How Do You Spell Transparency?

I recently joined a real estate forum and started contributing in what I thought was a respectful, professional manner having been blogging, writing and tweeting on the Internet for the past 10 years. It was a nice forum because it recognized that many people contributing to these types of media want to get some SEO, search engine optimization, value for their efforts, myself included.

As a result the forum allowed it's members to include anchor text links in their signatures, posts and comments. To make sure their members were at least somewhat sincere, it was required that you make 15 contributions before you could actually start linking back to your site. Over all I thought it was a great idea, that is until I logged in and got this message;

You have been banned for the following reason:
No reason was specified.

Date the ban will be lifted: Never

This caught me by surprise as I belong to many online communities and I'm very familiar with basic etiquette and I work hard to be professional, relevant and transparent. I thought back over my previous posts to try and see what I might have done or said to "get the boot". But when I noticed that there was no reason specified as to why I was banned, I thought there must be more to this than meets the eye so I decided to poke around a little.

I discovered that the owner of this forum was a real estate marketing company and they obviously didn't want any competition. I kind of wish they would have mentioned this up front as I did read their terms of participation and there was no mention of who could join or not join.

They also could have made it clear who was the owner of this forum. As a real estate marketing company providing a great internet marketing tool for real estate agents, I would want everyone to know who was providing the service. Why hide this fact?

Anyway, at first I was a little mad about the whole thing but then I realized that there was nothing stopping me from launching my own industry forum. When I looked into the software required and costs, courtesy of a link at the bottom of their site, I discovered that it was more affordable than I thought and now Agentopolis is in the process of launching our own real estate forum. This will be free and a great place for real estate agents to develop valuable links back to their sites to help them with their Google rankings and internet marketing. We will even provide free webinars on how to use this tool.

So I guess you could say I'm grateful to the secret owner of the forum who kicked me to the curb, if it hadn't been for them I never would have known about this great free real estate marketing tool.

Thanks secret real estate marketing company, and don't worry, your secret is safe with me ;)