It seems that Eric and his team are now serious in moderating Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog.

Today, I received a notice from its admin telling me to this: “Don’t freak! We didn’t delete your messages, we just hid those not from your contacts“; and explained this on their blog:

All users now default to only seeing messages from contacts they have made in MyBlogLog. This means that when you log into your account, you may see significantly fewer messages than the last time you were last there. Don’t worry, they haven’t been deleted, just hidden. There’s a button at the top of your message list that toggles between showing messages from your contacts and messages from everyone.

Well, it’s a good move to protect its members from any abuses made by others. They even added that:

1) We’re switching back on email notifications for when someone leaves you a message, BUT…
2) When set to “Contacts only” you will only receive email notification when a contact leaves you a message (assuming you have email notifications turned on in your profile).
3) When someone is viewing your profile, they will only see public messages posted by you and your contacts
4) You will always see your own posts when viewing someone else’s profile, even if you aren’t their contact. (We messed this one up initially, so sorry if you weren’t sure if you’d successfully left a message).

Nothing I can say but it’s the best decision that they have.

However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to ban ShoeMoney just because he showed us some bugs, tricks and hacks on using the MyBlogLog. Well, it’s true that Shoemoney gave us some tips how to get the MyBlogLog members id (or should I say data) of its users but I don’t think that it’s the real reason why they banned him, because in the first place the member’s IDs are not hidden, and that even amateur members can find it. It’s not Shoe’s fault but of the MyBlogLog programmers (themselves). Shoe is just showing us the site’s bugs, not destroying the site.

I think, the best way that MyBlogLog team should do is to consider Shoemoney as their beta tester. Let him hack the site, and let him show us what he did. And your (MBL team) task now is to fixed the bugs that he found on the site.

Hope that MyBlogLog will reinstate his profile, just like what Andy Beal said:

In support of Jeremy, I’m boycotting MBL until they reinstate his profile. What MBL doesn’t understand is that “community” means more than just a collection of avatars, it means supporting those bloggers who support you.