Kinsta Is Apparently Trying To Delete Our Wikipedia Page

Update 5/17/2019: Kinsta associate Alex Panagis is now trying to actively hack into LittleBizzy.com

How do you know that your business is making a difference?

It’s easy. Your (insecure) competitors attack you at every opportunity, no matter the cost. In fact, their reaction is often so knee-jerk and desperate that it ends up hurting their own reputation more than yours!

“I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

― Margaret Thatcher

First it was Flywheel hosting who came at us with anger and threats after we revealed some very big differences between their platform and ours. We’re just a small startup, but apparently our comparison chart was visible enough to piss them off, and they shot over an email without doing any research.

Now, its Kinsta web hosting that is coming after us, in a much dirtier way.

Over the past week, Kinsta’s “Chief Marketing Officer” Brian Lee Jackson, and his buddy Alex Panagis (who is also a Kinsta affiliate and promoter) launched an all-out assault on LittleBizzy’s reputation, with help from fellow scammer Naveed Moein and some Wikipedia users they “coaxed” to join. This is some next-level SEO, folks…

It began when Panagis reached out to LittleBizzy and pretended to be interested in Sales, and then suddenly changed course and asked me to publicly endorse his WordPress plugins, despite my never even trying them out. “Hmm… who dis?,” I thought. “That name sounds kinda familiar.”

I then remembered, this was the same guy who on public Facebook forums had repeatedly accused me of lying about Jackson’s misdeeds, and was strangely running defense for Jackson’s various businesses — I had thought it was weird at the time, since I didn’t know of the shady relationship between Panagis and Jackson. When I rejected the offer and added him to a banned list for harassing our Support team (which we typically expire if the behavior stops), Panagis decided to double-down on douchery (DDD) and began spamming us with tons of fake email inquiries using aliases, posting fake reviews about LittleBizzy around the web, emailing dozens of cloud networks and blogs to try and get them to cut ties with LittleBizzy, and even submitted a fraudulent DMCA Copyright complaint to Google to try and remove our website from search results. Wow.

Panagis then apparently reached out to Jackson and Moein, and leveraging their Wiki stooges, they are now trying to get Wikipedia to delete our company’s profile (we did not even create the article, originally). In fact, so many of their “SEO fraud” gang have now vandalized our Wikipedia page and the pending “deletion” discussion that a senior Wikipedia editor finally locked the Wikipedia article and put a warning on the thread:

If you came here because someone asked you to, or you read a message on another website, please note that this is not a majority vote, but instead a discussion among Wikipedia contributors. Wikipedia has policies and guidelines regarding the encyclopedia’s content, and consensus (agreement) is gauged based on the merits of the arguments, not by counting votes.

What sort of juvenile, pathetic “WordPress community” is this?

A few years ago, when I called out Jackson for stealing our GPL licensed code from our free Disable Cart Fragments (Speed Demon) plugins and bundling it into his own premium “Perfmatters” plugin without the legally required attribution, some in the WordPress community laughed at me — either out of disbelief, or because they were one of his fellow wannabe IM-gurus. I was even booted from a Facebook group because of it!

Initially, I let it go, because it’s part of what happens in the OSS community, and because I wanted to give Jackson the chance to come clean, or at least update his plugin’s credits. (He did neither.)

But over the next few years, Jackson went from casual consumer fraud (writing fake, non-disclosed blog reviews endorsing his various products and affiliate links) to more massive scale consumer fraud, to full blown turning both the KeyCDN and Kinsta company blogs into part of his gray-hat PBN network promoting that very same product, Perfmatters. I figured at a certain point, leadership at both companies would realize what he was doing and put a stop to it, but here we are a few years later and it’s even worse: Kinsta web hosting recently promoted the guy to “Chief Marketing Officer” — apparently a reward for growing their blog traffic, ironically.

There is a massive and growing split in the WordPress “community” that’s been bubbling under the surface for the last several years, and it’s finally rearing its big, ugly, pathetic head.

Shame on Kinsta, and their CEO Mark Gavalda… but compared to Matt Mullenweg, its par for course.