A surprising number of users are being suspended at linkedin. I know this because I was recently suspended myself. The following details will help you know what happened and what to do about it. Post here if you wish to contribute your own experiences.

My experience: I'm a regular user, although I am a member of 30+ groups. I spend up to two hours on the site on a busy day and write very detailed posts when I can contribute to my industry.

One day, I could not log in. I got a message that said my account had been suspended and I could click on a link to resolve this with customer support. No automated email ever came, as would be expected from any other social media platform. e.g. if Facebook or Youtube locks or suspends your user account, they tell you why immediately and give you options for responding.


It took about 5 days to get a response from Linkedin, and the response I got was a canned one. Although I know a human sent it because no computer takes five days to send out something that looks like it came from an autoresponder:

<table style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" bgcolor="#ffffff" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="700"><tbody><tr><tr class="header_logo" valign="bottom"><td colspan="2"> LinkedIn Customer Support Message </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">
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</td></tr><tr><td class="header" colspan="2" bgcolor="#ddf0f8">Subject: Restricted Account</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">
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</td></tr><tr><td class="text" colspan="2" bgcolor="#f0f0f0">Hi klancy,

We recently noticed that an excessively high number of LinkedIn pages or member Profiles are being viewed through your LinkedIn account. It is against our User Agreement to do so, regardless of whether you are viewing them manually or you have set up a program or third-party application that accesses the pages on your behalf.

As a result of the high rate of page views, your account is currently restricted. The restriction can be removed if you agree to stop the page views. Please reply to this message letting us know that you agree.

If you are not sure why this occurred on your account, you should check for any software you may have installed on your computer that would collect information from various social or networking websites and disable the feature. Please let me know if you need assistance with this in order to comply with our request.

We look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,
LinkedIn Privacy Team</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">
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</td></tr><tr><td class="text" colspan="2" bgcolor="#ddf0f8">Original Contact:</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">
</td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#ffffff">Member Comment: klancy kennedy</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">
</td></tr><tr><td class="text" colspan="2" bgcolor="#ffffff">Probably too many log in attempts.
I was trying my old email instead of my new email.
Please review history if in doubt for any reason.</td></tr></tr></tbody></table>

Since I am a pretty low volume user, I had to take point with this, and I made some very valid points in response. In my response below, you will see details about what the problem is with Linkedin. Why they suspended your account without notice, why they take 5 days to respond, and why the problem with locked accounts is ongoing. (I don't expect they'll fix the problem with frozen linkedin accounts within the next six months, but I hope so. I've offered them some solid technical solutions.)

The response template should say if I am to respond by email or by other means.

I view about 30 pages per day, maximum. Maybe up to 60 on a busy day. I am a member of many groups
and I browse with tabs, opening several pages at once because linkedin is slow. Then I spend hours writing
very long, and very detailed posts.

There's a problem here because you didn't even look at that. You don't know my time spent on the site, average
time per page, daily post velocity, or post length. You don't even know that I have a Linkedin group. And you don't
know that I log in daily because I am a daily user. You know a lot of nothing because you don't even look.

In all probability, your system didn't look at that either because it has been poorly programmed, so it just blindly
locks accounts. Then you blindly send out template responses without even looking to see if the system was
correct or not. That is the first issue with how Linkedin is handling this situation incorrectly.

I think you guys can do a much better job. The programmers behind Linkedin's bot detection need to consider the
following:

• Page view to post ratio
• Post response ratio (Measure the community response to someone's posts.. spam doesn't really get many responses on Linkedin)
• Post length
• Content duplication (Did someone post the same thing in more than one location?)
• Page visit duration (Does a user close 98% of their pages within 3 seconds, or do they spend up to an hour? Obviously, one of those situations is a bot.)

Starting to get the picture?

You're in a bad position because if the system locks someone's account for a specific reason, it doesn't even send an automated
response. The system depends on YOU to send a template response. But what's the difference? It's still a canned response.
Let the machine handle it. This is wasting your time. The system could have sent that days ago to save you time, and to save me time.

This means you've got upset users because the system, the very machine that is Linkedin, was poorly implemented.

Linkedin is a site for professionals, so the development of the site needs to reflect that. I'm no genius, but I'm already telling
you how to make a better system because the system you have now is performing unacceptably.

Please pass this on to your development team after you have unlocked my account.

I am sure that thousands of users are experiencing my situation daily because I'm a regular user and your system was dead wrong.
I googled it, and that means they're googling it as well. I will be blogging about this and expect to be on page one for related search
queries. I think that will be a popular spot which might gather a lot of feedback and interest very quickly. Others will know exactly
what the problem is here. Pass on this email and get your system fixed.

Regards,
Klancy Kennedy

As you can guess from my letter, I'm intimately familiar with how customer support works in any company, and I'm also familiar with designing systems that work. I actually do that for a living. I go to companies with broken systems. (Usually, they don't even know how broken their systems are), and then I fix the problem.

Even companies like Linkedin (fortune 500's are no exception), often fail to run process flow charts on how they are handling customers or doing business. In the end, this leads to a lot of inefficiencies such as auto-suspending accounts that should never be locked or frozen to begin with, and then of course having your customer support send out templates which the system should have sent five days ago.

A little management 101 goes a long way. As far as you getting your linkedin account back, just be patient. And know that it's totally fine to respond by email. (their canned message doesn't tell you what to do, but you can just email them right back.)

By the way, here's their CS email address: <linkedin_support@cs.linkedin.com>
That might shave off a few days on getting your linkedin account unlocked or unbanned.

I can't help myself when it comes to seeing a company doing things the wrong way, so I read their template email again and gave it a human response. Today, we're getting a lesson in process flow because there's one thing Linkedin did which was a horrible mistake about suspending my account. No, it wasn't that they suspended MY account, it was that their approach was all wrong.

In their letter, they say they've locked my linkedin account because of excessive page views and suggest that this could be due to automation. They don't define 'excessive' though, so that alone is going to piss a lot of people off. But what's worse is that if there actually IS excessive page views, like some ungodly event where someone does a million views in one night.... well, they never reset the password, did they? Not part of their process flow.

What this means is that if someone hacked a linkedin account, the hacker will get to bomb linkedin one more time (back for linkedin), and of course the owner of the newly unsuspended linkedin account is going to have one day of peace followed by being suspended by Linkedin again. So they'll naturally assume that Linkedin sucks.

Don't alienate your users like that.

For your reading entertainment and education, here's my angry response:

Define excessive. You mean looking at 20 pages in 24 hours?
There's days I look at as few as three pages. Is *that going over the limit?

Seriously, what the ****. Look at my actual logs with your own human eyes.
I doubt you're going to find anything surprising. Boring guy hardly uses Linkedin.

You ARE going off of my account, right? Not my IP address? If you're a smart techie
like me, then you already know that VPNs are popular with your user base, which is made
of global businessmen. You also know that some of them might be on hot IP ranges.

If for some reason you actually DO see something that alarms you (from my ACCOUNT only),
for example, more than 20 pages were seen in 24 hours.... something more like 1,000 or more,
well then reset my password and let me know that it appears my account was compromised.
Obviously, something is amis then, isn't it?

That would be a smarter course of action. Here's why:
If you just warn people and blindly ask for compliance, you'll first get pissed off responses.
Assuming that someone was actually compromised... then guess what? You never
reset their password, did you? It's business as usual for anyone that actually might have access
to their account.

So what will you do next?

Getting the logic yet? You will wrongfully ban your regular users and totally alienate them
while giving them the impression that your service skills totally suck.

Process flow, people, process flow. Sit down with your manager and talk about logical process flow.

You know how to do this stuff right, you don't need me telling you how to do your job?
OK then.

Well, think about it. Then act intelligently.

The genius that knows how to do things right when you're doing them wrong,
Klancy Kennedy

Another thing that appears to be wrong with the linkedin way of handling account suspensions is that their template email suggests that if someone is using any third party tool with some kind of social networking functions, then that could be the source of the problem.

Well great then. How about some examples, genius? How about a link?
You don't actually expect your users to do effective troubleshooting off that, do you?
Oh my god, you did! God help us all!

You guys KNOW that certain applications can cause a problem, and you take the time to specifically say that... but then you don't even give a link to a page where someone can learn more or see examples? How stupid is that?

I think that'll be my final customer service lesson for the brainless idiots at Linkedin that are busily suspending thousands of accounts each day: If you know that certain things can be a problem, then feed your users with some useful information.

Brilliant. Am I brilliant? Yes. I am. *applause light*

Very professional response. They thanked me for the suggestions and unlocked me.

I found out what the problem was on my own. I have a Firefox addon called 'tryagain', which will try to reload a page automatically.
In a situation where a server is pretty much unreachable, I've configured it to try thousands of times per day... just keep trying until you finally get your page.

From China, I can't access Linkedin unless my VPN is on. If it's off, I can rack of thousands of page requests pretty quickly. Funny thing is the page doesn't load, but they still see the request.

I think I'll close my epic rant by acknowledging the fact that I'm an asshole.
But I do give good ideas to anyone that can bear one of my wicked rants.

I think I'll close my epic rant by acknowledging the fact that I'm an asshole.
But I do give good ideas to anyone that can bear one of my wicked rants.