ARISING FROM coffee chatter at Limerick OpenCoffee and some personal experience gained while returning to the grid comes ten tips that a few visitors here validate as inside information useful when reconnecting to places where you've been banned. If you've been kicked out of a discussion forum, blocked by civic sites, blacklisted by eBay, evicted from a social network or otherwise shunned for something you have fixed, these tactics may work for you. They got me back online in one place and they are the reason I carry around four different nics when setting up microblogs across the internet.
1. Consider changing your IP address when signing up again. This means get a different service provider or sign up by using a 3G card on a laptop. Do not attempt to sign up again via AOL if you have been blacklisted while using the AOL browser. Your AOL browser has a unique installation value that some site registrations record for posterity.
2. Sign on with a different email address. In Ireland, those addresses are relatively simple to get by joining community groups.
3. If you're at odds with a business site, you will need to get a different credit card, issued by a different bank from the one used in the original place. Try to set up that new account with a post office box instead of a physical address. In Ireland, that normally means getting two service billings delivered to the post office box.
4. When prompted for a mailing address, use a post office box. If the letters PO reject your application, use the term Postfach instead of POB.
5. Visit with your Bank Manager and direct him in writing to include a note in your account that forbids any of your credit card information or bank account information to be released to queries coming from outside of the bank. As verified on the Enterprise Ireland e-business mailing list, Irish banks divulge information over the phone when prodded with the correct personal details. You need to block that behaviour with an electronic note attached to the financial records kept by your bank.
6. Delete all cookies from your computer before revisiting the site you need to rejoin. Remember that HTML emails from companies like eBay contain web bugs that reset cookies with the eBay session. You need to delete those HTML emails if they are from companies or organisations banning your presence on a website or inside an e-commerce system.
7. Lurk online for at least 90 days in the places where you have regained entry. In many community systems, this kind of lurking builds a track record and removes your profile from a restricted category. Do not chat, rate, comment, buy or sell a thing for that three-month lurking period. Browse, let the browser open for a few hours at a time on random pages, and look like you are a thoughtful visitor who is trying to decide where to go next.
8. After a quiet 90 days, start asking questions, requesting email contact, and chatting in the provided chat systems. If you are back inside an e-commerce site, buy something small and have it delivered to the postal address.
9. Do not buy more than one item a day for the next month. If you are rejoining a selling network, do not try to sell anything until one month after you have received the item you have purchased.
10. If you are trying to rejoin a network as a seller, only sell inexpensive items like beer mats, curios from festivals or brochures from one-off events. These cannot be branded items nor can they command designer prices. You cannot look like some boutique, just a casual person selling online the same things you would sell in a car boot sale.
