A few days ago my very old and very large Pinterest account was suspended. In trying to appeal the suspension I ran into a weird problem, a bug…
Your account has been deactivated
Common reasons for account deactivation include:
- Violating Pinterest Community Guidelines.
- We noticed unusual activity on your account.
- You requested an account closure
Contact us if you have questions or would like to reactivate your account
Appealing the suspension
When I saw this, I clicked he Contact us link and went ahead with appealing the suspension. The account in question is very old and has over 10,000+ followers, and I never use it for any reason that could get it suspended. So I was sure that the suspension was by accident, and that they would restore my account.
The only reason I can think of for the suspension is that I logged into the account behind a proxy some time ago, and perhaps someone else had used that IP address to do some shady stuff on Pinterest, and they suspended all accounts that had logged in using that IP address. But I can’t know for sure…
After completing the steps to appeal, I received an email from Pinterest:
Hi there,
You selected the option to appeal an account suspension, but the account you logged in with isn’t suspended. It’s possible you have more than one Pinterest account.
To help us find your other account, please send the following:
- Pinterest username (found in your profile’s address, like this: www.pinterest.com/
EXAMPLEUSERNAME)
- Any other email addresses you may have used to sign up
- A link to your Facebook account (if it’s connected to your Pinterest account)
If your account isn’t suspended and you’re having trouble logging in, try resetting your password Thanks,
The Pinterest team
##- Please type your reply above this line -##
This is obviously incorrect, as my account clearly is suspended, as you can see in the initial screenshot from this post. I went ahead and replied to this email, but then I got an error. I will show you the error in a minute. But after receiving the error, I made another suspension appeal, except this time I selected different options on the Pinterest help page.
After completing the steps, I received an email from Pinterest:
Hi [NAME],
I’m here to help. In order for me to proceed with your request, I need to verify that you’re the account owner. Please respond to this email from [email protected].
Thank you for your patience.
Error replying to emails
In both cases above, I replied to their emails using the email my Pinterest account is registered with, and when that failed, I also replied to the emails using a different email that I own. But again, every time I would reply to their emails, I would immediately receive this in my inbox:
Oof! It looks like your message didn’t go through. This usually happens if it’s been awhile since we’ve heard from you, or if your original question was closed. Sorry about that!
To ask a new question, just fill out our support form: http://help.pinterest.com/
contact We’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
Thanks,
The Pinterest support team
This is clearly a bug on the appeal process. Maybe it’s accidental or on purpose, but this seems to be how it works. So you basically get caught up in this loop, never actually being able to finish the appeal process.
Successful ending
I tried doing the above about 5-6 times, and every time it would end the same, in tears. However, in one of my attempts, instead of selecting to appeal a suspension, I selected that I had a difficulty logging in.
When I did that, I received this email:
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out. We’ve received your request and we’ll reach out as soon as we can.
Thanks,
The Pinterest team
So I basically sort of gave up, accepted that my Pinterest account is lost, and went to sleep. I figured, I’ll either give up on the account and make a new one, or maybe I try appealing again, just as one last attempt.
In the morning I woke up, and I tried logging into my account again. The reason for this was because I looked around on some Reddit posts on the Pinterest subreddit, and I saw a person write that they went through the same situation, but then some time later their account was just restored. And indeed, I logged into my account, and it was working again.
Success!!! 😀
Here is a video I made talking about this:
Conclusion
I have written in the past about a Pinterest account getting suspended and reactivated, but the difference between that article and what happened now is that now I did not receive an email in my inbox informing me about my account being suspended, and giving me the ability to click a link and appeal the suspension.
On the one hand it is good to learn that there is another way to appeal a suspended account. On the other hand, it sucks to learn that Pinterest’s system is buggy, and you actually can’t appeal a suspended account through their Help page. Or maybe you can, but I did something wrong. Or maybe sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Or maybe it works for some countries and not for others. Who knows…
In the end, all is well that ends well. I have my Pinterest account back, and life goes on 😀