I've seen some comment on Twitter about the messages we encourage players to send. The s-word comes up from time to time. I want to clarify our position on this.
Echo Bazaar does not, by any commonly accepted meaning of the word, spam. We don't send unsolicited messages to anyone, ever. We don't ever use anyone's account to send a message without their direct and immediate consent. We do offer an incentive for sending viral messages, but it's quite a modest incentive and we only offer that incentive once every 24 hours. And finally, we allow people to edit the viral messages without any restrictions beyond keeping the fallenlondon link in. If you want to say, 'I diskard this silly game [link]', well, it's your Twitter account, not ours.
We do also allow people to send postcards and echo content if they like the content. This is their call, it's entirely voluntary, and it's really no different from any of the [Twitter this] links on any of a thousand sites.
Ultimately, some people are bound to find EB-related tweets annoying, but we want to limit that annoyance to, oh, the kind of annoyance I'll feel when the World Cup rolls round and half my friends start tweeting about bloody football. So if you think there's something reasonable we can do to reduce possible annoyance, let us know. If you find any hint that anything I've said about our tweeting guidelines is untrue, let us know straight away. We take this very seriously.
If you're a player, you might be wondering what's kosher to do by way of tweet edits. To reiterate what I said above, it's your Twitter account, not ours. But a few points below. Consider this a draft T&C section.
Things we really don't mind you doing
- tweeting for an action refresh and putting completely unrelated text in the other 100 characters. Think of the fallenlondon link as sponsorship. :-)
Things we'd strongly prefer you not to do, but we won't hassle you for
- tweeting for an action refresh, and then deleting it straight off. We considered penalising people who do that, but (i) it seems a bit aggressive (ii) if someone's protected their updates we'd probably be penalising them too. Ultimately we rely on the goodwill and enthusiasm of our players.
- tweeting for an action refresh and saying 'this game sucks.' :-)
Things that are potentially bannable offences
- linking to content that pretends to be EB content, in a way that's griefy or fraudulent rather than funny.
- misrepresenting what our tweet policy is in a malicious way: 'If you see this tweet then EB is spamming my account without my consent [link]'. Unless we've embraced the dark side, in which case, nail us to the wall, folks.
- and of course, anything that contravenes the Twitter TOS.
Ta for reading. Comments welcome as ever.