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Direct from our email inbox …

Because you’re a Squidoo lensmaster and because we’re making some significant Terms of Service and policy changes, we wanted to send you a very early heads up about it.

The most important thing to know is this: 99% of you probably won’t ever even notice these policy changes! If you’re busy creating authentic, useful, unique lenses, you’re fine.

The next thing to know is: Take a deep breath. We won’t begin implementing these new policies until mid-July 2009, which means you’ve got more than a month to review and adjust to the changes.

We hope you’ll take a little time to read them so that you can keep using and thriving on Squidoo.

A Quick Summary of Squidoo Changes

1. No Spam. This one’s not new, but it’s worth saying again.

It’s simple: given our pedigree, our point of view and our dyed-in-the-wool, we-will-never-change-our-mind conviction on this issue, spam is not okay at Squidoo. For a few years now we have had a very strict and enforced stance against spam.  If you actively spam people with your Squidoo lenses (by email, in blog comments, by stalking and harassing people on Twitter, by tricking people with the content in your lenses, and more) we’ll lock your entire account.

2. No more X-rated lenses

If you came to Squidoo to create X-rated content, the time has come to say farewell.  Supporting X-rated pages no longer makes sense, and it invites more spam and empty traffic and wasted overhead than anything. Find out more about why we’re making this very hard decision, and what it means for your lenses. (Don’t panic! You can export your content and take it with you).

3. No Junk Topics from our “SquidDon’t” List

Lenses on free movie downloads. Toenail fungus cures. LoseBellyFatNow promotions. Reverse Phone Lookup 4U. You know junk when you see it.

Unforunately, topics like these are overwhelmingly conditioned and proven to attract spammers. If a topic has displayed enough trickery and spam and bad activity, we choose not to support it. If we find a lens on a SquidDon’t topic or something very similar to it, we’ll lock it. For good. Our best recommendation: Don’t bother with topics like these. There’s plenty of incredible stuff to write about and recommend online without having to go near the edges of what we’re got going here.

4. A new limit on overly promotional lenses

Making a lens to promote or recommend something is a terrific endeavor. It’s a big part of why a lot of our people are here. But: Less is more! Sales lenses far too often turn into junk lenses, as described by the relentless number of outbound links to the same exact domain.

So to help you focus your lenses, and sell even better–and to help surfers find our pages more useful overall–we’re introducing a limit to the number of outbound links to the same domain that you can have on a lens. If you have more than 9 links to the SAME domain on a single lens, your lens will get locked for review. Of course we’ll have domains that are whitelisted out of this (meaning, you can have as many outbound links to them as you like), as well as sites that are blacklisted (meaning, even a single link to that domain will get your lens locked).

Please read all the important details on how this works.

What now?

We won’t be flipping the switch on these new policies until July 20, 2009 or later. So you’ve got more than a month to review your lenses to make sure they’re playing by the rules.

In the meantime, here are 4 things you can do to get ready for these changes.

1) Ask some fellow lensmasters in this peer-driven forum! See if they’re willing to suggest changes or ideas for making sure your lens is filled with authentic, curated, useful content on topics that don’t feel like spam or junk.

2) Edit your lenses to make any changes you think are needed according to our policy update. You’ve got over a month before we implement most of these new policies, so that should be plenty of time to do a quick review of your lenses, just to be sure! (Never hurts to brush up on some lenses, anyway).

3) If you have lenses with Adult content, or lenses focused on any of our spam or junk topics, you might consider saving yourself the hassle and just deleting them yourselves. If you go near the edges of what we’ve laid out here, chances are your lens will get locked and then deleted.

4) Last: If our policies have convinced you that Squidoo is no longer for you, you’re welcome and encouraged to export your lens content and take it with you to use it somewhere else on the web. We don’t want anyone to lose content they worked hard on, even if it’s not in accordance with our policies, so we’re giving you this long heads-up period to save your lens and take it with you, before we lock it or remove it from the site.