of the inspectors, there is an option "mark this contributor as a spammer" and they use it abusely, which is causing the 'automatic email' we all recieved.
But this does'nt explain the files apparently deleted for some contributors portfolio...
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Like all of you I received the famous email, like all of you I find it unjustified. I asked to another contributor that I know if he received it to, and he do not received anything. we have the same serious way to work but he is a major contributor with more than 50 000 images, personnaly I have 10,000 images online. I would like to know if some very large contributors had also been alerted or if the message is intended for small and medium contributors
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An hypothesis : it's july, they hired or outsourced a new team of inspectors for summer holidays totally new and unaware to the business, and applying the rules with way too much zeal. Maybe in the admin interface of the inspectors, there is an option "mark this contributor as a spammer" and they use it abusely, which is causing the 'automatic email' we all recieved.
But this does'nt explain the files apparently deleted for some contributors portfolio...
I haven´t uploaded for several weeks and I still got the message. Why are these inspectors going through old stuff? I guess they started a project with some temporary staff to tidy up the portfolios. Nothing wrong with that, except that it went horribly wrong.
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Going through my files, out of curiosity..
So, do I belong to jail for titles like this?
qte
Panama City, Panama - August 29, 2015: Panama city skyline is seen at night on August 29, 2015 in Panama, Central America
unqte
That's the word Panama x 4 times and I have a few of those actually :)
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Going through my files, out of curiosity..
So, do I belong to jail for titles like this?
qte
Panama City, Panama - August 29, 2015: Panama city skyline is seen at night on August 29, 2015 in Panama, Central America
unqte
That's the word Panama x 4 times and I have a few of those actually :)
Of course, your total portfolio should be instantly and permanently suspended since you obviously "create a poor customer experience". How dare you???
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Going through my files, out of curiosity..
So, do I belong to jail for titles like this?
qte
Panama City, Panama - August 29, 2015: Panama city skyline is seen at night on August 29, 2015 in Panama, Central America
unqte
That's the word Panama x 4 times and I have a few of those actually :)
This is NOT blatant spamming
Blatant spamming is like the examples they gave prange,prange,prange
This is what happens when a code is written to filter certain criteria and no sensible human checks it over
Mass confusion and anger
Usually happens when you try to do things in a quick way without thinking it through
Multi Billiondollar company run by ijits
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An hypothesis : it's july, they hired or outsourced a new team of inspectors for summer holidays totally new and unaware to the business, and applying the rules with way too much zeal. Maybe in the admin interface of the inspectors, there is an option "mark this contributor as a spammer" and they use it abusely, which is causing the 'automatic email' we all recieved.
But this does'nt explain the files apparently deleted for some contributors portfolio...
Problem is, it won't be a day or two. Someone deliberately sent this prior to a four day weekend in the states. They wanted the pot to boil over while they are on holiday.
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Going through my files, out of curiosity..
So, do I belong to jail for titles like this?
qte
Panama City, Panama - August 29, 2015: Panama city skyline is seen at night on August 29, 2015 in Panama, Central America
unqte
That's the word Panama x 4 times and I have a few of those actually :)
This is NOT blatant spamming
Blatant spamming is like the examples they gave prange,prange,prange
This is what happens when a code is written to filter certain criteria and no sensible human checks it over
Mass confusion and anger
Usually happens when you try to do things in a quick way without thinking it through
run by ijits
At this rate they may not be a Multi Billiondollar company for very long.
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dozens of images deleted and have no clue which or why. thought the email said to change titles, why delete images instantaneously without giving us time to correct. harsh
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An hypothesis : it's july, they hired or outsourced a new team of inspectors for summer holidays totally new and unaware to the business, and applying the rules with way too much zeal. Maybe in the admin interface of the inspectors, there is an option "mark this contributor as a spammer" and they use it abusely, which is causing the 'automatic email' we all recieved.
But this does'nt explain the files apparently deleted for some contributors portfolio...
I haven´t uploaded for several weeks and I still got the message. Why are these inspectors going through old stuff? I guess they started a project with some temporary staff to tidy up the portfolios. Nothing wrong with that, except that it went horribly wrong.
The fact is that almost each summer, I have strange files rejections with totally unjustified reasons. But true I do upload on a regular basis (30 i/m).
As you say maybe they have hired some staff to tidy up the portfolios, but probably the same people who are doing strange rejections...
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Along with others I can only think of those editorial images where I have London,England in the place and then London again in the actual description sentence e.g. Fleet Street, London
Anyway, I wrote back asking for clarification. Have to say the e-mail read like it was written by some keyboard mashing oik in the lower echelons with poor communication skills....but probably came from the higher ups.
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With such large companies it is very naive to think that this was just a mistake in all chain of administration. What could happen? Somebody ordered automation, somebody probably outsourced his own work to unknown village using any freelancing site, somebody didn't verify, somebody approved, and finally how often you saw that companies apologize? No, they try to take a benefit even from disgusting situation. Or not the whole company, but related to the events employees or shareholders. Such people will care about current short time benefits, shaking the basement and allowing their people to come. Companies start, grow, and finally become thick and old. Treatment is not always return to a previous state, sometimes amputations happen.
Sending of such type of e-mail it is really spitting to faces of all who worked hard for this business.
Automation from one side, but the text of the e-mail was written by a human! Not surprised that it was not signed.
Somebody above mentioned how the time of sending was choosen - just another proof that in total there was no mistake.
Who is familiar with the laws regarding crowdsourced businesses - please post your comment about this e-mail and last events.
Direct offences make people angry and emotional, yes, it is known and it works.
SS have to come here with explanations, not leaving us too suspicious.
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I can't loose my ss income so I am forced to go through all my images this holiday weekend ...
SS is down right now too which make this harder ...
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Somebody called Kate at Shutterstock is responsible for these emails she posted on the Announcements section, loads of people are worried about it as the views on it are 36k+
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Shutterstock is down, and according to one site, has been down for 2.5 hours
Thats a long time to be down without warning, and nothing I can see on their twitter account?
Related to this image spamming fiasco?
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C r a p I cant even log in the the contributor side. If all I get is two weeks and the site is down how on earth do they expect us to fix our illegal, horrible, intentional phantom spammy titles?
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Perhaps they have an outage caused by the massive amount of contributors accessing the site to find out what is going on.
Maybe they emailed every contributor with this Repeating word email
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Tried to log in this morning and all I get is a page with this text,
"Something went wrong"
Well, they are right about that.
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but why are they deleting images and what about editorial images
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I just posted this on Shutterstocks "Contibrutor experience"
Dear Shutterstock,
You have recently offended thousands of your contributors, including myself, with a rude e-mail accusing us of spamming titles and threatening us to suspend our portfolios.
Personally I have wasted a lot of time seaching for spammed titles in my portfolio (more than 5000 files) without finding any. I cannot understand why these spammed titles (if they exist) have not been caught by your approval process. Your explanation seems to be that I have edited the titles after the files were approved. That is not true.
If you are serious at all about this, please show that you care about contributors, re-assure us that it was a mistake and that we don´have to worry. If you don´t show us that respect, and keep claiming that all contributors that received the e-mail are spammers that "create poor customer experience", must "edit these titles to bring them back into compliance" and should not "continue to create repetitive or spammy titles" or risk suspension, then tell us so so that we can opt out on all our contents and then leave your site. Since we create such bad customer experience I am sure we will not be missed. Don´t bother to suspend our portfolios, we will happily do it for you.
Thank you.
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I can't loose my ss income so I am forced to go through all my images this holiday weekend ...
SS is down right now too which make this harder ...
I can't afford to lose my SS income either but begging on the streets would be more fun than going through almost 5,000 images when I have done nothing wrong. We shouldn't be made to waste so much time like this and if we all do as they ask, what crazy thing will we be required to do next?
It should be easy for them to send everyone links to the images that they want edited. If they can't do that, then I'm not confident about their future and wouldn't want to waste any more of my time doing a task that shouldn't be necessary.
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JUST GOT THIS EMAIL FROM SHUTTERSTOCK (sigh of relief)
We would like to offer a clarification about yesterday’s email regarding the titles of your content. This email was distributed to a broader group of contributors than we intended. We sincerely apologize for the concern caused. We want to reassure you that no further action is required from you.
The vast majority of our community work hard to consistently create powerful and descriptive titles to support their work. Our goal is to create a fair and level playing field for our entire contributor community and we value the time and energy invested into preparing your content for license on Shutterstock.
We have robust compliance standards in place to protect the integrity of your content and we are investing heavily in developing a new platform to improve the contributor experience. You may have seen some of the new pages recently rolled out. Included in this development will be new contributor tools to help with your content submission process.
We are working tirelessly on creating the best contributor experience for our content creators and we apologize for the communication yesterday. You can expect that any further communication from us will be detailed, informative, specific, and actionable.
Thank you,
Jon Oringer
and
The Shutterstock Contributor Support Team
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Wow, a reply via e-mail!!!
We would like to offer a clarification about yesterday’s email regarding the titles of your content. This email was distributed to a broader group of contributors than we intended. We sincerely apologize for the concern caused. We want to reassure you that no further action is required from you.
The vast majority of our community work hard to consistently create powerful and descriptive titles to support their work. Our goal is to create a fair and level playing field for our entire contributor community and we value the time and energy invested into preparing your content for license on Shutterstock.
We have robust compliance standards in place to protect the integrity of your content and we are investing heavily in developing a new platform to improve the contributor experience. You may have seen some of the new pages recently rolled out. Included in this development will be new contributor tools to help with your content submission process.
We are working tirelessly on creating the best contributor experience for our content creators and we apologize for the communication yesterday. You can expect that any further communication from us will be detailed, informative, specific, and actionable.
Thank you,
Jon Oringer
and
The Shutterstock Contributor Support Team
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I got the email too, thought they would get that sorted much quicker but at least I didn't waste time looking at all my titles.
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JUST GOT THIS EMAIL FROM SHUTTERSTOCK (sigh of relief)
We would like to offer a clarification about yesterday’s email regarding the titles of your content. This email was distributed to a broader group of contributors than we intended. We sincerely apologize for the concern caused. We want to reassure you that no further action is required from you.
The vast majority of our community work hard to consistently create powerful and descriptive titles to support their work. Our goal is to create a fair and level playing field for our entire contributor community and we value the time and energy invested into preparing your content for license on Shutterstock.
We have robust compliance standards in place to protect the integrity of your content and we are investing heavily in developing a new platform to improve the contributor experience. You may have seen some of the new pages recently rolled out. Included in this development will be new contributor tools to help with your content submission process.
We are working tirelessly on creating the best contributor experience for our content creators and we apologize for the communication yesterday. You can expect that any further communication from us will be detailed, informative, specific, and actionable.
Thank you,
Jon Oringer
and
The Shutterstock Contributor Support Team
Yes, me too. I appreciate the apology. But they still didn't answer my questions...were any of my images deleted or moved to Rejected Photos? If so, which ones?
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Yes me too. Ss test us?
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Common guys, SS did a mistake and they accepted their mistake. Chill down.
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Thank you, Jon, and shutterstock for saving my weekend.
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Common guys, SS did a mistake and they accepted their mistake. Chill down.
I can accept when a mistake is made, we all do that, but the only mistake here might have been the carpet-bomb email. The removing of images was certainly no mistake, and I don't think I will "chill down" until I understand what happened to my images, assuming some have disappeared*. For a company to remove images, with no notice or chance to fix, is not a mistake.
*I have looked through paperwork and I can't confirm or deny that any of my images have disappeared. I can only rely on SS answering my email to confirm that images were deleted, or that no images were deleted.
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An hypothesis : it's july, they hired or outsourced a new team of inspectors for summer holidays totally new and unaware to the business, and applying the rules with way too much zeal. Maybe in the admin interface of the inspectors, there is an option "mark this contributor as a spammer" and they use it abusely, which is causing the 'automatic email' we all recieved.
But this does'nt explain the files apparently deleted for some contributors portfolio...
or they just redirected the new uploads to Atilla 's household.
good thing you reminded me of July; looks like i won't be uploading anything for this month.
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Hard to be a Company.
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I received the "we apologize" e-mail this morning too. It used Jon's name and although it didn't say the magic words "I'm sorry", it did say that any further communications would be "detailed, informative, specific, and actionable", which is good. It was a bit "mistakes were made", but they're corporate now, so I guess that's just how missives are.
Unless the total number of files in my portfolio is being mis-reported on the contributor home page, they haven't deleted anything of mine. There's the correct number of pages at 100 per page when I look at my portfolio, so I think it's intact. Not sure how those of you with missing files figure out what went away, but Are you going to contact support to complain? It might be another software snafu rather than intentional deletion, but either way, one would hope they have detailed records they could consult...
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Common guys, SS did a mistake and they accepted their mistake. Chill down.
I can accept when a mistake is made, we all do that, but the only mistake here might have been the carpet-bomb email. The removing of images was certainly no mistake, and I don't think I will "chill down" until I understand what happened to my images, assuming some have disappeared. For a company to remove images, with no notice or chance to fix, is not a mistake.
*. You uppset about removing images and yet, you don't even know, if they were removed from your port. You're a joke.
When you don't have anything intelligent to say, resort to bad language, name calling and bullying. ::)
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I received the "we apologize" e-mail this morning too. It used Jon's name and although it didn't say the magic words "I'm sorry", it did say that any further communications would be "detailed, informative, specific, and actionablel", which is good. It was a bit "mistakes were made", but they're corporate now, so I guess that's just how missives are.
Unless the total number of files in my portfolio is being mis-reported on the contributor home page, they haven't deleted anything of mine. There's the correct number of pages at 100 per page when I look at my portfolio, so I think it's intact. Not sure how those of you with missing files figure out what went away, but Are you going to contact support to complain? It might be another software snafu rather than intentional deletion, but either way, one would hope they have detailed records they could consult...
I am not exactly sure that files went away, I just know the total seems off. I did contact support, but not to complain, I just asked them to confirm whether some of my files were deleted, and if so, which ones. It would be nice to have a chance to correct the problems (if there are any).
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The best part of the "apologies" email from SS today (apart from a sigh of relief) is this one:
"We have robust compliance standards in place to protect the integrity of your content and we are investing heavily in developing a new platform to improve the contributor experience. You may have seen some of the new pages recently rolled out. Included in this development will be new contributor tools to help with your content submission process."
Seems like they plan to introduce new tools for contributors. Frankly, the SS uploading process is the best for me personally, so I'm curious to see what else they can introduce.
Anyway, congrats to all of us with justice and TGIF!
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I will take it! I can enjoy my holiday weekend now!
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Good, so no work to take home for the weekend :)
Today's email from Jon started with "Dear Lana", thanks for that, coz yesterday it was just Spammer Lana ;D
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Sorry to have interrupted your Independence Day weekend ,Jon !
but it's a good sign, and i won't be grouchy over the missing "i'm sorry",
because at least, Jon was brought in to go full damage-control, if i know my business protocol.
which hopefully means the idiot-good-for-nothing who had been ruining running the
office has been sacked or moved to some position where less damage is likely eg sanitation management (ie washing toilets)
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Shutterstock's forums have a post from an admin saying that no images were removed as part of this title spamming exercise
http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/?p=1555859 (http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/?p=1555859)
I see someone has reported other removals (Harley Davidson content was mentioned here on MSG), so perhaps they're doing other cleanup?
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I'm glad they got it sorted out before the weekend, but have a few problems with it. First, it's not really a 'clarifcation.' This same email was posted on their forum, so does that mean that none of the people that got it should have? in that case, who was supposed to get it - everyone who didn't?
And yeah, there was an apology of sorts, but going from calling us spammers and threatening to suspend our accounts to, "this went to a broader audience than intended."
I wonder how many people, besides the ones who posted here and on SS wasted hours going through hundreds or thousands of images because of the accusation and threat.
SS needs to knock heads and clean house. And someone needs to be in charge
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Got the same email where they apologized... At least this is over for the moment..
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Yes, and to make up for the needless panic that most of us experienced over the last 24 hours, an awesome gesture for freaking us all out would be a nice little bonus in this month's payout.
I mean seriously, many many people were in distress over this, feeling like they had just lost their income. lost countless work hours trying to figure this out and many, I am sure lost sleep as well and a nice bonus to make up for the near heart attacks would be a sweet gesture :-)
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Move on people, show is over
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I want new D-810s because of this!!! :P :P :P :P
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I want new D-810s because of this!!! :P :P :P :P
I can sell you mine ;)
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Shutterstock's forums have a post from an admin saying that no images were removed as part of this title spamming exercise
[url]http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/?p=1555859[/url] ([url]http://forums.submit.shutterstock.com/topic/88687-shutterstocks-position-on-repeated-words-and-phrases-in-titles/?p=1555859[/url])
I see someone has reported other removals (Harley Davidson content was mentioned here on MSG), so perhaps they're doing other cleanup?
Thanks for that Jo Ann. Good to know no images were deleted. I am making notes and taking screenshots in case of future problems.
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I got it too, and started going through my images and checking titles, but then I got this one today:
We would like to offer a clarification about yesterday’s email regarding the titles of your content. This email was distributed to a broader group of contributors than we intended. We sincerely apologize for the concern caused. We want to reassure you that no further action is required from you.
The vast majority of our community work hard to consistently create powerful and descriptive titles to support their work. Our goal is to create a fair and level playing field for our entire contributor community and we value the time and energy invested into preparing your content for license on Shutterstock.
We have robust compliance standards in place to protect the integrity of your content and we are investing heavily in developing a new platform to improve the contributor experience. You may have seen some of the new pages recently rolled out. Included in this development will be new contributor tools to help with your content submission process.
We are working tirelessly on creating the best contributor experience for our content creators and we apologize for the communication yesterday. You can expect that any further communication from us will be detailed, informative, specific, and actionable.
Thank you,
Jon Oringer
and
The Shutterstock Contributor Support Team
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Common guys, SS did a mistake and they accepted their mistake. Chill down.
I can accept when a mistake is made, we all do that, but the only mistake here might have been the carpet-bomb email. The removing of images was certainly no mistake, and I don't think I will "chill down" until I understand what happened to my images, assuming some have disappeared. For a company to remove images, with no notice or chance to fix, is not a mistake.
*. You uppset about removing images and yet, you don't even know, if they were removed from your port. You're a joke.
When you don't have anything intelligent to say, resort to bad language, name calling and bullying. ::)
+100
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Yes, and to make up for the needless panic that most of us experienced over the last 24 hours, an awesome gesture for freaking us all out would be a nice little bonus in this month's payout.
I mean seriously, many many people were in distress over this, feeling like they had just lost their income. lost countless work hours trying to figure this out and many, I am sure lost sleep as well and a nice bonus to make up for the near heart attacks would be a sweet gesture :-)
MOST? I hope not! i'm amazed at the paranoia & insecurity that seeps thru this forum
" SS is down an hour "
"i didn't have any sales today"
"my payment is late because of the 4th of july"
then the rumors about files being deleted BECAUSE OF this email
shift happens, and this is a commodity business for the long term - individual blips don't matter - they're noise, not signal
that email was obviously a mistake, especially obvious once we saw here how many (everyone?) got the email, so there was no reason not to wait a day or 2 to let things settle. no reason to search & edit images that likely needed no changes (eg all editorial images before the changes in policy)
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Yes, and to make up for the needless panic that most of us experienced over the last 24 hours, an awesome gesture for freaking us all out would be a nice little bonus in this month's payout.
I mean seriously, many many people were in distress over this, feeling like they had just lost their income. lost countless work hours trying to figure this out and many, I am sure lost sleep as well and a nice bonus to make up for the near heart attacks would be a sweet gesture :-)
MOST? I hope not! i'm amazed at the paranoia & insecurity that seeps thru this forum
" SS is down an hour "
"i didn't have any sales today"
"my payment is late because of the 4th of july"
then the rumors about files being deleted BECAUSE OF this email
shift happens, and this is a commodity business for the long term - individual blips don't matter - they're noise, not signal
that email was obviously a mistake, especially obvious once we saw here how many (everyone?) got the email, so there was no reason not to wait a day or 2 to let things settle. no reason to search & edit images that likely needed no changes (eg all editorial images before the changes in policy)
LOL, so true.
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so...
we're back in DEFCON 5.
:-)
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well, my images are back as well, i was missing over 50 images.
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I got the email too. Went through all my photos....
Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk
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all 3 images
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Got email with apology and clarification from Oringer and SS this morning. It was a mistake. Everybody calm down. "We want to reassure you that no further action is required from you."
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Got email with apology and clarification from Oringer and SS this morning. It was a mistake. Everybody calm down. "We want to reassure you that no further action is required from you."
Wouldn't that just be the S H ! T S if in a month our accounts were closed for not cleaning up titles (by taking no further action)? :'(
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that email was obviously a mistake, especially obvious once we saw here how many (everyone?) got the email, so there was no reason not to wait a day or 2 to let things settle. no reason to search & edit images that likely needed no changes (eg all editorial images before the changes in policy)
Exactly, it was so obviously sent out to so many people in error that I couldn't understand the panic. When these things happen it's best just to sit back a couple of days and see what happens before wasting your time.
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that email was obviously a mistake, especially obvious once we saw here how many (everyone?) got the email, so there was no reason not to wait a day or 2 to let things settle. no reason to search & edit images that likely needed no changes (eg all editorial images before the changes in policy)
Exactly, it was so obviously sent out to so many people in error that I couldn't understand the panic. When these things happen it's best just to sit back a couple of days and see what happens before wasting your time.
I agree on your last remark.
But, even if it was obviously a mistake, a Shutterstock employee on the SS forums actually confirmed the e-mail was sent intentionally, so the panic / anger was understandable.
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i didnt read an apology
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that email was obviously a mistake, especially obvious once we saw here how many (everyone?) got the email, so there was no reason not to wait a day or 2 to let things settle. no reason to search & edit images that likely needed no changes (eg all editorial images before the changes in policy)
Exactly, it was so obviously sent out to so many people in error that I couldn't understand the panic. When these things happen it's best just to sit back a couple of days and see what happens before wasting your time.
"So obvious" was it? Why was it so obvious to you: because Shutterstock can do no wrong? Please. The idea that a stock agency would crack down on some perceived violation of the rules to such an unreasonable extreme that it includes almost everyone, is not that hard to believe. Especially when an SS admin confirms the email was sent intentionally and says that examples of the violating images would be sent out. Anger and panic are completely justified.
I think it's more likely the back pedal and retraction email signed by Oringer was a panic reaction on the part of Shutterstock because they angered so many contributors. It may have been a mistake and heads may roll at head office but I am sceptical of that. I think they will simply wait a bit and try a different approach.
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Am i the only one who didn't get the email ?
I feel like i missed the party.
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Am i the only one who didn't get the email ?
I feel like i missed the party.
You're not.
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that email was obviously a mistake, especially obvious once we saw here how many (everyone?) got the email, so there was no reason not to wait a day or 2 to let things settle. no reason to search & edit images that likely needed no changes (eg all editorial images before the changes in policy)
Exactly, it was so obviously sent out to so many people in error that I couldn't understand the panic. When these things happen it's best just to sit back a couple of days and see what happens before wasting your time.
I agree on your last remark.
But, even if it was obviously a mistake, a Shutterstock employee on the SS forums actually confirmed the e-mail was sent intentionally, so the panic / anger was understandable.
yes, and that employee no doubt has been parachuted by , or is now parachuted to,.. IStock ;)
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The e-mail obviously wasn't a mistake. The mistake was in programming the bot that flagged up the "spammed" results, otherwise the initial confirmation that the warning was real wouldn't have been made. They must have thought a few dozen or few hundred serious spammers would be pulled up and receive the automated mail, but the bot made vastly more connections than they expected. That's how I read it, anyway.
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the only consolation , for me, is that this is the first time Oringer is writing us since he last emailed us about ss going public.
but this time, more importantly , is the first time that Oringer stepped into the office to address the concerns of contributors, and the f**kups of ss frontline managers.
i see this as a good sign that heads will roll and hopefully there will be major changes in how ss
treat their contributors.
in a utopian alternative reality, i would anticipate a vast drop in ss share prices so that all the vultures who bought ss (to make a killing and not caring a hoot about contributor relations and long term-loyalty), would go into a major scale panic to dump their controlling shares,
so that Oringer will come back in to buy back all ss shares at a grand profit,
and move back to ss as a private enterprise.
but i won't hold my breath for that.
however, it can happen, as in entreprise history, many is the instance where such flipping has been done.
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The e-mail obviously wasn't a mistake. The mistake was in programming the bot that flagged up the "spammed" results, otherwise the initial confirmation that the warning was real wouldn't have been made. They must have thought a few dozen or few hundred serious spammers would be pulled up and receive the automated mail, but the bot made vastly more connections than they expected. That's how I read it, anyway.
But that's where one of several huge mistakes were made. The program that scoured the images looking for spam and the program that sent the email should have been separate and independent. Run the first program, evaluate the results, and only then, let the bot send the email. If they had done that, it would have been obvious that the first part of the program was buggy or the parameters were incorrect.
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Obviously some folks at SS HQ have been spending too much time in the fitness room and eating free pizza. :o
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http://www.shutterstock.com/de/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html?src=aarskWmOLD8Q5bcVImmorg-1-1 (http://www.shutterstock.com/de/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html?src=aarskWmOLD8Q5bcVImmorg-1-1)
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[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/de/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html?src=aarskWmOLD8Q5bcVImmorg-1-1[/url])
What a sad portfolio - perhaps 200 actual images and endless repetitions of similars - glasses, skulls, easter eggs and so on
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html (http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html)
The titles are spammed, the keywords are spammed and visually, 9/10 of the portfolio is spam. SS must really want to bulk up the library to permit this sort of pollution.
If you change the title after approval, do they change the image page URL? If not, these URLs indicate the image was approved this way, not changed afterwards.
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The e-mail obviously wasn't a mistake. The mistake was in programming the bot that flagged up the "spammed" results, otherwise the initial confirmation that the warning was real wouldn't have been made. They must have thought a few dozen or few hundred serious spammers would be pulled up and receive the automated mail, but the bot made vastly more connections than they expected. That's how I read it, anyway.
But that's where one of several huge mistakes were made. The program that scoured the images looking for spam and the program that sent the email should have been separate and independent. Run the first program, evaluate the results, and only then, let the bot send the email. If they had done that, it would have been obvious that the first part of the program was buggy or the parameters were incorrect.
There was a famous chess player who said that when his opponent made his first mistake he usually ignored it because it was invariably preparing for an even worse mistake. I guess the same principle works here, too.
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The e-mail obviously wasn't a mistake. The mistake was in programming the bot that flagged up the "spammed" results, otherwise the initial confirmation that the warning was real wouldn't have been made. They must have thought a few dozen or few hundred serious spammers would be pulled up and receive the automated mail, but the bot made vastly more connections than they expected. That's how I read it, anyway.
But that's where one of several huge mistakes were made. The program that scoured the images looking for spam and the program that sent the email should have been separate and independent. Run the first program, evaluate the results, and only then, let the bot send the email. If they had done that, it would have been obvious that the first part of the program was buggy or the parameters were incorrect.
There was a famous chess player who said that when his opponent made his first mistake he usually ignored it because it was invariably preparing for an even worse mistake. I guess the same principle works here, too.
consider the issues that have been occuring for the past 2 years:
- review of images , out of focus.. when many complained they were not OOF
- mass rejection of images by experienced contributors (poor composition, WB,etc as if
they all suddenly contracted alzheimer and forgot composition, wb, focusing,etc)
- email sent out warning many, correction... a majority.. that their accounts will be suspended
for spamming.words and phrases.
i suspect all these were done by bots.
it was only when Oringer came in to his corporation to find most of the work have not been
done by the humans he hired and have been paying them wages while they
played ping pong or use the new building facilities during work hours
while their workstation were all being manned by bots.
if it were not for this latest incident, a worse tragedy could have happened
ie. the king bot would be taken over the whole company
and bought over all the shares of ss,
and we would have a new AI takeover movie in real life.
and we would all be extras in the movie, without being paid 8)
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[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/de/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html?src=aarskWmOLD8Q5bcVImmorg-1-1[/url])
What a sad portfolio - perhaps 200 actual images and endless repetitions of similars - glasses, skulls, easter eggs and so on
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html[/url])
The titles are spammed, the keywords are spammed and visually, 9/10 of the portfolio is spam. SS must really want to bulk up the library to permit this sort of pollution.
If you change the title after approval, do they change the image page URL? If not, these URLs indicate the image was approved this way, not changed afterwards.
What a shame . That person has some talent and individual style too. The spamming must be an act of desperation.
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I got it and then the next morning got a we apologize you shouldn't have gotten that letter. Something about to wide of an audience.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
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[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/de/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html?src=aarskWmOLD8Q5bcVImmorg-1-1[/url])
What a sad portfolio - perhaps 200 actual images and endless repetitions of similars - glasses, skulls, easter eggs and so on
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html[/url])
The titles are spammed, the keywords are spammed and visually, 9/10 of the portfolio is spam. SS must really want to bulk up the library to permit this sort of pollution.
If you change the title after approval, do they change the image page URL? If not, these URLs indicate the image was approved this way, not changed afterwards.
How can this get past a reviewer? And here the rest of us have to put up with seemingly random rejection reasons. Something is deeply wrong there.
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[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/de/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html?src=aarskWmOLD8Q5bcVImmorg-1-1[/url])
What a sad portfolio - perhaps 200 actual images and endless repetitions of similars - glasses, skulls, easter eggs and so on
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html[/url])
The titles are spammed, the keywords are spammed and visually, 9/10 of the portfolio is spam. SS must really want to bulk up the library to permit this sort of pollution.
If you change the title after approval, do they change the image page URL? If not, these URLs indicate the image was approved this way, not changed afterwards.
How can this get past a reviewer? And here the rest of us have to put up with seemingly random rejection reasons. Something is deeply wrong there.
I have the same question, what was the reviewer doing when he let these vectors pass with such a title:
Emoticon emoji set. Emoticon emoji icon. Emoticon emoji design. Emoticon emoji flat. Emoticon emoji art. Emoticon emoji image. Emoticon emoji illustration. Emoticon emoji vector. Emoticon emoji eps 10
http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/2271365/429629455/stock-vector-emoticon-emoji-set-emoticon-emoji-icon-emoticon-emoji-design-emoticon-emoji-flat-emoticon-emoji-429629455.jpg (http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/2271365/429629455/stock-vector-emoticon-emoji-set-emoticon-emoji-icon-emoticon-emoji-design-emoticon-emoji-flat-emoticon-emoji-429629455.jpg)
Even now these spammers don't care to correct these titles, obviously they got no email, or just don't care.
These spammy titles are a new trend and obviously they work wonders in search and
rank (http://m-rank.net//).
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Generally all this is not about a technical mistake, but continuing discussion about changes of treament of contributors in ss started several years ago. Workflow, e-mail wording, dependance of sales from outside activities of contributor, manner of communication, canned answers, etc etc etc. Attempt to remove spammers served other purposes.
Here are a lot of programmers on msg. Who will think that creation of a script which will cycle through database searching for spam by selected criteria, is so difficult that could lead to such a mistake? How to protect the data, resist attacks, data manipulation with such level of work? Shame really.
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I got it and then the next morning got a we apologize you shouldn't have gotten that letter. Something about to wide of an audience.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
there was no apology
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[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/de/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-385305055/stock-vector-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-heart.html?src=aarskWmOLD8Q5bcVImmorg-1-1[/url])
What a sad portfolio - perhaps 200 actual images and endless repetitions of similars - glasses, skulls, easter eggs and so on
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-318128897/stock-vector-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses-glasses.html[/url])
The titles are spammed, the keywords are spammed and visually, 9/10 of the portfolio is spam. SS must really want to bulk up the library to permit this sort of pollution.
If you change the title after approval, do they change the image page URL? If not, these URLs indicate the image was approved this way, not changed afterwards.
How can this get past a reviewer? And here the rest of us have to put up with seemingly random rejection reasons. Something is deeply wrong there.
I have the same question, what was the reviewer doing when he let these vectors pass with such a title:
Emoticon emoji set. Emoticon emoji icon. Emoticon emoji design. Emoticon emoji flat. Emoticon emoji art. Emoticon emoji image. Emoticon emoji illustration. Emoticon emoji vector. Emoticon emoji eps 10
[url]http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/2271365/429629455/stock-vector-emoticon-emoji-set-emoticon-emoji-icon-emoticon-emoji-design-emoticon-emoji-flat-emoticon-emoji-429629455.jpg[/url] ([url]http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/2271365/429629455/stock-vector-emoticon-emoji-set-emoticon-emoji-icon-emoticon-emoji-design-emoticon-emoji-flat-emoticon-emoji-429629455.jpg[/url])
Even now these spammers don't care to correct these titles, obviously they got no email, or just don't care.
These spammy titles are a new trend and obviously they work wonders in search and
rank ([url]http://m-rank.net//[/url]).
I'll bet you dollars to donuts that everyone who received the first email received the second as well. I'm sure they didn't do any further programming to tease real spammers out of their original email list. So all the spammers now feel there's no action needed on their part.
Obviously this port passed through review with the spammy titles in place. All in all a complete fail for Shutterstock.
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I'll bet you dollars to donuts that everyone who received the first email received the second as well. I'm sure they didn't do any further programming to tease real spammers out of their original email list. So all the spammers now feel there's no action needed on their part.
Obviously this port passed through review with the spammy titles in place. All in all a complete fail for Shutterstock.
I could understand if a few of these spammy images passed review but there are thousands of spammy vectors and entire ports. You just have to hover over the images on this page (http://m-rank.net/#top1/) and see for yourself.
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So, how do we know, that the titles weren't changed after files were accepted?
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So, how do we know, that the titles weren't changed after files were accepted?
I believe that it's because SS assumes that their reviewers would have picked up the spam and the artist "HAD TO HAVE CHANGED" them post acceptance. Hence the accusatory message in their email. To me it seems like an awful lot of work to submit a legit batch then go into the editing system after acceptance with the strategy to spam your titles (and even keywords). So there has to be culpability on the part of inspectors. It will be VERY INTERESTING over the next couple of months to track a few spammy ports to see if they actually take action on the offending artists.
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Obviously this port passed through review with the spammy titles in place. All in all
I could understand if a few of these spammy images passed review but there are thousands of spammy vectors and entire ports. You just have to hover over the images on this page ([url]http://m-rank.net/#top1/[/url]) and see for yourself.
What gets me is that contributors catch the problems before the actual people who get paid to review do. Apparently they dont have paid people who continually monitor the database. But why should they...they have us. I am willing to bet it only came to their attention after a contributor noticed and complained. ::)
Yes, it will be interesting to see what becomes of this whole snafu.
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So, how do we know, that the titles weren't changed after files were accepted?
I believe that it's because SS assumes that their reviewers would have picked up the spam and the artist "HAD TO HAVE CHANGED" them post acceptance. Hence the accusatory message in their email. To me it seems like an awful lot of work to submit a legit batch then go into the editing system after acceptance with the strategy to spam your titles (and even keywords). So there has to be culpability on the part of inspectors. It will be VERY INTERESTING over the next couple of months to track a few spammy ports to see if they actually take action on the offending artists.
That maybe a lot of work, but if it really helps search positions it might be worth it. After all, you also re-keyworded your old files, right?
But they just might let the files go through when they are reviewd. After all, they're also allowing all that spam to their database. Who knows.
And I think, that SS, allowing this, is digging their own grave. It's just a matter of time, when customers will be fed up with all that crap. How can they even find images, when searching for "new" content, when there is pages and pages of that crap.
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If SS was to remove all the spam and similars (icons for example, or that pot-guy), their databse would shorten for a few million files...
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So, how do we know, that the titles weren't changed after files were accepted?
Well, I just changed one of my titles to see what would happen, and the URL stayed the same. So either this passed review or some people's work gets uploaded without review.
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Well, changes don't take effect immediately, so, maybe if you wait a day?
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How do you get URL with the title anyway? I only get URL with image ID number.
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Here is a URL with title:
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-363531434/stock-photo-wild-brown-hare-with-big-ears-sitting-in-a-grass.html (http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-363531434/stock-photo-wild-brown-hare-with-big-ears-sitting-in-a-grass.html)
But you can simply replace that title part with anything:
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-363531434/shutterstock is great.html (http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-363531434/shutterstock 20is%20great.html)
Image ID is the only important thing here...
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Well, changes don't take effect immediately, so, maybe if you wait a day?
I waited a few hours and refreshed the image. The title changed, but the URL stayed the same.
(You get the url with the title when you don't log in as a contributor. When you're logged in you see your image # in the url instead.)
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Ok, thanks.
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I'm pretty sure that those ports were uploaded with the spammy titles and I'm sure because there are many new ports from 2016 (http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-3943346p1.html/) among them. Which beginner contributor would risk to be suspended right at the start?
This is very sad, not just because it is unjust but because it encourages further spamming.
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I'll bet you dollars to donuts that everyone who received the first email received the second as well. I'm sure they didn't do any further programming to tease real spammers out of their original email list. So all the spammers now feel there's no action needed on their part.
Obviously this port passed through review with the spammy titles in place. All in all a complete fail for Shutterstock.
I could understand if a few of these spammy images passed review but there are thousands of spammy vectors and entire ports. You just have to hover over the images on this page ([url]http://m-rank.net/#top1/[/url]) and see for yourself.
so now we see that perharps there is no review going on with vectors
or that there is a bunch of lax reviewers for vectors
while there is an extreme ANALysis of reviewer(s) for photographs.
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Here is a URL with title:
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-363531434/stock-photo-wild-brown-hare-with-big-ears-sitting-in-a-grass.html[/url] ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-363531434/stock-photo-wild-brown-hare-with-big-ears-sitting-in-a-grass.html[/url])
But you can simply replace that title part with anything:
[url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-363531434/shutterstock[/url] is great.html ([url]http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-363531434/shutterstock[/url] 20is%20great.html)
Image ID is the only important thing here...
right - the title desc is never used - you can bring up the image with just the pic-xxxx
so looks like this is SS trying to get google attention with a descriptive url that doesn't exist
(also, looking at the source, they're still using meta keywords which google abandoned years ago)
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I'll bet you dollars to donuts that everyone who received the first email received the second as well. I'm sure they didn't do any further programming to tease real spammers out of their original email list. So all the spammers now feel there's no action needed on their part.
Obviously this port passed through review with the spammy titles in place. All in all a complete fail for Shutterstock.
I could understand if a few of these spammy images passed review but there are thousands of spammy vectors and entire ports. You just have to hover over the images on this page ([url]http://m-rank.net/#top1/[/url]) and see for yourself.
so now we see that perharps there is no review going on with vectors
or that there is a bunch of lax reviewers for vectors
while there is an extreme ANALysis of reviewer(s) for photographs.
Nope. My vectors are reviewed. And I get stupid rejections just like everyone else.
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I'll bet you dollars to donuts that everyone who received the first email received the second as well. I'm sure they didn't do any further programming to tease real spammers out of their original email list. So all the spammers now feel there's no action needed on their part.
Obviously this port passed through review with the spammy titles in place. All in all a complete fail for Shutterstock.
I could understand if a few of these spammy images passed review but there are thousands of spammy vectors and entire ports. You just have to hover over the images on this page ([url]http://m-rank.net/#top1/[/url]) and see for yourself.
so now we see that perharps there is no review going on with vectors
or that there is a bunch of lax reviewers for vectors
while there is an extreme ANALysis of reviewer(s) for photographs.
That's not what I said, I have no idea of how review works with vectors.
I showed clear examples of spam, you are welcome to demonstrate that I'm wrong.
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if it were not for this latest incident, a worse tragedy could have happened
ie. the king bot would be taken over the whole company
and bought over all the shares of ss,
and we would have a new AI takeover movie in real life.
and we would all be extras in the movie, without being paid 8)
Terminator 6: Rise of the Automated Stock Footage Reviewers, Okay, We're Kindof Running Out of Ideas.
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We have discussed "auto inspection" at SS for the last couple of years. I think this scenario pretty much shows that they are using automation for at least keywords and titles and maybe a few main image features like sharpness, which seems to be a common rejection reason for sharp images.
From their SEC filing: "We also leverage proprietary review technology to pre-filter images and enhance the productivity of our reviewers."
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1549346/000104746912005905/a2209364zs-1.htm (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1549346/000104746912005905/a2209364zs-1.htm)
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We have discussed "auto inspection" at SS for the last couple of years. I think this scenario pretty much shows that they are using automation for at least keywords and titles and maybe a few main image features like sharpness, which seems to be a common rejection reason for sharp images.
From their SEC filing: "We also leverage proprietary review technology to pre-filter images and enhance the productivity of our reviewers."
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1549346/000104746912005905/a2209364zs-1.htm (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1549346/000104746912005905/a2209364zs-1.htm)
Yes and that SEC document is 4 years old. Imagine what they're "leveraging" now.
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I received e-mail from support this morning in reply to the request I made for a list of images with spam titles. It was just a cut and paste of the letter sent out earlier saying the distribution was to a broader group than intended and does not apply to me.
It was such careless cut and paste that they left the last paragraph as it had been, even though the support reply was sent July 4th and the communication in question was sent out June 30th.
"We are working tirelessly on creating the best contributor experience for our content creators and we apologize for the communication yesterday. You can expect that any further communication from us will be detailed, informative, specific, and actionable."
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I received e-mail from support this morning in reply to the request I made for a list of images with spam titles. It was just a cut and paste of the letter sent out earlier saying the distribution was to a broader group than intended and does not apply to me.
It was such careless cut and paste that they left the last paragraph as it had been, even though the support reply was sent July 4th and the communication in question was sent out June 30th.
"We are working tirelessly on creating the best contributor experience for our content creators and we apologize for the communication yesterday. You can expect that any further communication from us will be detailed, informative, specific, and actionable."
That is what I got as well. :(
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No surprise there. They probably received hundreds, if not thousands of emails. Replying to every single one of them would be quite a long task
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...Replying to every single one of them would be quite a long task
I wasn't expecting something handcrafted for me. I was expecting that they'd pay enough attention to the words in the generic e-mail to have them be appropriate.
It's the lack of any attention to detail that bothers me, not any sense of personal entitlement.
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i got an apology, yay
We sincerely apologize for the concern caused
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That's not what I said, I have no idea of how review works with vectors.
I showed clear examples of spam, you are welcome to demonstrate that I'm wrong.
i never implied you said that. i just say that looking at all this issue(s) in the past year,
it is obvious there is a double standard somewhere...
no doubt targeting experienced contributors, as they are the one who is a threat to those
factory producers; easing up on the newbies because they are not the ones who
will take away the earning of the new entries of factory-out-sourced.
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We have discussed "auto inspection" at SS for the last couple of years. I think this scenario pretty much shows that they are using automation for at least keywords and titles and maybe a few main image features like sharpness, which seems to be a common rejection reason for sharp images.
definitely, mantis.
check back on your approved images, and be shocked of how some of the keywords are sliced off
... i was shocked to see how many of my images were left with only a handful of keywords
which could mean no downloads.
sharpness too. try even having a slight motion in your image, to show panning or action of the subject..and it is rejected "out of focus".
resubmit it with sharpened edge, and it gets approved. or perharps, resubmit it without any change
and find a new reviewer and it gets approved too.
hint - skip the weekend reviewers ;)
IF WE ALL LEAVE THEM WITH NO WORK, THEY MIGHT JUST QUIT ON THEIR OWN
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We have discussed "auto inspection" at SS for the last couple of years. I think this scenario pretty much shows that they are using automation for at least keywords and titles and maybe a few main image features like sharpness, which seems to be a common rejection reason for sharp images.
definitely, mantis.
check back on your approved images, and be shocked of how some of the keywords are sliced off
... i was shocked to see how many of my images were left with only a handful of keywords
which could mean no downloads.
sharpness too. try even having a slight motion in your image, to show panning or action of the subject..and it is rejected "out of focus".
resubmit it with sharpened edge, and it gets approved. or perharps, resubmit it without any change
and find a new reviewer and it gets approved too.
hint - skip the weekend reviewers ;)
IF WE ALL LEAVE THEM WITH NO WORK, THEY MIGHT JUST QUIT ON THEIR OWN
Totally. That is happening now. I could not believe it....until yesterday when I went back to look at my CSV file and compare to my existing files. Low and behold half to a third of my keywords on most files are indeed missing, especially my older ones that I am re-keywording. And might i say some are MAIN keywords that are missing.
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Omg. A few of my images suddenly stopped selling this weekend, and sure enough some of the most important keywords have been removed. Recent uploads also have missing keywords. Do I now have to go back through 10,000 images and re-keyword?
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We have discussed "auto inspection" at SS for the last couple of years. I think this scenario pretty much shows that they are using automation for at least keywords and titles and maybe a few main image features like sharpness, which seems to be a common rejection reason for sharp images.
definitely, mantis.
check back on your approved images, and be shocked of how some of the keywords are sliced off
... i was shocked to see how many of my images were left with only a handful of keywords
which could mean no downloads.
sharpness too. try even having a slight motion in your image, to show panning or action of the subject..and it is rejected "out of focus".
resubmit it with sharpened edge, and it gets approved. or perharps, resubmit it without any change
and find a new reviewer and it gets approved too.
hint - skip the weekend reviewers ;)
IF WE ALL LEAVE THEM WITH NO WORK, THEY MIGHT JUST QUIT ON THEIR OWN
Totally. That is happening now. I could not believe it....until yesterday when I went back to look at my CSV file and compare to my existing files. Low and behold half to a third of my keywords on most files are indeed missing, especially my older ones that I am re-keywording. And might i say some are MAIN keywords that are missing.
Well this caused me some concern - but I have just spent a fair amount of time checking images - old and new - and I don't see any evidence of this at all.
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We have discussed "auto inspection" at SS for the last couple of years. I think this scenario pretty much shows that they are using automation for at least keywords and titles and maybe a few main image features like sharpness, which seems to be a common rejection reason for sharp images.
definitely, mantis.
check back on your approved images, and be shocked of how some of the keywords are sliced off
... i was shocked to see how many of my images were left with only a handful of keywords
which could mean no downloads.
sharpness too. try even having a slight motion in your image, to show panning or action of the subject..and it is rejected "out of focus".
resubmit it with sharpened edge, and it gets approved. or perharps, resubmit it without any change
and find a new reviewer and it gets approved too.
hint - skip the weekend reviewers ;)
IF WE ALL LEAVE THEM WITH NO WORK, THEY MIGHT JUST QUIT ON THEIR OWN
Totally. That is happening now. I could not believe it....until yesterday when I went back to look at my CSV file and compare to my existing files. Low and behold half to a third of my keywords on most files are indeed missing, especially my older ones that I am re-keywording. And might i say some are MAIN keywords that are missing.
Well this caused me some concern - but I have just spent a fair amount of time checking images - old and new - and I don't see any evidence of this at all.
I don't know how it happened, only speculating that it is an auto-check of some kind. But it is strange that I would put in 40 keywords (from my CSV) and only 10-15 are in the file. Last week I spend hours redoing a bunch, then I got burned out and quit. But there are a lot of my files that are awful, and strangely, lean on key words.
-
We have discussed "auto inspection" at SS for the last couple of years. I think this scenario pretty much shows that they are using automation for at least keywords and titles and maybe a few main image features like sharpness, which seems to be a common rejection reason for sharp images.
definitely, mantis.
check back on your approved images, and be shocked of how some of the keywords are sliced off
... i was shocked to see how many of my images were left with only a handful of keywords
which could mean no downloads.
sharpness too. try even having a slight motion in your image, to show panning or action of the subject..and it is rejected "out of focus".
resubmit it with sharpened edge, and it gets approved. or perharps, resubmit it without any change
and find a new reviewer and it gets approved too.
hint - skip the weekend reviewers ;)
IF WE ALL LEAVE THEM WITH NO WORK, THEY MIGHT JUST QUIT ON THEIR OWN
Totally. That is happening now. I could not believe it....until yesterday when I went back to look at my CSV file and compare to my existing files. Low and behold half to a third of my keywords on most files are indeed missing, especially my older ones that I am re-keywording. And might i say some are MAIN keywords that are missing.
Well this caused me some concern - but I have just spent a fair amount of time checking images - old and new - and I don't see any evidence of this at all.
I don't know how it happened, only speculating that it is an auto-check of some kind. But it is strange that I would put in 40 keywords (from my CSV) and only 10-15 are in the file. Last week I spend hours redoing a bunch, then I got burned out and quit. But there are a lot of my files that are awful, and strangely, lean on key words.
What kind of Files? - mine are all photos uploaded via the site uploader.
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We have discussed "auto inspection" at SS for the last couple of years. I think this scenario pretty much shows that they are using automation for at least keywords and titles and maybe a few main image features like sharpness, which seems to be a common rejection reason for sharp images.
definitely, mantis.
check back on your approved images, and be shocked of how some of the keywords are sliced off
... i was shocked to see how many of my images were left with only a handful of keywords
which could mean no downloads.
sharpness too. try even having a slight motion in your image, to show panning or action of the subject..and it is rejected "out of focus".
resubmit it with sharpened edge, and it gets approved. or perharps, resubmit it without any change
and find a new reviewer and it gets approved too.
hint - skip the weekend reviewers ;)
IF WE ALL LEAVE THEM WITH NO WORK, THEY MIGHT JUST QUIT ON THEIR OWN
Totally. That is happening now. I could not believe it....until yesterday when I went back to look at my CSV file and compare to my existing files. Low and behold half to a third of my keywords on most files are indeed missing, especially my older ones that I am re-keywording. And might i say some are MAIN keywords that are missing.
Well this caused me some concern - but I have just spent a fair amount of time checking images - old and new - and I don't see any evidence of this at all.
consider yourself lucky then. we would not be just saying it for fun , would we???
i would say, if your images tend to be selling well in a certain category,
and it happens to be where the factory outsourced are having their core sales,
that would be the first port that would be targeted.
i was astonished when i discovered as mantis did, the main keywords that gathered the regular sales suddenly went missing, and even say if you had two categories,
one would be gone.
it would not be across the board, since not everyone's port is a threat to the factory
special treatment accounts, just certain contributors... like i found out,
and now mantis and also shelma.
iow, those who had a certain kind of port that were selling regularly and then
for no reason suddenly see the sales and large single earnings disappearing
,... i would look back at the files to ensure your keywords and/or category is missing...
if the integral keywords are gone, the clients will not find your images that they regularly
look for, would they???
an easy way to shift the sales to their own buddies,etc..
no one needs to believe what we are experiencing. i only say this because of the evidences
- disappearance of SOD large earnings which i used to have regularly
- disappearance of earnings from certain subjects that used to sell well and regularly
- drop in earnings even though the uploads of new images which are of equal or
higher standard than those which were selling well.
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What i found in first taken for a test image: changed order of keywords in "approved images" and i didn't like this order, which moved all essential for this image keywords down, and moved up "environment description" keywords.
On the image page presented for buyer - keywords have a third order - alphabetic.
sky, blue, clouds, texture, girl, female, happiness, white, women, young, pretty, love, lifestyle, holiday, floral, - on ss approved images page
hanger,attractive, beauty, bridal, bride, celebration, cute, day, decor, dress, fashion, female, - what i sent minus one keyword deleted by me.
BTW with overall sudden drop in sales last 4 days this image does not sell anymore at all.
Edit: in catalogue manager keywords order is again different and again not the same i sent with the image!
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OK, now I'm really curious. I'm gonna check some of my images. Where did you people, who are missing keywords checked for them. On a page like the buyer would see the image and keywords or in that section, where you can edit your keywords (Approval status/Approved images...)?
I don't think that position of keyword matter at SS.
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other example:
Berlaymont,European Commission,institutions,government,headquarter,office,administration - my order
popular,street,national,travel,view,day,power,european,urban,culture,restored - SS order in catalogue manager
european, berlaymont, belgium, union, buildings, modern, popular, bruxelles, conemporary, - order on search result page
If keywords order does not participate in search then where is a reason to keep at least 3 different orders in the database?
To find image in "approved images" pages takes time, because search by id opens the image only in catalogue manager, but not on traditional page, where the order is different too. Dates on batch are useless because i sent image by image in that time.
I have verified some more images, and in all pages where keywords are availabl - catalogue manager, approved images, search result image details - in all pages order of keywords was different.
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...I don't think that position of keyword matter at SS.
I'm pretty sure order doesn't matter. It's entirely possible that the different display order has to do with different chunks of code written at different times that just happens to do different ordering. Not saying that's how things should be, but it's entirely possible for the order to vary without the order being in any way significant in search placement.
It is possible that buyers who search with one or more keywords and then purchase cause some sort of statistic to be updated that affects a search with Relevance sort order. Any statistics relating to purchases are going to keep changing over time, not stay the same as at upload time.
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OK, now I'm really curious. I'm gonna check some of my images. Where did you people, who are missing keywords checked for them. On a page like the buyer would see the image and keywords or in that section, where you can edit your keywords (Approval status/Approved images...)?
I don't think that position of keyword matter at SS.
I checked via the buyer side and through the Catalog manager.
I can't find any images with changes - meaning missing keywords.
And keyword position at SS doesn't matter.
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For missing keywords i will verify. I had in the past multiple cases of missing keywords at SS and iS.
And if the order is not important - but they keep 3 different orders!
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OK, now I'm really curious. I'm gonna check some of my images. Where did you people, who are missing keywords checked for them. On a page like the buyer would see the image and keywords or in that section, where you can edit your keywords (Approval status/Approved images...)?
I don't think that position of keyword matter at SS.
I checked on buyer site in chronological order "New". Keywords for newer images are in alphabetical order but older ones are random. The problem is that after page 10 when I click the "next page" (big gray button), it jumps back to page 4. When I insert manually the page number in the box (11, 12, 13....), images are in random order, so I give up further checking.
What a mess!
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This browsing problem was reported already several times, but it is back again. Affects sales? For sure!
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I know it was reported, what I wanted to say is that it is impossible to check keywords on images after page 10 on buyer site.
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Just noticed this: You can expect that any further communication from us will be detailed, informative, specific, and actionable.
www.dictionary.com/browse/actionableActionable definition, furnishing ground for a lawsuit.
Yes, I know, there's a secondary, less common meaning. It just struck me as a funny ambiguity.
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Tried to search for oldest images to compare keywords, but the last page does not show the oldest ones. All is mixed. Waist of time.
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OK, now I'm really curious. I'm gonna check some of my images. Where did you people, who are missing keywords checked for them. On a page like the buyer would see the image and keywords or in that section, where you can edit your keywords (Approval status/Approved images...)?
I don't think that position of keyword matter at SS.
Ok, so I checked about 20 of my oldest files and a few files in the middle and all (at least main) keywords are still there....
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For me this time amount of keywords was not changed. Still worry that the order of keywords in reality can affect sales.
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When I read about the missing keywords, I had to look...
I found a relatively easy way to check it out...
(I remember someone asking about it)
Here's the link strait to it:
http://submit.shutterstock.com/review_batch.mhtml?approved=1&type=photos (http://submit.shutterstock.com/review_batch.mhtml?approved=1&type=photos)
In case the link doesn't work:
Home-> Portfolio-> Approval Status: Images-> Approved Photos (or whatever is you are going to look)-> Go to bottom of page-> Click "View All ..... Approved Photos"
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When I read about the missing keywords, I had to look...
I found a relatively easy way to check it out...
(I remember someone asking about it)
Here's the link strait to it:
[url]http://submit.shutterstock.com/review_batch.mhtml?approved=1&type=photos[/url] ([url]http://submit.shutterstock.com/review_batch.mhtml?approved=1&type=photos[/url])
In case the link doesn't work:
Home-> Portfolio-> Approval Status: Images-> Approved Photos (or whatever is you are going to look)-> Go to bottom of page-> Click "View All ..... Approved Photos"
yes, that's where i always check to ensure my new online images = approved images
and it was where i got shocked to realised many of my new images of regular selling category
were missing a lot of vital keywords... and even had category removed.
as i mentioned before, it does not happen with the non-sellers; just the images that
fall in the well-selling category. it used to be like that at istock
where certain exclusives reviewing the indies would approve all the not so competitive
images and if say you are doing well in lifestyle, your lifestyle new images would be
heavily rejected with all sorts of reasons from poor composition, out of focus, wrong wb,etc..
sound familiar????
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When I read about the missing keywords, I had to look...
I found a relatively easy way to check it out...
(I remember someone asking about it)
Here's the link strait to it:
[url]http://submit.shutterstock.com/review_batch.mhtml?approved=1&type=photos[/url] ([url]http://submit.shutterstock.com/review_batch.mhtml?approved=1&type=photos[/url])
In case the link doesn't work:
Home-> Portfolio-> Approval Status: Images-> Approved Photos (or whatever is you are going to look)-> Go to bottom of page-> Click "View All ..... Approved Photos"
yes, that's where i always check to ensure my new online images = approved images
and it was where i got shocked to realised many of my new images of regular selling category
were missing a lot of vital keywords... and even had category removed.
as i mentioned before, it does not happen with the non-sellers; just the images that
fall in the well-selling category. it used to be like that at istock
where certain exclusives reviewing the indies would approve all the not so competitive
images and if say you are doing well in lifestyle, your lifestyle new images would be
heavily rejected with all sorts of reasons from poor composition, out of focus, wrong wb,etc..
sound familiar????
Click on the image id, that takes you to the image page on the customer site, and you'll find all your keywords there...
Don't ask me why they don't show all keywords on the approved file list, but they're not deleted...
Or click on the edit symbol, you'll still see all your keywords, just not in the list overview.
I have yet to find an image where keywords were really deleted (as compared to not shown in some view on the site).
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Odd that I can read and understand words in English. It says title not keyword. Am I the only one who read that?
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When I read about the missing keywords, I had to look...
I found a relatively easy way to check it out...
(I remember someone asking about it)
Here's the link strait to it:
[url]http://submit.shutterstock.com/review_batch.mhtml?approved=1&type=photos[/url] ([url]http://submit.shutterstock.com/review_batch.mhtml?approved=1&type=photos[/url])
In case the link doesn't work:
Home-> Portfolio-> Approval Status: Images-> Approved Photos (or whatever is you are going to look)-> Go to bottom of page-> Click "View All ..... Approved Photos"
My approval status - approved photos page scrambles the order results after page 51. Sort by date and sort by sales both are scrambled beginning on page 52. Anyone else have this issue?