Hi Greg and all -

I’d like to set the record straight, if you’re willing to listen.

First of all, we did hire a “SEO Expert” to optimize our website a few years ago, which is why all the tags. We’ll be removing the ones that are not appropriate asap.

Greg’s malicious attack was uncool. Seriously, his “They went to a higher authority” argument for what he did is bullshit. We didn’t ever get attornies involved - we tried to keep it neighborly, as neighborly as you can be when your neighbor is starting to build on your property. We contacted folks directly, rather than having attorneys do it - did Greg contact us and say “Hey MyEvents - if you hold yourself in such high esteem, stop SEO spamming.” Had he been a good neighbor, we would have said, “thanks Greg, we’ll take care of that - our pimply faced SEO expert may not be as smart as we gave him credit.”

But in regards to the Trademark infringement, c’mon. We do legitimately have the trademark MyEvents - and until now, have had no real issues. We asked folks at Drupal to simply change it since it was legitimately causing marketplace confusion. We actually had people contact us saying we charged their credit cards!!! We didn’t.

We weren’t unreasonable either - we simply asked that they put a space in the name - My Events. That is not trademarked, does exactly what they intended, and give us a little bit of shelter from the onslaught of marketplace confusion.

We tried to go about it in as nice a manner as we could. We didn’t get our attorney involved. We contacted the folks at Drupal and Civicspace and asked them if they’d assist us - to be good neighbors on the Internet. We also did approach a few companies with the “MyEvents” name before we understood what was going on, letting them know that they were infringing upon our trademark, and asking them to please change it - again, just “put a space between My and Events”. It really is not a big deal for Drupal, but it is a big deal for a small business that is getting slammed with calls. Now, we even have a Canadian company called MyEvent.com, making our little space even more confusing.

I’m sure some folks will have some great retorts to this. But hopefully for the folks who are unbiased, you’ll see that we actually weren’t assholes coming down on the little guy with guns blazing - we are a little guy simply asking Drupal to do the right thing, which they did, because they are cool.

In the future, for those of you who are cool enough, if you ever have any problems with content on MyEvents, I’d ask that perhaps you give us the benefit of the doubt and contact us directly.

But you could be like Greg…