Aardvark figures out who might be able to answer, and asks on your behalf — Aardvark is the hub.

It’s all about people helping each other out!


I’ve been using Aardvark for about 2 months now and whilst I haven’t asked that many questions myself, I’ve enjoyed answering the questions I receive when I can and getting that warm fuzzy feeling you get from helping a complete stranger out.

I even wrote a glowing review about the service when I first started out using it and have recommended it to a few people as it’s a wonderful way to get quick answers to certain queries that don’t quite work in a search engine.

Recently however I’ve been suspended from the service and have discovered that Mechanical Zoo seem to care more about what people use as a username then the integrity and usefulness of their network.

Just under two months ago I received the following email from Aardvark support:

Hi OzSoapbox,

My name is Tim — I work at Aardvark on community support.

To make Aardvark better for everyone involved, we ask people to use their real names in their profiles. Aardvark is just like Facebook or LinkedIn or other ‘real name’ services, where you are connected to people you know in the real world. (That helps to facilitate trust for asking & answering questions.)

To continue using Aardvark, please either:
- Change your name by logging into the website here
- Send me your full name, and I’ll update your account for you
- Or just let me know if in fact you always go by “OzSoapbox OzSoapbox” — in which case I apologize in advance for being presumptuous

Thanks very much! And please let me know if you have any feedback about Aardvark, I’d love to hear it.

All the best,
Tim


I promptly ignored the email and went about using the service. I was providing (what I thought) were high quality answers to any questions I received and given my name isn’t all that common wasn’t keen on broadcasting it along with my surname initial and location to the world. I know I don’t make much of an effort to hide where I live on this website but that’s on my terms, not someone elses.

All was well until last week when I received another email, informing me my account was to be suspended.

Hi OzSoapbox,

I have to temporarily deactivate your Aardvark account because “OzSoapbox OzSoapbox” doesn’t pass our real-name filters.

A few days ago you were sent an email about our “Real Name” policy — Aardvark requires users to use their full, real names, just like Facebook or LinkedIn. This policy helps facilitate trust for asking & answering questions, which is what Aardvark is all about.

If you’d like to re-activate your account, just respond to this email with your full name and I’ll update your Aardvark profile for you. (Only your friends on Aardvark will see your last name — everyone else will just see your last initial.)

You can also feel free to email me with any questions or feedback.

Best,
Chelsea


This time I was forced to reply:

Hi there,

I have a pretty unique name and would rather not disclose it on a public service unless I absolutely have to. OzSoapbox is the name of a site I run so I figured as long as I wasn’t giving rubbish answers to queries I’d be right.

If you’ve got access to account activity you should be able to see the questions I’ve responded to were all informative answers. If this still isn’t acceptable then I guess I’ll have to forfeit my account.

I don’t used Linkedin but I think you’ll find Facebook aren’t too fussed what name you use on their service as they do not verify accounts.


Now I thought that would be the end of it and my account would be re-instated. Surely Aardvark cared more about retaining useful members who actually contributed to their network over getting their knickers in a knot over what usernames people choose to represent themselves with on their network?

Apparently not. A few days later I received a followup response:

Hi (removed),

Thank you for responding.  I understand your concern.  If it makes you feel better, there are other users named (removed) on Aardvark.  Using real names is important to the Aardvark Community.  Please let me know if you’d like me to update your name and reinstate your account.

-Chelsea
Aardvark User Support


Clearly they don’t understand my concern so I made it bluntly clear to Chelsea:

Hi Chelsea,

There might be other (removed)’s on Aardvark but I’m pretty sure I am the only (removed) in Melbourne, if not Australia. Put tit this way if someone wanted to track me down it’d be ridiculously easy. I’d rather not compromise my identity at this time thankyou.


As of yet I haven’t received a reply but my account is still and has been suspended since June 9th.

Honestly for a service that relies on answer integrity to actually be useful you’d think Aardvark would be more worried about retaining users who actually help make the network what it is. I mean really what, users are all of a sudden going to leave in droves because they receive helpful detailed answers from people that don’t have real life sounding names?

All they use are text filters to check that names sound real’ish, Aardvark don’t even verify your identity. I could just have easily changed my account name to Bob Bobbob and pretended that was my name but it’s about the principle of a company expecting me to contribute to their service.

This entire ordeal seems to be a far cry from Aardvark’s self proclaimed “approach to design and development processes“:

When we set out to build Aardvark, we made two decisions:

1. we wanted to be user-driven — that is, we wanted to be informed by the interests and needs of people who were actually using Aardvark; and
2. we wanted to stay nimble with our engineering by being highly collaborative and adaptive.


Seems they missed the possibility that not everyone wants to run around the internet blasting their name on every single service they use. Maybe Mechanical Zoo could adapt and collaborate to accommodate this, I can’t be the only one who values my online privacy.

Unless I’m buying something from you or we have some sort of business interaction then I’m not using my real name on your service just because you say so. Hopefully the control freaks as Mechanical Zoo will realise that if the popularity of their service increases it’s soon going to become impossible to police what user names people are using.

Answer integrity should be no. 1 in a service like Aardvark and providing it’s not offensive or rude, nobody really cares what the username is of the person they get helpful relevant answers from is.

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