This evening I deleted my Squidoo account. I had three active lenses and one for which I had requested review. This will be my Squidoo rant post.

I had recently tried to add a fourth lens on WordPress Posting Tips. When I hit the publish button there was a message that the lens was considered a spam lens and referred to several pages including the Squidoo Terms of Service. I spent a good deal of time reading the linked pages and could not see anything that applied to my new lens. I had linked to one of my sites in the introduction as credit for the image that I had used. I thought maybe the link in the introduction was a problem, so after removing the link I hit the button again and got the same message. I then submitted the lens for review since I saw nothing in any of the links that seemed to apply. Later I remembered that I had used a screen shot that I had on file from another lens and thought maybe that was the reason. I will probably never know.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was finding an email stating that my most popular lens had been locked as spam and referring to the same pages that I had poured over recently. I could see no reason listed for the old lens just as for the new one. My lenses had earned 38 cents to date, so they were not of critical importance to me. That money will now go to a charity of Squidoo’s choice.

When a lens is submitted for review they state that the review may take up to 30 days. It would probably be less if they did not have so many false positives from their software. In all fairness, perhaps there was something with the parallel lenses that flagged them as spam. It would be nice if the pages to which they referred me would have held some mention of anything related to the lenses.

Squidoo was never very important to me. I had hoped to drive some traffic to some of my other sites with the lenses, but traffic was never significant to any of the lenses. The one article that I have up on Buzzle.com has produced much more traffic than the lens on the same subject. I decided to delete the account. I logged in and deleted the four lenses and then looked for a way to delete the account. I could not find a likely prospect, even when looking right at it.

I then signed in to the forum. I looked for the best category in which to ask the question, but decided that I should do a search because I was fairly sure that others had wanted to delete their accounts. I looked for the typical search box and there was none anywhere to be seen. I then opened a help category thinking that I would have to post the question since I saw no search box. One of the stickies was about searching before posting. They came off of the information that the search feature could be found by clicking on a menu tab that was handily named SEARCH. Why they choose to hide the function and then complain that people don’t use it is beyond me.

It was on my third try with the keyword search that I finally hit pay dirt. There were concise instructions on how to delete the account, if you could find them. I followed the instructions and am no longer a published Squidoo author.

If you are considering signing up for Squidoo you may guess that my advice would be ‘don’t waste your time’. The idea was nice and the platform was hot for a while. I think that it is past its prime by now. As far as I can see, Squidoo is a social club. If you want to be part of the club, and deal with the unstated rules, Squidoo may be for you. I believe that it is not for me.