#but that doesn't make the thousands of other reporters useless or malicious just because a handful of reporters and upper management

[phoenixyfriend]

Some of the comments I get on my posts about the NYT just have me going "you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater"

[duckprintspress]

Thanks so much to the people who've already helped spread the word, it's making a big difference already.

The exact amount of the junk pledge is $2,015.

To overcome it's malicious impact, we need to hit an "actual" amount of $15,515 (instead of our real goal of $13,500) - as in, we need to raise enough over our actual goal to cover the money that'll disappear when this fake pledge is removed.

Someone also suggested in the tags that we report it - we absolutely did. :) Here's what I wrote to KS:

"My campaign has 50 hours left and I just got a huge spam pledge for $2,000. This is absolutely insane, and I'm furious. How can you guys let this happen? When this pledge becomes nothing but air, my campaign either won't fund at the last minute because people who WOULD have backed to help get us over the line will think we're already funded, or it won't get cancelled til after the end and then the money won't exist and we won't actually be able to afford to do our project. I'm absolutely livid. I knew y'all were having problems with spam pledges but jesus f-in christ KS you need to resolve this absolutely immediately or figure out a way to make it up to loyal users like us. It impacts KS too, since if we crash and burn at the last minute because of this spam pledge, y'all can't collect your fees. This pledge and it's timing entirely screws up my ability to get last-minute pledges, and even having it there for a few hours will have a substantial negative impact on my ability to run this campaign.

"If this can't be resolved immediately, please PLEASE extend our campaign a day, anything to make up for the damage that this will do to my ability to get my project funded.

"This is the kind of problem that, if KS can't get it under control, I don't know how I'll be able to continue using the platform. Another person I know has had over $10k of spam pledges on his campaign in the last few weeks, and was initially told one of the pledges WASN'T spam and it took over a day to actually resolve. Can you think what it taking over a day will do to my project?

"Sorry, I'm ranty, but I'm livid, and the useless chat bot, my inability to get a human in chat when I've got an urgent problem, the utter lack of FAQ support for what to do when I get a spam pledge like this, and the irrelevant categories on this form I'm filling out now, plus the dozens of uncontrolled spam messages I've gotten about my project across four different platforms, have all combined to make me feel like KS either doesn't care about the spam issue or has zero ability to control it, and honestly neither of these conclusions is heartening when they relate to a company that has taken thousands of dollars in fees from me over the last few years."

I. Might have been a little angry, lmao.

However, their support staff doesn't even get to the office until 9:00 AM Eastern time (one hour from when I'm posting this), and then they'll have however many other e-mails to get through before mine. Our 48-hour window starts at 9:37 am. The odds that the junk pledge will be gone by then are EXTREMELY low. The person I mentioned in that message, it took over a day to get rid of a junk pledge and KS initially told them it WASN'T a junk pledge, so ya know that was awesome for them. I'd been feeling pretty lucky that it hadn't happened to me yet - this happened to them about three weeks ago - but well. guess my luck had run out.

Anyway, if anyone has other questions or comments, I'll see them in tags or you can drop us an ask. The outpouring has already been incredible, folks have pledged (or increased their existing pledges) to a tune of $303 since I put up the post an hour and a half ago, which means we're only about a thousand shy. I was teary-eyed before because I was upset about the junk-pledge, and now I'm teary-eyed instead being grateful about how awesome people are.

Thanks, everyone.

We'll overcome this dipshit scammy bullcrap!