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Advice Company

Post Office Box 1739, Sausalito, California, United States, 94966-1739

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An absolute cesspool! If you make the mistake to ask a question on the forums, you will be utterly degraded and your situation will be made into a joke. This is not an advice site, this is a place for society rejects to feel better about themselves. If you speak up for yourself, you will be banned.

Advice Company Response • Apr 05, 2020

We have no record of the exact exchange to directly address your complaint. However, I do hear your concerns. We ask both users as well as contributors to be polite and treat everyone with respect in order to foster a constructive exchange and share information. Though admittedly we are not perfect and forget that there is a person on the other side of the computer monitor, we do strive to provide users with useful information and allow them to leave with a safe and positive experience. Degrading a user certainly is not a positive experience as well as harassing, demeaning, taunting, or lewd language. We will pass this along to our contributors to remain respectful of all our users.

One star, because the majority of this site is somewhat useful, though the articles fail to explain to users that the laws are different in different states. I also feel like the "ask a lawyer" section is very professional (probably because they aren't anonymous and have to stand by what they say in real life).
My major problem with the site is the forum that is full of abusive "volunteers" that are literally raised to the status of administrators and experienced advisers. If you read through the threads, you can see them treating people very poorly, rather than, maybe explaining their points or disagreements professionally. Yes, some people ask questions and become very defensive when they see they might be wrong about things, and it looks bad, and seems very annoying.. but the volunteer advisors abuse these people rather than being professionals. It sort of seems like this forum is their playground, a place set up for them to bully and abuse people in their free time. They seem like a little club with a chip on their shoulder, and a superiority complex. When you click their post history, you see that they are there ALL DAY EVERY DAY posting and being hostile towards the users that this site lures into the forums with their very professional looking front pages and by promising legal discussion/advice.
One of the biggest offender's username actually implies they are a Guardian Ad Litem in Ohio. If they weren't anonymous, I feel pretty confident this person would have already been reported and, very likely fired or removed from that sort of position. If you understand the professionalism in the court systems, it would shock you to see the vile, awful things this person writes to people merely asking for advice. I've never seen ANY person do or say ANYTHING that would warrant the treatment they get from this person, he or she just comes in with what appears to be a deep seated hatred for the people on this site, especially in the family court related forums. This *** person says very insulting things to, especially the female users, about their sex lives, and shames them for not getting abortions if they have any issues with the biological father of their child(ren)... And they are a guardian ad litem... Seriously..??? I've seen many people talking about this on many other sites, and even naming the same names. Over and over and over again.
Now, in my particular situation, I tried to be receptive and open minded, but that is hard to do when a person is just taking potshots at your sexlife and the obviously terrible mistakes you have made in life- as if everybody needs this person to shame them into seeing that they screwed up when they are just there for LEGAL ADVICE. I have lived with my mistakes- I am not a perfect person and never claim to be, but is a legal advice website the place for that? I've gotten help for my problems, I've felt ashamed for years, I've dealt with my PERSONAL issues, that is not what this LEGAL ADVICE site is for, not what I asked for, and, really, none of this person's business..
There was only one volunteer user that came onto the thread, kept it professional, and didn't just treat me like human garbage. I thank them for that.
Anyway, I felt like I wanted nothing to do with the site after this experience and emailed the customer service or whatever and asked that my account be deleted. Even this person was snarky with me and made a comment like "Oh, well you didn't ask me to remove the thread so I'm keeping it up hahaha!" I was glad they kept it up, because I want other people to be able to see this stuff. But then I saw that they removed all the terrible things said by *** and it didn't really matter at that point. They remove the crappy things they say to people so that when other users read the forum- it makes the *askerlook like a crazy person that got defensive for literally no reason because it doesn't show the abuse they received throughout the thread. I'm very curious as to why the people that run this site let the forum run it into the ground like this. Kinda just seems to me like a superiority complex- Reminds me of 4chan- even the response they give to the other user that rated them on this seems rather... petty.
If they really wanted to fix this problem, they would probably not allow their "advisors" to be anonymous *** internet trolls and would make them stand by what they say in real life, too.

Advice Company Response

First, although we have not been able to locate the posts the writer complains of, or even confirm she did in fact use our website, we are disappointed that the writer says she had a negative experience on our public Forums. We do appreciate that she nonetheless found FreeAdvice.*** to be useful – as do the overwhelming majority of the 25 million Americans who visited our website in the past year.
Ever since we launched FreeAdvice.*** over 25 years ago we have tried very hard to help solve the legal problems of the Americans who visit our website each year – all for free -- and while neither we nor anyone else one can solve every visitor’s legal problem, it’s not for our lack of trying.
In addition to the site’s thousands of legal articles, legal Q&As, and legal videos, our FreeAdvic*** Forums now contain well over 3 million posts. As many as 1,000 people are active, asking questions, looking for answers, and contributing their knowledge and experience on our Forums at any one time, day and night, 365 days a year. The Forums are and always have been absolutely free for consumers to use, although they cost us huge sums to operate and monitor. We rely on hundreds of contributors – including many volunteer lawyers and judges -- to provide assistance to consumers, and monitor the website each day.
We would like nothing better than to have all people who ask questions, and all those who contribute answers, to always treat each other with respect, civility and common courtesy. Yet as with all public Forums – including ours – that are open to the public at large, it is inevitable that some visitors, including those who contribute answers, will not always be as polite and non-judgmental as we and others may wish. We also recognize that even some normally thoughtful and considerate folks sometimes have a bad day. Some people – occasionally including the volunteer attorneys and judges who contribute their valuable time and experience in an effort to help others – seem to forget that there is a living, breathing human being on the other side of the computer screen and become exasperated or outraged. Even judges in court have been known to express outrage at the conduct of the parties and lawyers who appear before them; yet on the Internet, with everything in print, the outrage expressed can take on special significance.
Second, we share the writer’s desire that the Forums be as useful and helpful as possible and free from inappropriate or rude comments. That is why we employ paid staff to proactively monitor Forum posts on an ongoing basis, and why we built in an extraordinary number of additional safeguards to try keep the FreeAdvic*** Forums as free as possible from unpleasantness.
Among those special safeguards are (1) filters preventing improper language from appearing, (2) an ability for any poster to remove his or her own posts/threads at any time with just one click, and (3) the ability of any visitor to flag anyone else’s post he/she deems abusive, derogatory, demeaning, humiliating, etc. which immediately makes the flagged post invisible to the public until it can be reviewed by a lawyer or other legally trained member of our staff. At that point the flagged (and now hidden from public view) post or thread might be permanently deleted in its entirely, edited to remove anything offensive, or restored.
We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to make our Forums a great place to visit, and on the rare occasions when confronted with persons who are systemically abusive, we have deleted their posts, banned them from the Forum, and even sued them in court, resulting in a permanent injunction prohibiting their return to the website. We also (using outside counsel) take steps to confirm that any regular contributor who purports to be a lawyer is in fact duly licensed to practice law and is an attorney in good standing with his or her state bar.
Finally, we recognize that some legal issues – particularly questions related to family law – can be deeply personal, emotional, and volatile. Each of us – lawyer and lawman -- has a unique personal sense of values, shaped by such things as what our parents may have taught us (or failed to teach us), our religious beliefs, our education and training, our political viewpoint, and our own life experience. Choices people make (or have forced upon them) often have serious consequences, and regrettably, not all outcomes are resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Further, the legal system is not designed to absolve people of the results of bad choices or assure outcomes that everyone agrees with. Unfortunately, as in the case of the writer and the lawyer who responded to her post, visitors may express controversial or provocative viewpoints or frustration with another person’s conduct, and some can get testy, sarcastic or even acerbic, and threads sometimes take on life of their own, with the result that offense is properly taken.
We thank the writer and the Revdex.com for bringing the matter to our attention, and we plan to pay very close attention to posts from the particular attorney who was the subject of the complaint. We know that the attorney in question had previously provided extraordinarily valuable help to tens of thousands of consumers, and received accolades from a great many of them for her volunteer efforts. We have addressed the matter with the attorney, and will pay close attention going forward. If as a result of our observations while monitoring the Forums, the flagging of posts by visitors, or direct or indirect complaints, we have concerns about the advice she is providing or the nature and tenor of her comments, we will take appropriate action. We, more than anyone else, want the Forums to be a helpful and pleasant place to visit for all.

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Address: Post Office Box 1739, Sausalito, California, United States, 94966-1739

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