No Blend for you at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf

Until an email from The Coffee Bean indicates that this was a policy decision, rather than an one-time bad connection for one user, let's not go off half-cocked--as my grandpa used to say.

(No idea what he meant, but I've never failed to elicit a hearty laugh from any group of LGBT people when repeating the phrase.)

But wait, there's more!

I love our support department because our team is not outsourced to some far off country and is made up of real human beings in San Francisco with real opinions and who really care about giving our customers and users high-quality support.  99.99% of the time, that's awesome.  Every once in a while (this might be the first time) I look at an answer and scratch my head wondering what they were thinking. I think you'll find this all gets cleared up in a couple of hours as folks roll into work and we'll send responses to UniteTheFight and the other sites.  

Also, in case anyone wonders... no "heads are going to roll" as a result of this, it was just a technical mistake and a slightly blunt support response from a well-meaning person on my team.  I'm confident neither will happen again. :-)

Thanks,
David Ulevitch
Founder, OpenDNS

ps, the irony is that I can say with a very high degree of confidence that nobody at OpenDNS, least of all our support department, has any issue with LGBT sites.  If you ever see our blocked page again in error just flag it for review.

Unfortunately, a group of users are abusing the system by adding websites and blindly labeling them pornography/nudity/sexuality/whatever without even looking at the website in question.*

What, if anything, are you going to do about the absolute mess that user tagging system has become to prevent this type of situation from occurring again?

* For instance one user has submitted 190,116 domains, voted on 83,510 domains and is considered a "super voter". You will never convince me that they actually even looked at those sites or really considered what they are voting on.

... and before I could finish typing this note, the "Adult Themes" label has been rejected as well.

that as just a thought,, however a online protest might just help.. give the Coffee Bean some bad press.  

With so many sites on the internet, it's easy to accidentally block one.  Write them and let them know they have gay customers who stay on top of these issues.  But I don't think a boycott is even close to being necessary.

They'll unblock it.  If they don't, then take more action.  

dirty dirty dirty

You send somebody down to the Bean to have a little face to face with management.  Show concern that it appears content for gay and lesbian websites is being blocked at their location. Tell them how "unfortunate" it would be if this information were to become public and go viral.  Feign appropriate concern for THEIR business mistake and offer any assistance you can on helping them reconfigure their filters before the whole thing blows large enough to push fake tits off the front page.  After all, I really doubt the folks at the Bean want things to get all messy.

Enjoy.  

Mom always told me I was special and I believed her.

Unite the Fight has experienced some criticism for having some sort of agenda behind this and being overly critical of Coffee Bean.

In my original post, I thought I was clear that my frustration was based on technical matters that we LGBT face all the time at work and at libraries and more simply because key words such as "gay" "lesbian" "transgendered" is automatically associated with smut and therefor anything on the internet with those words is blocked.

I wrote my angry email to the Wi-Fi service OpenDNS, not to Coffee Bean. Then, as we know, OpenDNS responded as they did, shifting it back to Coffee Bean.  Luckily, that has now been clarified from OpenDNS.

The great result of all this is is that every party involved wants to resolve it and believe the flagging system needs to be adjusted. And that is beautiful.

I'll post more at Unite the Fight.