
Someone defaced an eBay announcement post with tags including "eBay is evil" on the eBay Australia announcement board. (This blog post was updated with new information shortly after it was published.)
The eBay Australia News Team (au_news_team) posted an
announcement on September 1st to inform sellers of a technical issue that resulted in sellers not knowing which orders needed to be sent as express to the buyer.
At the bottom of the announcement, a small tag icon appears directly before the following five tags:
- ebay is evil
- eBay Plus is robbing the sellers
- I am certain anyone who missed them by mistake won't be punished
- someone said eBay is evil so it must be true
- Your staff didn't have a clue about this issue yeasterday!
People can add tags to their own original posts, they can also add tags to other people's posts. You can see the "Add Tags..." hyperlink (it's blue) at the bottom of posts, right before, let's say, "Message 1 of 8".
Initially I wrote: "But because announcements are posted by eBay moderators in read-only mode (they don't accept comments), the announcement posts generally don't have the "Add Tags..." option."
However, I realized that despite the fact I was logged in on eBay.com, I was not logged in to eBay Australia. Once I logged in to eBay Australia, I could see the "Add Tag" option.
David pointed out that most announcement posts written by eBay moderators don't allow people to add tags, but whoever created this one apparently did not check whatever box was necessary to prevent people from tagging the post. So there's no security issue at play.
If you click on the first tag, it
takes you to a page where you can see how often the tag has been used: