Today I have a tale of marketing gone wrong.
It Started Out Good…
Almost exactly one year ago, Anton Voroniuk reached out to us highlighting his Udemy courses. He’s a content creator and offers his Udemy classes for free for a limited time. I think his strategy is to offer it free for a week, during which times there are tons of signups (why not? it’s free!) so that when it goes live for sale, it looks like it’s a very popular course.
OK, nothing wrong with that. His topics are semi-adjacent to our mission: things like how to market more effectively on social media, how to launch your Etsy store, how to run a mailing list, etc. From a cursory glance, nothing earth-shattering or unique but presumably helpful to someone.
Voroniuk originally contacted us coincidentally after we’d had a very popular thread on LowEndTalk in which people shared other limited-time Udemy and other courses. These were much more on-brand for us, with topics on programming, security, etc. Voroniuk’s ping happened to overlap so I thought what the heck, someone might enjoy them, and we ran posts listing which courses were free on October 23, November 25, April 26, and July 28.
Don’t look for them now. They’ve been removed.
However, There Were a Couple Problems
Over time, we realized this content wasn’t all that exciting to our readers. That’s not unusual – we try things, and keep what the community likes. No one was coming back and saying “I loved this course!” and I noticed no one was subsequently sharing the info, as they did with our LowEndTalk Udemy thread about programming courses.
So, no harm, no foul – thanks, we tried it, and using words spoken by every editor since the dawn of time, “this just isn’t for us.”
However, Voroniuk would not take no for an answer.
We got tickets offering his courses every day, and sometimes twice a day. We’d have to devote LowEndBox entirely to his promotions in order to keep up. Even if his content was 100% on-brand for us, there wouldn’t be room for anything else.
So we started declining his tickets, just based on sheer volume. Eventually it got ridiculous and our replies when closing his tickets got more direct. We asked him to stop opening tickets.
The tickets kept coming.
Multiple time, we politely said “thanks, but we’re no longer interested”. I even emailed him outside of WHMCS in case he was blocking ticket replies.
But they keep coming…
Marketing Fail, Technical Solution
There’s a certain irony in someone claiming to be a marketing guru and then proceeding to annoy his marketing outlets. His strategy apparently revolves around spamming promotions to anyone who’ll post them. You don’t need to be a guru to do that.
Since Voroniuk refused to reply and refused to stop submitting his tickets (just got another one 19 hours ago!) we had to resort to technical solutions.
Unfortunately, WHMCS does not have a way to block guest ticket submissions, unless you want to force everyone to register first, which we didn’t want to do. We allow anonymous registrations because our WHMCS is also support for the LowEndTalk forum.
In tickets, there’s a “block sender” button right next to the submitter’s email. However, this doesn’t do what you expect. Per the docs,
Messages that you receive via the contact or submit ticket pages are not subject to these spam controls. For those, we recommend using reCaptcha.
In other words, if someone emails in a ticket, it’ll be blocked, but if they go to the web page and enter things manually, this is bypassed. Voroniuk has some script to post to WHMCS.
The solution is to change the WHMCS template so that when someone tries to submit a ticket, the spam control table is checked and anyone on it is denied. We have a thread on LowEndTalk with links to the code.
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I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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