Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by simonbackx 1357 days ago
Good question! I would also like to know the answer. I've scanned through our sites and couldn't find any malicious content... My guess is that the block was automated, and might have been caused by a fake spam report. There can be some competition between non-profits (e.g. two scouting groups in the same local area). Maybe they started to report each other as a joke.
3 comments

Did you consider the fact that your domain name itself could have been the cause by itself? It is not extremely far fetched that stamhoofd could somehow find its way in being found offensive by some automated tool (or a person who takes these things very seriously). It would explain the TOS violation too, if it considered the word to be problematic.
A large percentage of users use the "report spam" button as an unsubscribe/delete button in their email client.
Right, from a user's point of view labelling it "Spam" has the same effect as when you put letters unread on that pile by the door, "I don't want to read this". Should they? Doesn't matter. Years back we even had users who were paying us to send them specific emails and would mark it as spam.

The use of "users marked this as spam" as a signal is a cheap but lousy shortcut and it's bad news that we became reliant upon it.

Too bad they won't actually say what the trigger even is. Could be one mass email.