Thank You For Your Feedback, New Security Features

Over the past few weeks, we were surprised to be the target of internet hacking wherein several people created fictitious accounts, intentionally exploited a work-around of our registration system to create duplicate screen names, repeatedly reposted their review, posted multiple reviews,   posted inappropriate reviews that violate our terms of use and engaged in uncivil dialogues with each other using the commenting tool.

We spent last week listening to the user complaints about these issues, and this week working with our engineers to make changes to improve the security.   We have now closed the loophole in the registration system, restricted the ability to comment on reviews only to people who have verified official status with the nonprofit, removed reviews that violated our Terms of Service, and banned several users.

We know that some of our users feel that we should have responded faster.     We weren’t ignoring you – we were planning and implementing the technical solutions.   We will do a better job next time communicating with you and even if we don’t have a solution, let you know that we’re aware of the problem and looking into it.

So for most of you (who are not trying to hack our site), you won’t notice a difference in the site.   The biggest difference is that only nonprofits can comment on reviews about them.   So some of you who wrote comments responding to reviews and are not officially a staff of the nonprofit – sorry, we no longer support this feature.   If you want to compliment the reviewer, vote the review as “helpful”.

If you are officially with a nonprofit, and you wrote a comment but you don’t see it there anymore, it’s because you haven’t claimed the nonprofit.   To do so, click the “Staff -Claim Org” button on the top of the nonprofit profile page and fill out your information.   Then your comments should appear again automagically – voila!

Enjoy the new security measures and thank you for your feedback!

Best,
Perla