Writingbattle Opiniões 

If I could give it 0 stars, I would. I feel like this whole contest is a scam. I ended up losing to stories that were poorly written and didn’t follow the prompts that were given. When I complained about it, I got a vague reply about how the judges judged. I had already entered a second competition before I got my first results, but my heart was not in it anymore. I just knew I was going to lose again. This time, after my criticism about the judging, I came in completely last. I lost against stories that should have been disqualified for not following the genre or even because they might have been written by AI (I just can’t prove it). I asked for a refund after noticing that the results were being tampered with. They refused.

Multiple other participants on reddit feel the same. People apparently got banned for speaking up. Banned stories were still in the battle and even won. People mentioned that battles they gave a win ended up a loss in the end.

Avoid Writing Battle. I wish I had never given this organization my money. I’m not a sore loser, I just want results to be fair and it definitely was not.

There's a lot of other posts about ethics, fairness, transparency, etc. on here that are more articulate than what I can add. I can only speak on what happened to me (from my understanding).

I received an unexpected email on Aug 19th informing me that I was being pulled from the active "Raven" competition and would be refunded. The entry in the "Owl" competition would stay and they would let me know via email if it won a monetary price.

I, however, was banned and informed "We do not wish to have you as a customer, now or in the future." That is the direct quote from the closing of the email.

I responded requesting details on what actions I made that led to my banning from the platform. To the best of my knowledge I've done nothing offensive or inflammatory. I'm no Ben O'Neil or Chris Fulwel but I'd been on there long enough for people to recognize me, and I'm sure I would have heard something if I did something egregious.

To date, I have not received explanation to my removal from Writing Battle and am left with no understanding to why. All I have are the following events leading up to it.

Context: WB shut down most of the community features upsetting a lot of their users. Some users, including friends of mine, did what writers do, and wrote. In the only place on the site that would allow them to speak between competitions: The Tavern.

These users wrote satirical stories about the situation and other recent decisions by the WB team. Some very subtle. Some pretty obvious. Nothing inflammatory.

These users had their stories removed, and were banned from the platform. One friend of mine merely commented on a story, and was told their account would be suspended for 24 hours. That 24 hours has been over a month and they have not been reactivated and to the best of my knowledge received no further communication that they were banned from the platform.

I sent an email to Writing Battle asking if it would be possible for banned user to be able to get access to their intellectual property? Their stories, not just the ones that led to their banning. Some of them wrote several stories directly on the platform and now had no access to them. So I wrote as a friend and an advocate on their behalf.

I heard nothing back.

The current "Raven" competition began a week or so later, and I put in MY entry. My story for this competition was NOT satire. It had nothing to do with the events in WB. It was a silly story from perspective of the Magic Bean Seller after the events of Jack in the Beanstalk. No harm, no foul.

For those of you who don't know, "Raven" contests are Peer Judged. You submit a story, you'll judge 5 rounds of paired stories.

Round 1, had a story that could have been satirical about WB, but it could have been just as easily a generally cute anti-authoritarian story. I liked it. I voted for it. Not because I wanted to make a statement. It was the better story of the pair.

Round 2, had a story that was MOST DEFINITELY a commentary on recent moderation decisions made by WB, specifically banning stories for weird/unclear reasons. The other story was about alien anal probing. It was cute. I gave the win to the first story though as it had more heart and was the superior story.

I didn't vote for either of those stories because I had an axe to grind. They were the stories presented to me by WB and they were the better stories.

Right before Round 3 was when I got my ban notification. I later found out that the two stories were removed and their authors banned.

I'm not one for conspiracy, but without any response from the WB team on WHY I was banned. I'm led to believe that it had to do with my voting in favor of two stories they deemed critical of their company.

Why did those two stories happen to come my way to begin with if they were so beyond the pale to WB?

Was it because I sent an earlier email asking for users to get their property which is theirs by right, and WB decided to give me a loyalty test? Seems crazy. Definitely conjecture.

But I have nothing else to go on.

This is not a fair or just company. They make their moderation decisions based on their own feelings and back it up with ever changing Calvinball rules.

It isn't a safe place for writers, or even the softest of criticism. And it certainly isn't worth your time, money, and loyalty.

When I started writing, several years back, the process was largely private. Sharing bits and pieces as if my words were purely autobiographical and would violate my HIPPA rights. But then one day, I discovered writing challenges. I loved being able to anonymously compete with other burgeoning writers and with Writing Battle, the community I found in the forums.

People would hit submit and then pivot to the forums, chatting and comparing notes. Seeing if anyone else got a particularly funny story or was still haunted by another. Writing Battle was a blue dot dopamine hit even after the writing had been completed.

However, despite the forum liberating writers, the mods soon cracked down on any posts that dared to question them. Posts were deleted without explanation and then users began being blocked. Problematic stories with racist or sexist themes, which are prohibited by their own rules, were allowed to stay. Stories that could be seen as parables of the mods were removed.

I stopped giving my money to Writing Battle after I saw one too many “We don’t want you on our platform” emails from friends who had been banned. Banned without explanation. Banned without warning or necessity.

Writing Battle could have been great but mod egos came before the voices of the community that paid their way. I am not writing as someone who feels cheated. I have placed and done well in Writing Battle competitions. My issues are strictly with the suppression of speech and ideas in a forum that touts itself as a ‘community’.

Website started out well, but then didn't know how to handle customer feedback. He could have just let people alone when they posted feedback on the community forum. Instead he banned people, instituted weird age verification checks as an excuse (wtf). Banned people for writing stories that alluded to censorship (really!). People were appalled. Oh, yeah, you'll notice some five star reviews all done on Aug 6th. Funny coincidence that. The owner asked his friends to post positive reviews for him. It's like North Korea, jawdropping if not sad and horrible.

Don't waste your time or money. The same people win again and again and they have posted the
5☆ reviews here. Why wouldn't they? They have a great gig going. Eye rolling stories like "Pancakes McBride" win, as do stories that feature sa, misspellings, run-on sentences, and incomprehensible plots.
The "professional" and "industry" judges are sketch: freelance editors and likely self-published authors who, shocker of shockers, also compete.
Does this sound like a fair contest?
Scam-o-rama

A lot has been said by others, and I have have witnessed most so will leave it to them.

I was recently banned from Writing Battle, and I have not been told why. There is an ongoing complaint that is being ignored and while I will probably be labelled disgruntled for my opinion, it is not opinion but fact that Writing Battle appear to have bent and broken the laws around contracts, competitions of skill, and privacy.

So while a private company can chose to operate how it likes, it can't choose to ignore the law of the land.

And I loved the actual competitions (though never did well in them), but the changes in management practice have made it a business that cannot be trusted.

This contest has helped me write a lot of stories in a variety of genres that I might not otherwise had a chance to write. In particular, I really enjoy the 1 v 1 format of the contest and the tournament style. In other competitions I've felt like the odds of doing well were really high because you're just being judged against all 2-300 people at once, and I sometimes had questions about the judging methods and lack of transparency related to the judging of the comps. However, with Writing Battles peer judging, you know one writer is going to read, comment, and pick a winner between the stories. Though I sometimes disagreed with the judging, I thought it was a good reflection of readers in general-- not everyone is going find your work as appealing. As a result of participating in this competition, I've been able to grow a lot as a writer even though I've never won any money. I also became a lot more aware of who my peers in the writing world are, and made some really great connections.

In my experience with the owner and the forums:
I've had emails with the owner and he's always been very respectful and helpful even when he didn't agree with my ideas. I always appreciated him taking the time to respond. I haven't been so active the last year, so I haven't spoken with him or his team in a long time. As for the forum, I was super hyped for this competition when I first joined it, so I tried to be active there. As the contest grew in popularity, it seemed like people on the forums were clashing more and more, some groups of people dominated the forums, and other people just posted random threads that I wasn't that interested in, so I stopped spending time there. I had come to the conclusion that I didn't join the comp to discuss things on a forum. I joined to write stories.

I think this competition is a good place to improve your writing skills. Not all of the feedback on your story will be life changing, but it is often helpful in a variety of ways. The frequency with which they have competitions give writers a chance to produce a lot of stories in the year, and I think that's great. I definitely think it's worth a try.

I am not typically one to write reviews online. But at this point, I am sad and discouraged.

I'm a long-time writer, but I decided I wanted inspiration to start and finish more stories, so I looked into writing contests. Writing Battle was my first stop this last April 2026. I instantly loved the prompts, the battle style, the forum, and the community. I have since made many good writer friends from WB, and that by itself made me a stronger writer.

But very quickly, changes started a-comin'. And they were chilling. Topics of dissent were "frozen". Comments got deleted (again, usually dissents or complaints). Myself and some others commented on the disappearance of an otherwise prolific and hilarious forum poster, and that conversation was deleted and we got personal emails that this was some ne'er-do-well who they banned for previous infractions. We were told they would not address it again.

Then more people started getting banned. Specifically people who'd provided constructive feedback to the WB team. There was also a pattern of these folks having been connected to something that happened on the forums in Spring 2025 that I can't comment about because I wasn't there.

Then the forums were taken down entirely, and my personal writing buddies started getting randomly banned - with no explanation. One of them has yet to even be told they were banned. They just can't get on the website.

Throughout this time, I rarely spoke on the forums. I was there, but not a lot. I commented once or twice on a story in the tavern a few months ago. I didn't post anything on Reddit. I wrote a story for the most recent competition that included some subtle commentary. Which, to be honest, could have been commentary on any internet drama. No mention of WB. No mention of the moderators. No mention of anybody by name. Just metaphorical horror using my assigned prompts.

And now I am banned. Was it for the story? I don't know. Coincidentally, that same day, 5 other people in my private discord group were ALSO banned. Making it clear it was a targeted banning, and making us wonder if perhaps something we'd said in that discord got reported.

So yeah, this was a competition that was lots of fun. And if you know nothing about the ethics of the people running it, or about the history of the complaints, you can probably still enjoy the competition itself. There's no community anymore, though. And be careful what you say, even in the privacy of your own spaces or in the metaphors of your stories. You might get banned for it!

The administration of this contest and the website that hosts it is prone to making reactive and emotional decisions based on customer feedback. They have done and will continue to ban customers for complaining or suggesting improvements to the site. They will lie about reasons for bans, delete comments and lie about the existence of comments, and intimidate people who disagree with them by asking for their government ID (not required to receive award payment via PayPal, which is how the site historically has distributed awards). They will refuse to disqualify reported stories for sexism or racism, citing freedom of speech and creative freedom, but will disqualify satire and ban the customers who write it. Find somewhere more stable to spend your money.

I have been participating in writing contests since 2016. I've done *a lot* of them. I've also been doing WB since the very first prose battle.

It used to be my favorite contest. The prompts were creatively unusual, the admin team was responsive and transparent, the story vs story format was unique, and the community was active and welcoming.

Unfortunately, over the past year or so things have gone off the rails.

*Rules change on a whim, so what you paid for is not always the product you get.

*Members of the community are silenced for offering lived-experience sensitivity feedback in story share, while the damaging stereotypes in the stories are defended as free speech.

*Community comments are so heavily moderated that it was impossible to have a conversation or opinion. The censoring of community engagement became so unwieldy, they ended up deleting the entire forums—ultimately removing one of the biggest draws to the comp.

*Users who offer critique or difference of opinion on management are banned.

*Users who are *suspected* of being critical of management are banned, often without any explanation.

*Participants who submit stories that the admin deems as critical or satirical of the platform are DQed and banded.

*Users who speak out on (checks notes) OTHER PLATFORMS are banned.

*Previous winners, including myself, are being removed from their winners’ listing page for—at least in my own case—publicly supporting those who have spoken out with legitimate concerns.

Most of the people who have spoken out are not rabble rousers, looking to take WB down. Most of us wish that the admin would have heard the concerns and worked to address them so that we could all keep participating in a contest that we loved.
Instead, they doubled down on the censorship and banning.

TL;DR. I think it’s broken. Don’t waste your money.

The negative reviews here sum up a lot of recent frustrations that I — and apparently many writers — have with WB’s changes over the past few months. There’s solid feedback in recent reviews, both bad and good. I think the reviews that praise the prompt and tourney-style format are spot on. It’s a cool format. And the reviews pointing out the inconsistency of heavy-handed moderation, the nuking of forums and the weird WERE YOU TALKING ABOUT US?!?!?!?! bans are likewise spot on, also super weird. WB creators would do well to take all of this feedback to heart.

My feedback is fairly simple: be like 100% more chill. Please.

Watching mods ban people for fictionalizing the softest of soft critique of the site is a level of middle school insecurity that makes me so embarrassed that I want to crawl out of my own skin. Guys… you know that doing nothing was an option, right? Laughing it off was an option. Asking yourselves if maybe you made a wrong turn and regrouping was an option. Banning people for like barely critical stories in Tavern, or worse, convos that happened off-site was "im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.”

Stop policing reddit forums and 2025 discords and wherever else you think people are whispering about WB. Just be chillllll. Everyone is going to have an opinion about WB. Listen to what’s useful. Discard what isn’t. You are not the website, which you can verify by looking at your hands and seeing hand skin and not html, which let’s be honest, could use a real cleanup WHICH IS NOT A CRITICISM OF YOU A HUMAN PERSON.

The people expressing their frustrations aren’t out to get you. They aren’t wringing their hands hoping for your demise. They want the site to do well and be welcoming, despite the lovely review here from someone I can only guess aspires to be a professional hall monitor for a contest “where those sorts of people aren’t welcome”. Lol, okay bro.

Go back and think about what you wanted when you created this whole thing. You still feel like you’re doing that? Because it doesn’t feel like you’re doing that.

Wildly unprofessional behavior. I have been participating in online writing competitions since 2020, and I have never seen anything like what is going on with Writing Battle.

The appeal of Writing Battle when I found it was a passionate and supportive community. It was immediately evident from the forum posts, the tavern story sharing, and the peer feedback. The strength of Writing Battle was its community.

Over the past few months, the admins at Writing Battle have undone all of that. It started with deleting forum posts as a method of censoring posts they didn't like, then the entire forum was removed when they realized they couldn't effectively control people's conversations, and eventually they began deleting user accounts without giving any legitimate reason... nor any illegitimate reason. No reasons given at all.

When my account was deleted, this was the entirety of my notification:

"Hello,

This email is to let you know that your account has been removed from the platform.

We will contact you via email if your story wins any cash prizes for the Solstice Owl Battle.

We do not wish to have you as a customer, now or in the future.

Sincerely,

WRITING BATTLE"

It seems the admins at Writing Battle now happily make judgements on who they deem worthy of paying them for the privilege of participating on their platform, possibly on the basis of activity outside of Writing Battle entirely, such as posts made on Reddit or participation in private Discord servers.

The people running this company are behaving like butthurt 4chan users instead of owners of a business. It's unfortunate to see them squander what was once something so positive, but their emotional and childish reactions to people stating their opinions has poisoned everything that was good about this competition.

I have subsequently submitted a request for my personal information, which is my right as a customer under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. I will follow up here on whether they complied with my request.

There are plenty more reasons beyond those I've given to avoid Writing Battle; I would recommend reading the other reviews here on Trustpilot, and searching for threads on Reddit and elsewhere before spending any time or money on these people.

EDIT: They responded to the PIPEDA request by sending me my own email address, a user ID, and a hashed digital fingerprint. This does not comply with my request, of which I informed them, and they stand to be reported on September 18th unless they actually comply by then.

Winning stories are more "abstract" and full of imagery rather than the actual teeth required to make for good story-telling. Half are written in prose format and only slightly (marginally) carry the prompts.

I've done, at this point, 10 writing battles, with positive results. Not as in "winning" but getting genuine feedback from users and judges that actually makes me reflect and know where my practice needs tweaking and tightening. I appreciate the communication and emails the teams send, which is always marked by their willingness to listen and try to keep the focus on the stories. I've only had positive interactions with the Writing Battle team and other members. While many new changes have been implemented in my time joining battles, none have been a surprise to me or ones I can't get extra details on.

While everyone's ideal way of "competing" and receiving feedback can be different, for me, this is the closest I've gotten to a writer's circle online. I love being able to explore other writer's work, their process, and find that everyone's goal is to turn out the best work they can. In turn, they want *you* to turn out great work too. I love knowing I'm part of that growth process!

To Note: I never used the forums, to be honest, really only focusing on stories and feedback, so my opinion on that is non-existent as I wasn't aware of any of the goings on.

I’m new to writing, and when I first joined Writing Battle, I honestly had no expectation of ever winning anything. I was genuinely happy just to receive honorable mentions for the first two stories I submitted.

What I valued most about Writing Battle was the community. I met a lot of writers I enjoyed talking with, learning from, and sharing work with. Over time, though, that community seemed to move more and more to Discord as moderation on the forums became increasingly restrictive. It eventually felt like criticism, jokes, or even conversations about how the forums were being handled could put people at risk of being banned.

I watched friends get banned for writing satire about the changes to the forums, and in some cases people were banned simply for commenting on those posts. That was the point when I started feeling like Writing Battle was becoming very different from the community I had originally enjoyed.

When I received the email announcing that the forums were being shut down, and I was given the option to receive a refund for the current Raven Battle, I took it.

I’m not writing this because I want Writing Battle to fail. In fact, I hope the opposite happens. A lot of their advertising emphasizes the community they have built, and I hope they eventually recognize that the community is one of the most valuable things they offer and start actively fostering it again instead of restricting it.

I would genuinely consider coming back if that happened. Writing Battle introduced me to writers and a community I’m grateful for. I just wish the platform itself still felt like a place where that community was welcome.

I am not "embittered" (trustpilot), "disgruntled" (reddit), nor am I known to be "problematic" (Community Letter, Writing Battle).

In fact, I have been fairly happy with Writing Battle and supportive of the many directions and rule changes that have happened. I go with the flow, write my story, submit, and then either judge (peer) or wait (pro), with Debrief to keep me occupied. I ignored the way everyone was called "ravens" (felt too culty for my taste) and just minded my business and enjoyed the competition. In fact, I've placed in the money several times and always had pleasant interactions with WB Admin.

But I feel that I should speak up - I am no longer going to participate in the Writing Battle. This is due to several reasons, the first being the lack of regard for SA victims and allowing them to be treated unfairly, for lack of better term, back in March 2025. At the time, I thought - well, everyone is heated, and WB Admin can't know everything that everyone is feeling, and they are trying to run a business based solely on free speech.

But then, they contradicted that by not allowing users to comment on problematic stories with anything but praise or mechanical corrections.

Okay - maybe they are just super Gen X and don't want to talk "religion or politics" at the dinner table (debrief) - I don't support it, but I understand if that's their view (they were raised by boomers, after all).

Then, they banned users who spoke up against those SA victims who were banned or left on their own accord, feeling unheard.

Again, trying to protect the peace - maybe they had a rough childhood, maybe their role is to always keep the peace, and maybe - well, a lot of maybes. A lot of excuses for this behavior, which isolated women and LGBTQ+ ravens specifically (the highest % of banned people were women and gay men).

Then, their moderation started. Freezing forum threads. Deleting forum threads entirely. Erasing any evidence of dissent.

This was shocking - and a complete 180 of the "free speech" they lauded back in March 2025.

When a request for a government ID was made to a user who was, according to the same email, accused of "fearmongering" in the forums...

...then a post was made on Reddit to discuss...

...then a WB moderator came in, with inflammatory language insulting someone's (dead) mother (comment removed, but screenshots exist)...

...then Writing Battle shut down the forums altogether, and began banning people for Reddit posts, posting satirical takes to the Tavern (which were taken down, but takes with brutal SA or even child SA are allowed - not only allowed, but win?).

This was all too much. My excuses weren't excusin' anymore.

I fear that I was supporting a misogynist with a power complex, and for that, and for not quitting sooner, to my fellow SA survivors, I'm sorry.

I loved Writing Battle. I loved what it was. I'll be grateful to it for giving me a close circle of writing friends, all who are not afraid to stand up for what is right. I'm sorry it took me so long, everyone. I stand with you, women, LGBTQ+, victims of SA, those unfairly banned, and any other paying customer who was targeted by Writing Battle.

(oh yeah, one more kick in the pants -- they were anti-AI until people started discussing using generative AI in the forums, and their rules changed/they made exceptions, allowing an alleged AI-written story to win?)

Earlier I mentioned the cult of the Raven. You can see for yourself, in the 5-star reviews here that sidestep the issues at hand, or condescend or demean those who feel WB went too far. Ravens turn their head, they bow to their leader, and they sit back and allow injustice to continue, while laughing their way through Debrief. They should be ashamed.

I've taken part of Writing Battle over the past several years. There is a piece of my heart that loves WB for how much good it has done for me getting me out of the box, but that good does not outweigh how icky I've felt in recent experiences. I've witnessed a lot of the censorship first hand in the forums, and it's always rubbed me the wrong way. Moderators were quick to punish some, while allowing more horrendous situations/stories grace. A lot of the time, mods wouldn't step in until somebody started questioning them. Recently, the newer additions to the mod and admin team had been purposefully rude, and they continue to act like they don't see it. The removal of the forums was just the icing on the cake -- I can understand a small portion of the community uses it, but to just immediately shut the whole forum down with no warning just because the moderators can't manage anything was the final straw.

I honestly think WB was better when it was just Teona and Max, but it's understandable for them to expand the team as the site grows. It's unfortunate that they've chosen to support mods that are incredibly power hungry instead of their community.

I engaged with one Writing Battle battle. I liked the concept, drawing cards to determine your prompt, even giving you the ability to reroll, which is a neat twist. I did not place, but the prompting and the writing were a fine experience.

A few things stood out though. For one, any even vaguely negative comments about other stories are frowned upon. You'll have to take my word that I was never mean or unfair -- the peer reviewed winner for the competition I was in was bland, and many other stories were more original and interesting and well written. The fact that none of them came close made the competition feel a little unfulfilling and I commented on the forums about some stories I thought deserved to win more because the winner was kind of bland and my comment was almost immediately removed.

This is kind of minor but a bit annoying, especially when feedback is emphasized as part of the contest. I didnt participate any more, but after witnessing the clown fiesta that is the mod team and their management of criticism of them and their competition is frankly embarrassing. Word got put that they were asking people for their government IDs over email (unsecured, and also seemingly as a means of silencing dissenting voices), and instead of owning up to it they doubled down, called their accusers liars, and deleted any and all mention of their mishandling of this from their forums. One of their mods went to a reddit thread discussing their mishandlings (since any and all discussion was quashed on their forums) and yelled at people. WB also has a history of changing their terms and rules to retroactively make things okay (like very recently changing a rule disallowing song lyrics to allow a winner to not be disqualified).

They nuked their forums and have also banned and disqualified tons of participants for banally commenting and agreeing with the dissent on completely separate discord. They have also disqualified stories submitted to their competitions that parodied, satirized, or referenced the ongoing controversy. You can guess whether this is supported at all by their rules. All while they tout "freedom of speech" as a value by allowing stories with things like shocking violence against children, sexual and otherwise.

Long story short WB is trash, run by stupid people who don't know what they are doing while insisting that they're too small to be bad or negligent (a regular response of theirs has been something like "we're just 4 guys! Not a big evil company!). It's clear that they don't know what they're doing, and there are also practices that call the outcomes of their competition into question, like allowing previous winners (who are often in writing groups with other contestants) to judge. It's a total mess, ethically and otherwise. The competition itself has some okay ideas, but the company itself is unsupportable, for reasons stated above.

This was once a really fun competition, with a vibrant community of writers looking to tell good stories and improve their craft.

Now, it’s more like some dystopian landscape where Big Brother has gotten heavy-handed with censorship of opinions, while letting some extremely suspect stories stay up despite skirting on the wrong side of their own rules (of course, those rules can also be re-written on a whim). The ban hammer is out, and now people are also being policed for speaking out on Reddit about censorship and other issues that have been bubbling under the surface.

I won’t re-hash all that, but please take note that when you sign up for a Writing Battle contest, the rules can change mid-contest, as can the code of conduct etc. Other writing contests may have a similiar business disclaimer, but I have yet to actually enter one that has done that. And certainly not with the whiplash frequency of Writing Battle, and certainly not mid-contest.

Lastly, I want to address the idea that some of the people commenting are “embittered”. It’s perfectly fine to have a different perspective of Writing Battle, however that does not negate the experiences of others. The reviews here are just the tip of the iceberg compared to what has been spoken about on Reddit. The conversation in that online space occurred because Writing Battle shut down any honest communication on their own site, and people found another place to discuss their experiences. Including people, who by their own accounts, have enjoyed success there.

There’s no coordination of reviews. Just individuals reacting to being told to be quiet. That never seems to be a great way to stop writers from expressing their own opinions.

For anyone seeing all these reviews, do your own research and make up your mind, and if you do decide to join any Writing Battles, I wish you the very best of luck.

For the WB Admins/Mods Who Are Reading This:

Do you really believe that a bunch of disgruntled writers did not "want to be here and were perhaps looking for a way out", were "sow[ing] discontent in the community" because it was "the only way to get their money's worth"? That seems like an awful lot of effort for people who you say don't want to be there. And then why would they continue to post critiques other places, if they've gotten what they wanted by "getting out"?

Your critiques are coming from people who *desperately* want to be on your site, actually, but who you've driven away with mid-competition changes, reactionary and misleading communication, and refusal to take accountability for missteps. We have emailed you privately and expressed our concerns politely in the forum for months because we trusted you'd hear and value our concerns.

We loved WB when we thought it was fair and transparent; mid-comp changes to result release dates announced one day ahead of time is only one thing that causes us to doubt that. We loved WB when we thought it encouraged free, respectful discussion and criticism; frozen/deleted threads and comments with no explanation, and allowing people who criticized in good faith the depiction of SA in a story to be attacked, and then later banned, is not what we signed up for.

Here's the other thing: your customers are writers and readers, and thus are probably more likely to apply critical thinking to your communications and actions than an average group. You can reset your site over and over again, turn out old writers for new ones, but the new ones will eventually take note of how you act, and with no forum to go to first, may just up and leave. That sounds exhausting for you, and not an ethical or successful way to run a business.

No one expected you to please everyone or implement every piece of feedback. What we did expect was thoughtful, consistent responses to genuine concerns -- not constant cover-ups and minimizations in the name of keeping things entirely positive. You're constantly tearing down houses of cards and replacing them with new decks, but eventually, you're going to run out of cards.

Just some food for thought. I'd really love to be able to come back.