Ecademy, is an odd old thing. It’s one of the UK’s oldest social networks but remains stubbornly “2003” in appearance and operation. Its cultish method of operation – awarding “black-star” membership to those who pay $100 a month for the privilege – regularly causes flair-ups among the members who don’t pay so much, and who seem to be variously small-time consultants and small businesses. It routinely bans members who question the way the site is run and inevitably this ends up appearing online somewhere.
I wrote about it extensively here, after which the site’s fans – like a horde of zombies smelling fresh, living blood – were set on the post and I had to eventually close the comments.
It also doesn’t help online relations that they have some kind of “feature” which means that their members seem to regularly spam unwitting recipients. Some examples are here, here, here, here and here.
And it now turns out that for some time the site (probably unwittingly, certainly incompetently) has been making publicly accessible tens of thousand of pages detailing email conversations with its customers.
Edit the last few digits in the range 1 – 22400 of a URL like http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=support&sid=22351 and you were able to access all sorts of emails. I tried this out myself on the weekend. It made quite entertaining reading.
At least you could do this, up until today.
They appear to have now plugged the hole, but not before blogger Paul Walsh captured an interesting exchange:
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=118231
re above blog:
Can I ask why it is permissible for this idiot to badmouth me in public on this forum…
I am shocked this evening to see that this ‘chap’ posted my (unrequested) testimonials as a joke and of ‘whats wrong with this network club!
I have just signed up/paid as an powernetworker within the last few days – unless I get a response I would like to cease my member ship & receive by return the amount I paid to join returrned to my credit card…
I find it disgraceful that this character asassination can take place… & if this Ecademy I want no part of it
I asked Ecademy to respond and give their side of the story several hours ago but they have not done so. I’ll update the post if/when they respond.
Update: They finally responded.