Reply To: 1 Million Points for Anyone in Our Community…

[peter]

That thread tells you everything. After I made a total of one comment stating that Jonathan Sasor owed Cakewalk Forum users an apology for berating them for asking if BandLab had ruled out the possibility of offering a perpetual license, first Sasor told me that the people that annoyed him didn’t include me. I replied that it doesn’t matter, that kind of behavior is simply wrong and I can’t support a brand where it’s acceptable for their employees to treat customers poorly. Not long after that I ended up getting suspended for a post in Larry’s thread for updates for a DAW where I asked if the new forum policy permitted a forum user to make head by head comparisons with other DAWs or if that would be censored. That was a 5 day suspension for that post and, like Larry, all of my posts then had to be personally read by Sasor before being posted. The next post I made — which I wrote realizing that Sasor would read it, so I wrote it very carefully, it didn’t matter I was banned. It was simply replying to a question asked in a thread by El Diablo wondering if Larry was okay and even featuring a song he wrote worrying if Larry was okay. I have had PMs with El Diablo and knew some personal things about him and wanted to ensure him that Larry was okay. So I posted that Larry is fine, he — and I — just don’t agree with the new Cakewalk Forum policies and are posting elsewhere. That got me a lifetime ban, although in my correspondence with Ashwin — BandLab’s social media guy — he’s told me that BandLab HQ is aware of the problems with their “legacy forums” and I should “be patient” as the company is letting their software tech team handle it and they’re not necessarily savvy with dealing with the public. I asked isn’t hostility towards your customers a violation of the company’s ethics? Why isn’t a manager involved. I let him know that BandLab exposed my personal customer data more than a dozen times over the years and some of that information remains public. He told me that he’d get it taken care of but never did, so I requested that my data be deleted. He said he would — it’s the law in many US states, such as California — but he never delivered on his promise.

If you look at that thread, people are posting links to other forums, affiliate marketing scheme sites, for profit sites…but there was no problem with any of that until LiikedMusicians was mentioned and then it was promptly censored. Our own  @fleer was among the people who posted a link to here. But it was gone in a heartbeat and after that, the thread was locked. I don’t think it takes a lot of detective work to see that Sasor has some kind of weird vendetta against me for asking him to apologize for berating forum users. While it’s not surprising for an indie developer forum to engage in that — and much worse behavior — it is surprising to see a midsize brand owned by a billionaire engaging in that kind of behavior. You don’t expect mid size brands to be so juvenile, petty and mean-spirited.  It’s one thing to have an employee with an anger management problem, but letting that employee be the public face of the brand, it makes me want to write the kind of articles I used to write years ago. It’s not just bad ethics, it’s profoundly dumb. There’s no upside for BandLab to let Jonathan Sasor destroy their brand image — except for the possibility that BandLab just doesn’t care about the older demographic that uses the forum, which is what I expected, but that was confirmed in the responses I had from Ashwin.

Anyhow, I appreciate everyone who tried to get the word out and don’t give up on PMing people and letting them know that they can just send an email with their first and last name and desired username to me at linkedmusicians AT Gmail dot c@m and I’ll get them registered. But the Deals (sub)Forum is clearly toast and I didn’t do it. Jonathan Sasor and even more, BandLab did it by even when given a heads up about their employees bad behavior towards customers doing absolutely nothing to fix the situation. Inexcusably bad management practices. I’ve always found that billionaire trust fund kids are better at buying up businesses than running them.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

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