Over the past two months, I’ve been repeatedly troubled by Fab’s review system. During this period, the issue has occurred at least two or three times, causing ongoing frustration. Just the day before yesterday, my account was suspended for 14 days—possibly because a beverage machine in one of my reception desk models included a Coca-Cola logo.
Yet all of these works had already passed review and were approved for publication when they first went live. Why wasn’t I notified at that time? Instead, a year later, I suddenly receive an email informing me of a violation, followed by an account suspension.
Shouldn’t it be that if a specific work has an issue, only that item is taken down? Rather than suspending all the works under my account, this approach seems excessively sweeping. Fab’s handling of the situation even reminds me of the harsh ancient practice of “collective punishment,” where penalties extend far beyond the original offense.
The whole system is built to protect the shareholders. Customer support lies that they can’t remove the suspensions, which they have done before and they wont tell you what the sanction actually is.
Later they also revealed that sanctions can’t be removed or overturned. So in this situation, they don’t tell you what the issue and lock you out of the ability to make the fixes. So it is actually purely a way to punish you and not a way to fix or address the issue.
When you figure that this is just about punishment and not any copyright infringements, all of this makes sense. They rather nuke your whole account and protect the shareholders, then actually take 5 minutes of their time to have a human review them.
@Zeps9001 You’re absolutely right. It seems like you’ve had a similar experience, and I can relate to that. I remember about two months ago, when I first encountered this issue, I had no experience with it. So, I emailed Fab support and they replied saying I should wait for the suspension to end, and then I could make the changes. I followed their instructions and waited for 14 days.
After those 14 days, I found that all of my 100+ works had been turned into drafts. I could only manually resubmit each piece, fix the so-called “infringement” issues, and request a review. At the time, I was relieved that everything passed the review. But then, I received another suspension notice. This time, I chose to appeal instead of emailing Fab support. Within a day, I got a reply saying it was a mistake on their part, and I was told my account was unlocked.
However, now I’ve been banned again. I’ve already tried the first two methods, but they didn’t work. I think a reasonable approach would be to convert only the infringing or non-compliant works into drafts while keeping the compliant ones online. That way, I would know which pieces have issues and can delete them completely. Alternatively, they could notify me about any problems right when I upload the works, instead of repeatedly tormenting me like this, acting like some kind of sadistic tormentor!