Despite multiple warnings to the contrary, here are the people, in date order (most recent first), who have used my contact form, ticked the boxes to state they weren’t selling/marketing/asking for plugin help, yet did so anyway (and, yes, it explicitly states on the contact form that I reserve the right to do this).
December 19, 2025
Well, it’s been a while since the last Wall of Shame entry. But, never-the-less, I’d like to welcome Elena Abate onto it, from cyberwebpros.com.
She’d very much like me to be aware of a post from ExpressVPN (whom, I assume, are her customer) and that “it might be a useful reference”. She’s not asking me to do anything, she’s not offering me anything, but let’s be honest this is a marketing request. Yet, she ticked the box on the content form to say that it most definitely wasn’t.
Welcome to the wall Elena!
April 1, 2025
1st of April you say? Sadly, not an April Fools.
Davita International, a distribution, manufacturing, and trading company based in Lagos, Nigeria, reached out to me as they’d like to stock my products.
Excuse me? My products? Those non-existent ones that I don’t have?
The email came directly from their sales team. A sales team who either have sight issues, or don’t bother doing any homework first. Great work. I don’t imagine a fruitful future is in store for this company, with research of this quality.
February 19, 2025
Happy New Year! It’s been a while.
One person who’s made it their New Year’s resolution to cold-market people is Eva Benoit. They run a health website and would love to write a guest post for my site. And then ticked to say they weren’t asking to write a guest post.
I’m not sure what they get out of this, as they don’t have adverts on their site, or appear to be selling anything. They have a page to indicate they’re working on a book but, looking at the internet archive, that was the case in 2019. If, 6 years later, the book hasn’t appeared, I’m guessing it’s probably not going to.
Whether it really was Eva messaging me, I don’t know, but the site doesn’t leap out to suggest “many employees”, so I’m guessing it was. Either way, I say very clearly I’m not interested and, yet, here we are.
December 20, 2024
2 instances in 2 days – you can tell it’s Christmas. The time of over-zealous marketing.
Today, it’s “Kate” from First Choice Holidays. After seeing one of my posts about Lisbon, she think’s it would be great if I linked to one of their Lisbon holiday pages on my site. Nothing in it for me, mind you. I’ll just advertise your business for nothing, right? Part of the rather bigger company Tui, this seems a little mean of them, considering they made over €20 billion in revenue last year.
Let’s see what Simon thinks…
I think that’s a “no” from Simon, Kate.
December 19, 2024
What kind of name is WPGlob? Urban Dictionary lists a number of meanings for “glob”, but none are positive. But that’s an aside.
Hasmik from WPGlob contacted me to say they are writing an article on “5 Best Social Media Plugins in 2025” and would like to feature my plugin Social Post Embed. Which is good. Why contact me? They want to “collaborate” with me. Why not just include it, unless they’re after something from me? Kinda sounds some kind of promotion and/or marketing.
December 9, 2024
Plugin developers CodeConfig got in touch with me asking me if i’d be interested in trying one of their plugins, which is related to Dropbox integration. They’d seen the page on my site which lists the plugin I’m using and said…
I believe it would be a great fit for your dropbox recommended plugins list
I assume they’re wanting me to add their plugin to my list. Except for one little thing – it’s NOT a Dropbox recommended plugins list and no Dropbox plugin is mentioned on that page (or Dropbox at all).
So, great quality reach out. And, as always, they confirmed this was not marketing or promotion, which it clearly is.
With regard the company, I always say to avoid anyone whose website won’t tell you where they are. And this is the case here. Find them on Facebook, though, and you’ll see they’re in Bangladesh. But if a website privacy policy doesn’t list an address that you can contact them, I’d seriously avoid them.
They have 2 plugins and many of the reviews are either from their own staff or from people who only review their plugins (which looks suspicious). And, let’s be clear, tactics like the one they’ve demonstrated from this approach makes them very suspect.
August 20, 2024
Rennard from FATJOE (his capitalisation – odd, that the logo is the opposite and all lower case).
Do you have availability for collaborations on Artiss.blog in the near future?
Yes, they’d like to speak to me about sponsored posts. You know, the kind of thing I say on my contact page that I’m not interested in and Rennard specifically ticked a box to say he wasn’t contacting me about. Not only that but, like the previous contact, it’s an SEO company.
You make the Wall of Shame for good reason.
August 6, 2024
Somebody named Emma Taub contacted me, as they’d read a post on my site. Now, what’s relevant here is that this post, from 7 years ago, was about the Yoast SEO plugin forcing a dismissible message on all users if they weren’t on PHP 7.
Well, Emma says that they’ve found a better tool than Yoast, which is the image compressor at Website Planet. Anybody spot the issue here? Yeah, apart from the fact that they’re commenting on a 7 year-old issue, it’s also that Yoast isn’t an image compressor. And, yet, Website Planet touts itself as a “hub for individuals and businesses seeking to create, promote, or expand their online presence”. Which sounds like SEO to me.
The whole message from them reads like a copy/paste job, even leaving in or omitting parts of the URLs.
Look, Emma, whoever you are – I know you’re working for Website Planet (directly or indirectly). I can even do a search and find various other sites where you’ve also recommended it. You’re fooling no-one.
July 26, 2024
Kristine Avocet from Fusion Web Experts felt the need to sell me their services, as a web agency.
They have the email of angles.rosemarie@outlook.com, which neither matches the name not is exactly professional. I smell a rat. Having said all that, take a look at their website and tell me about the company – there’s nothing. Not even a country of origin. Would you pay for services from a company whose domain was only registered a few weeks ago?
July 16, 2024
Tim from Don’t Wait to Date reached out to me to ask if my software could do some of the things that they’re looking for to improve their site? Which software? None of what they asked for has anything to do with my WordPress plugins.
Also, they explicitly say “I do not want free plugins”. All of my plugins are free.
Now, Tim, if you’re reading… commercial plugins do not guarantee anything, other than the fact that they will cost money. There are a LOT of good, free plugins which are feature rich and should now be discounted. And, having looked at your site, if you are only using commercial plugins, they’re not really helping you right now – the site is slow and has the looks only a mother could love.
Anyway, Tim wasn’t marketing or selling me something but actually trying to get me to sell to him a product which I simply don’t have.
May 23, 2024
Mark Piano (no sniggering at the back) from 2T-Digital (no, me neither) wants to publish on my website (yes, marketing – one of the big no-no’s that they ticked a box and said they weren’t sending me).
Here’s the thing, I suspect Mark Piano doesn’t exist and the company looks suspicious too. Here’s a tip for any sites you visit – try and identify where they are and any key contacts. Legitimate companies such as this will proudly show a carousel of staff, along with details of where they can be found. This one… nothing. They have a Privacy Policy and T&Cs page that don’t state anything about them, although the age limitations suggests a US privacy policy (but the business appears to be Portuguese).
This part of their T&Cs is interesting…
We reserve the right to request that you remove all links or any particular link to our Website.
Yeah, that’s not a thing.
May 21, 2024
Juan Perea at Toptal contacted me because he “stumbled upon [my] fantastic post about Coding Selenium”. Except the post he referenced didn’t, not have I ever spoken on the subject. No, he wants me to add links to my site to theirs. Marketing, in other words.
The company seems legit, as does Juan, but their marketing less so.
April 8, 2024
I recently had the pleasure of exploring your website suanhaoming.com
That’s the start of the message I received from Irina from Creative Fabrica. Yeah, that’s not my site. When you’re cutting and pasting your out-reach, at least change the bits you’re supposed to.
Anyway, they want to exchange links, which isn’t going to happen.
February 8, 2024
“Do you accept guest posts?” is the opening line from Oskar Reynolds at AWISEE. They want to pay me for guest posts. And, yet, Oskar also ticked the box that said “I confirm that this is NOT a marketing request – advertising, guest posts, selling your product or services, etc.”. The answer was there all along.
AWISEE is a UK SEO agency. You’d think they’d no better than this kind of practise.