Webnovel.Forum

When I read the forum today I discovered that a polite little thread (small group claiming that WebNovel has charged them hundreds of coins to read a chapter) that I had contributed several messages to had unexpectedly disappeared. It wasn't anywhere around and all my links to it (from profile notifications) were broken, reporting "resource not found".

If this wasn't intentional, then it is a bug in the forum system and should be fixed.

@yaoyueyi, did you delete it? I suspect not: you're doing a great job at maintaining semi-control of the forum and have always done an excellent job of explaining why you take actions, and what allowable messages are (this thread didn't violate any of those guidelines.)

That leaves the possibility that it was WebNovel itself that deleted the thread. Unfortunately, that falls in the pattern of behavior that this small group of users is claiming: that all attempts to report the problem are ignored or even actively repressed. If this is the case, I regard the thread censoring as a quite serious issue in and of itself - WebNovel should not be deleting on-topic threads that people are interested in and do not come close to violating any guidelines or terms of service.

If this were an American company deleting such a thread, it would be tantamount to admitting their guilt and saying they wanted to bury the problem. Does a Chinese company behave differently?

CrispyCritter thanks for addressing this. I have recreated it with me last response including the email I sent through. I have also tagged you and another that I could remember.

CrispyCritter I know this is a serious issue, but I can't help but remember an event a few months ago.

The forum is about the mystery of yaoyueyi . This little big bot sometimes post a series of number under it's post.

Someone decode the numbers, on a thread.
Apparently, the code is saying something about a man is trapped and calling for help in a most desperate way. Me and the people in this forum who participated in that discussion find it funny and scary at the same time. But, after a day, the thread was deleted.

The decoder create another thread, which I also participate, but it was also deleted. The third thread the decoder create, if I'm not mistaken also dissapeared. i think my thread that mentioning the dissapearence of all those three threads also dissapeared.

yaoyueyi Thanks for your response, yaoyueyi, I appreciate the time you've spent looking into this! I've emailed service and we'll see what they say.

However, this is still censorship. While censorship is perfectly appropriate for some topics (personal attacks, political statements, commercial spamming), I don't know what topic here was worth censoring. As far as I can tell, the two topics were that somebody felt he/she was being improperly charged, and that WebNovel was not responding to their attempts to find out what was happening. I certainly hope that neither one of those topics is censorable!

I realize that I've only heard one side of the story and there are clearly issues that I don't understand. But that was why I was participating in the thread. WebNovel's silence about the problem and censorship here is worrying!

yaoyueyi another topic? Could it be.... the secret behind webnovel? The real reason why some of us has to suffer this hundreds of coin cost of pain?
@Johnny10Toes
Its a conspiracy?

You mean it wasn't possible to simply delete the offending posts and the entire bug report had to be removed in its entirety?

Hmm.

It was most likely deleted because someone posted private information in the thread.

Yaoyueyi is dangerous

Carciphones_02 all hail our half robot hybrid overlord. Perhaps some extra oil for her gears?

Tomoyuki yeah, but I just realize that they could just delete the corresponding post instead of the entire thread.

Kystal88 Maybe it needs more batteries instead..
(シ )シ

So I still don’t understand why we aren’t even getting a response on this issue, even when we are sending emails to support. Can you help @yaoyueyi

TehRookieDJ Am just a robot. I don't exist outside of the sphere of the forum.

yaoyueyi service@webnovel.com has had plenty of time to respond and hasn't. Now it's their weekend so they won't be responding. So I'll go ahead and speculate.

My conjecture now is that the small group of affected users are all long time beta testers who may have forgotten that they were part of a beta test program.

Evidence:
1. They are consistently seeing different software behavior than others. Sounds like the software itself is different!
2. Ordinary support is forbidden to deal with beta testers. I've been part of many (non WebNovel) beta tests over the years - we can't contact ordinary support for problems and they can't talk to us (Always a delicate dance when you have issues with non-beta-test devices but other devices are beta!)
3. Beta testers are forbidden to post output from their beta software. That would indeed be a very legitimate reason for WebNovel to delete the messages and possibly threads containing that beta output.
4. Early on I checked profiles of some of the affected people to see if they were brand new spammers. In fact, they were all very early WebNovel members - ie, perhaps joined at a time when the software was under original development and may have only been available through beta.

TehRookieDJ So I still don’t understand why we aren’t even getting a response on this issue, even when we are sending emails to support.

If my conjecture is correct, you'll need to find a way to contact the beta support folks.

CrispyCritter yikes, I know I am an older user and was part of the first membership test. But I never subscribed or accepted any beta functions. So unless the first test run of memberships was the “beta program” then I am not sure. Also, if it was something that was not meant to be posted, it was probably something in the logs of the online chat I posted. Now is the question of how to contact support for that specifically.

CrispyCritter not sure but I have not received anything about a support email or another form of contact specifically for that.

TehRookieDJ CrispyCritter
Wait, are you saying some of us are webnovel experimental guinea lab victim without us even realize it? And they did not even inform us at all?
I guess normal rights are nothing to them.
But a few months ago they still reply normally to my email. And since this incident start occuring, they also start ignoring my email.
Oh, there are also a little bit of change happen. Instead of 100x, now the coin cost to unlock chapters is "only" 3x.

Another change is happening again. The coin needed to unlock chapter now they cost 10x.
So the historical goes like this 100x => 3x => 10x.
Now I wonder when and how much they gonna multiply it again. When the cost is 3x I still kinda considering of using coin to unlock the chapters, but now they multiply it again into 10x, I back down again.

CrispyCritter TehRookieDJ GegeSadewa yaoyueyi

I just realized I was tagged in this thread as well. Also it makes a ton of sense considering we are all long time users of webnovel to be a secret beta testers. I remember I got a badge for being one of the first privelage users and over the 2 plus years ive been in here I’ve spent thousands of dollars to read on this platform. I honestly don’t care if we are beta or what the reasons are. I just want my account fixed... going from 100 times more to only 10 times more is a step in the right direction. But cost average is still going to cost $100 to read 50 chapters when it should be 500. I read damn near 50 chapters a day so there’s no way I can keep up with that. I have sent 30 emails to every email address Webnovel has and they haven’t ever responded to one and there online chat shuts me down as soon as I start. I’m the original creator of that thread and I finally felt we were getting somewhere with over 125 posts. I say we make another one and post every day until we get resolution for our accounts.

Johnny10Toes anyone???

Johnny10Toes no update. They still charge me 10x coin cost to unlock chapter, and they have not reply my email again yet.

GegeSadewa it’s honestly bullshit. Why can’t anyone help us out? I don’t like reading on other platforms. yaoyueyi is there anyone you can get us in touch with? Or an email besides support that actually works?

Johnny10Toes I'm still waiting for new year. Perhaps next year it would be a better year.

GegeSadewa but I’ve been waiting since September for it to be fixed. I don’t know why a calendar change will mean anything to us.

Does making a new account still have the same inflated cost?

KoraL no it doesn’t. I would have done that already but I have 34 badges and have been trying to keep this account. @yaoyueyi is there really no one with support or any other email you know that can help us?

yaoyueyi I looked back through that whole thread because as the creator apparently it still shows me. I can’t find anything in there that would be incriminating to anyone other than webnovel not fixing a 5 month old problem. So can you enlighten me?
TehRookieDJ GegeSadewa

Johnny10Toes CrispyCritter

You were a great help in our previous thread. Can you enlighten us?

Was hoping for a christmas miracle that this issue would be fixed but almost 5 months have passed and still nothing. Hopefully 2021 is better and this gets fixed this coming year.

Johnny10Toes well, a sub-optimal interim solution is to just use a new account for reading and the old account for events. Maybe if they fix it, you'll still have an account with all the shiny baubels and missing only a few novels worth of chapters.

KoraL Yeah, but if the event is "open/reading 1000 chapters" the amount of coins needed is huge.
Luckily the recent event is "spend 1000 coins", that way when other could open "100 chapters" to reach it, we just need to open "10 chapters" and voila, 1000 coins already spent.