An employer who discovered that one of his listings had gotten flagged decided that instead of contacting me through e-mail, he would post a false listing and flag it and 16 other listings to get my attention. It worked.
I called him directly within minutes of discovering this BS and proceeded to chew him a new one, for half an hour. Profanity was used, by me, and I make no apologies for it in this particular case. If it had been anyone else, he would have been banned without me even letting him know.
Here's the deal: when a listing is flagged, the header bar goes black, the listing gets noted as such, and I get an e-mail telling me that the listing has been reported by
USER@DOMAIN.com (who must be a registered user of BackstageJobs/TheContactSheets.com). I then check the listing myself to see why it has been flagged. If I can't find anything obvious, than I contact the person who flagged the listing. If I don't get a response in 24 hours, the flag gets removed. If they only have a "this place sucks" story about the employer, the flag gets removed. If the listing contains false information, I try to contact the employer to get it corrected. If the listing only contains false information, or isn't appropriate for BackstageJobs.com (such as Waiters, MC's, Temp Agency's, etc...) I delete the listing.
If a listing that is a bonafide listing keeps getting flagged, I can "protect" it from future flags (in affect, removing the "Flag this listing" option for that listing). If a user maliciously flags a listing repeatedly, or flags multiple listings maliciously, I can ban that user.
As I told this particular employer: 99% of the time a listing gets flagged, I never need to contact the employer. Half of the time it is someone thinking (though I still don't know why, as it is spelled out that you are reporting a listing for ABUSE) that they are saving the listing in their account for easy reference. The other half of the time it is a user that had a bad experience with the employer. Only 1% of flagged listings ever need to be removed, and all but one of those have been listings that don't belong on the site (i.e. Waiter).
Complaints about employers should go on Traproom.com, in the Rants and Raves section. I can't go removing every listing from an employer that someone complained about, because I only have one side of the story. One person's summerstock-from-hell can be another's dream job. If you feel that a place is so bad you need to warn the world about it (and trust me, I've worked for those places too) do it here. But I can't remove listings unless the listing contains provably false information.
If you need to contact me about a listing that was flagged, EMAIL ME!
webmaster@backstagejobs.com. Or use the FAQ section on the BackstageJobs/TheContactSheets.com site. DO NOT, EVER, POST "WEBMASTER CONTACT ME" LISTINGS OR FLAG LISTINGS YOU KNOW NOT TO BE PROBLEMATIC. From now on this will result in an INSTANT ban.
