Out of the blue, i got a system message, that my account is banned from redeeming account points for 1 week due to points violations.
Point violation types:
fake downloads
bulk account registration
bulk upload of models
excessive self or mutual interaction
I am 49 years old and would describe myself as an exemplary user. I really don’t know anything of how to fake download by bots or something. I have never even thought about that.
I have exactly one account!
Bulk upload of models? I don’t think so!
Excessive self or mutual interaction? The only interaction is here and there some words at the forum and interaction with users who rated my models. I use the phrase “thank you kindly” for all of them and nothing more!
I have asked the makerworld team about further information, what is the specific nature of the accusations? I seems to me that i got a AI generated answer with following statement: “our system has detected your abnormal downloading data in your account”.
I think there is something going terribly wrong with the system!
I read some users who stated, that they were banned for 1 year and similar,because of fake downloads and i thought by myself, well there needs to be something fishy when makerworld detects something.
But now i am getting banned by myself for one week.
If I, who see myself as an exemplary user, am accused of “abnormal downloads”, then it can happen to anyone out of the blue even though they haven’t done anything wrong!
I don’t even know how to “achieve” such thing as “fake downloads”…
Since the last few months i spend the majority of my sparetime contributing to makerworld by thinking about models that find resonance in the community and creating them in fusion 360. Getting promptly in contact with the users who ask about my models or rate my models and leaving comments.
But now I’m devastated and don’t know how things can continue here… I haven’t done anything wrong and continue after the ban as if nothing had happened and then get banned again out of the blue?
What is your opinion about that specific issue?
Sorry for my english, i am not a native speaker/writer.
Based on experience, there’s often little recourse available. The unfortunate reality is that the chances of receiving a meaningful response are slim to none.
My advice? It’s best to let it go.
Before it happened, did you notice an unexpected surge in downloads?
I haven’t started putting my models online yet, but I was considering the chance of getting falsely accused. I figure that it happens because bots will download not only their intended target, but also download others so the bot looks less fake and the intended target is not as obvious.
I figured that if I all of a sudden started getting excessive downloads, that my best course of action would be to alert MakerWorld of the suspicious activity and declare that I had nothing to do with it, instead of waiting for them to detect it and dealing with the fallout afterwards.
That is an interesting explanation! This could be the reason! I don’t have the ability to judge which downloads are excessive and which are true downloads! I figured, that the models finds resonance and are downloaded out of this resason. The only tool that we have is the analytics board. But as i stated, how should you judge waht is true and what are fake downloads?? I had few models that trended well and have gotten a high number in downloads. My best one made ~3k. There are designers with much higher downloads…
I think there is nothing what we can do about this issue… You get AI generated all purpose messages and don’t even have the chance to chat with a person from makerworld to explain the situation. And the next thing is, i have no proof beside my honest words! As i said before, there is something terribly wrong in the moment with the system! If they don’t find a good solution for this issue, i fear there are more and more users who will leave makerworld…
You can’t judge which ones are fake, but my thinking was, if I had happen to me what happened to you, suddenly getting 1000’s of downloads, the first thing I would do would be to notify MakerWorld to protect myself from what happened to you. They can then investigate and judge themselves if it was real or fake. I would rather lose the points than be banned or suspended.
same thing just happened to me out of the blue,as above ive done nothing wrong and tbh its laughable although i have over 200 models i only average about 20 downloads a day and theres no spike only that 1 yellow but thats collects nothing to do with downloads so god know where they think ive cheated the system lol
but if you made 4.3K points in the last month, as can be seen on your screen, then that’s kind of strange if you supposedly only have 20 downloads a day… how did you manage to get 4.3k points in one month?
dunno how that works as i havent earned hardly anything since update most since update is about 50-100 ish points per day
This happens all the time. I’ve probably had that message a dozen or more times in the past few months. Since the lastest update, I think the points threshold is much lower or more sensitive. Just give it a few days and you’ll be able to redeem your points.