We recently received this email from a frustrated Trade Me user (I’ve removed the name of the company to protect their privacy):
Hi There
We here at [company name] are Trademe fans , and since 2 weeks ago they have barred the trademe address (www.trademe.co.nz) and also the IP address of (http://202.21.128.2) I was wondering if you could provide us with other access points to get on to Trademe, currently we are using (www.trademe.com.au) . We have a lot of staff members here that would love to get back on trademe .
Thanks
Sigh.
Lots of organisations seem to try to block staff from accessing Trade Me. I don’t think it’s unreasonable if somebody is taking the piss and spending all their time browsing the web when they should be working. And, it doesn’t seem to impact us at all.
But, there are surely lots of different ways to solve this problem, and I doubt that blocking IP addresses is the most effective.
I think Mod put it nicely when asked to comment about Carter Holt Harvey blocking Trade Me for their staff in 2005:
Some companies treat their employees like grown-ups. Some don’t. It’s nothing new.
Source: Worldwide Online Auctions News, August 3, 2005
Indeed.
Add [company name] to the list of companies I wouldn’t like to work for.
It seems like a new question to ask future employers in that uncomfortable “Do you have any questions for us?” part of the interview should be “Which websites do you censor?”.
Some organisations, particularly government and bank types, limit internet usage of their more ‘customer focused’ employees to limit the ‘perception of productivity’ from their customers.
There’s also OIA requests to .govts from reporters at Fairfax about how much time employees spend on trademe (heard about this happening a few months ago).
This seems to be a very interesting site, I have the domain name trademe.geek.nz if any one is interested. Could be helpfull for someone using the audtion sites a lot.. Peter..
YGUYDAHCBU