Please read this before posting

[moderator]

We are proud that our discussion board is actively moderated and, while we encourage vigorous debate and allow slightly off color jokes in the mindless banter section, we do rather quickly delete posts that are racist, vulgar, or promote products and services.

Besides being unfair to our sponsors and advertisers – whom we hope to acquire more of by the way – these ‘unofficial advertisers’ usually take the unscrupulous approach of posting false testimonials. These deceptive advertisers will no longer be tolerated.

Earlier today, someone joined this board and in their very first post promoted an admission service complete with an active URL to that service’s website. We deleted it almost immediately and locked the user’s account. An IP address check was performed and, you guessed it, it went right back to the domain name the false testimonial was attempting to promote. I then called this service and verified that their clients do not come into their office and use their computers.

This, of course, means that someone who works for this service logged on to our discussion board earlier today, posed as an applicant and praised his/her own company. If this company was nearly as large and proud as their website attempts to portray them, they would never have resorted to this underhanded and deceptive practice.

I will not name this service because I do not wish to give it any additional publicity. However, because a good and reputable admissions consultant can vastly improve your admission chances and because many of you may be thinking about hiring one, I will say the following. They are located on the West Coast and their domain name begins with the letters “in”.

A good admissions consultancy would never resort to such deceptive practices to acquire new clients. They would be too busy with their word-of-mouth referrals to have time during the day to post such deceptive testimonials. Besides, with such a large amount of scrutiny drawn to their integrity, I would not trust anything else on their website anyway.

Let us hope that this serves as a wake up call to this disgusting tactic and that other discussion board moderators begin taking similar actions. The life of a graduate school applicant is difficult enough without having to worry about getting suckered by some unscrupulous service.

[Author]

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