Dee R.

I used to be a big fan of the Internet Archive back when it was actually doing what it was supposed to, and that's archive really old sites, as well as public domain books. I used to have so much fun revisiting the earliest days of the web, back when people were making silly meme sites or personal pages on Geocities or other free webhosting sites.

As of 2020, whatever good will I had towards the archive changed when I saw that it was uploading a king's ransom of pirated movies, books, music video games and other things very much under copyright. I have screenshots from this year, back when it was trying to defend itself against Hachette in court The Internet Archive had the nerve to continue hosting all of this pirated content as it was being sued, I guess, waiting on the verdict from the lawsuit so it could decide whether to continue hosting these illegal files or not.

The Internet Archive also scrapes people's websites and files without their permission, and makes it easy for visitors to bypass paywalls, so that content creators can't get paid.

When you contact the archive to try and get your site removed, it demands all of your private information, including photo ID and domain registration information!

The Internet Archive is just another scummy content scraper and copyright thief, and if you have a website, I strongly suggest you remove it from the Wayback Machine.

Like so many people here, I was a holdover from LiquidWeb from many years ago and basically stuck with Deluxe Hosting (which had bought LW out) because I didn't want to go through the hassle of starting over with a new host. Everything was fine for awhile, but then things started going downhill around 2019 or so.

The first thing that happened was that I had constant problems logging in, to where I had to contact support or keep resetting my password every few months. The last time I reset my password, their password security algorithm was so insane that no matter what I created using its requirements (one upper case, one lower case, characters, etc.), it wouldn't accept it. So I was left with a completely random, hard to remember password that was practically 50 characters long and only consisted of numbers.

I put up with all of these issues regarding logging in until I noticed early in 2021 that Jetpack Monitor was sending me constant alerts about my WordPress site going down. I contacted support about it, and they told me that everything was fine on their end, that all I needed to do was clear my cache. Come to find out, according to a visitor the site was indeed offline for many times during the day, in some case as long as an hour.

When I logged into my account to open a support ticket, I saw a message from Deluxe Hosting saying that it had experienced a hardware failure and was currently transferring accounts. That was all well and good but it was a classic case of too little, too late. Besides, the host had lost all credibility by this point anyway. I had experienced months of downtime, reported it and was told by these people that nothing was wrong, only to find out that they had experienced a hardware failure the entire time. I could've waited for them to fix the problem, but why bother at this rate with the amount of money I was paying them?

So, I'm done with Deluxe Hosting. I immediately canceled and switched to a different host. Everyone else, stay far away. Don't even think of joining them.

Man, I thought I was going crazy all these weeks, but reading other people's reviews, now I know that I'm not. I've been experiencing the same thing that others have been complaining about. When I first started doing the "Answer a Question" jobs, everything was accepted without any problem. I even had a few "nice job!" comments from the editors thrown my way. But then, all of a sudden, I finally hit that "wall", where it seemed as if I was getting at least one rejection for every batch I submitted.The feedback was ridiculous, too, just lots of hairsplitting and nitpicking, as if the editor was looking for any reason to reject my submission.

For example, there was one question asking about the best way to find a medical specialist. I wrote, "One way is to ask your doctor for a referral." The source I had linked to said exactly that, except added that it was recommended to ask for two referrals. The editor rejected my task whining, "You wrote that you needed *a* referral. That's not what your source said. It said that you need *two* referrals." No, dingbat. The source said to ask for *a* referral, but ask for two to be on the safe side.

Another thing that editors have been doing is rejecting your work when they've become too lazy to edit it. They'll just reject it with the generic, "Has poor writing/multiple infractions" robo feedback. How do I know this? Because it's always the longest 200-300 word answers that get this feedback.

Editors have also been rejecting tasks based on their assumptions about writers being "ESL." In case you don't know what I'm talking about, editors went to the CrowdSource forums complaining about how writers were "obviously ESL." (They have the magical ability to tell who's a blue-blooded American speaker and who is a Third Worlder who only just learned English a year ago). They then demanded the ability to flag jobs as being "ESL." Apparently, this "ESL" thing gained traction, because not too soon after, a writer went to the forums complaining that several of his tasks had been unfairly rejected, with the suspicion that they had been rejected by an editor who had deemed his work "ESL." CrowdSource agreed with him that the rejections were unfair and overturned them.

Editors also seemed to have lost scope of what their job entails. Some editors have begun leaving snarky feedback based on value judgments they have made about the pieces they are marking. Last I heard, a writer complained at the CS forums about a rude piece of feedback she had received on her piece. When called out on it in the forums, the editor who had left the commentary made the excuse that she was justified, because it was "obvious" to her that the writer had "run out of things to say."

At any rate, after about a month of smooth sailing, I saw my score--which had climbed up to an 84--suddenly drop down to 77 over one weekend. What I noticed, too, is that in spite of still having other tasks pass successfully, they had no impact on my score. Apparently, only the Expert answers affect your score and not the High Traffic ones. So you could submit hundreds of High Traffic answers successfully with flying colors but as soon as your Expert answer is rejected, your score plummets.

Needless to say, don't waste your time with CrowdSource. It's a shame, too, because if it weren't for the bad editors, you could make some decent income there. Not anymore.