The problems were:
1. Not credited as the discoverer of discovered links on the review pages.
2. Omittance of reviews on the review pages
3. Omittance in ‘Recent visitors’ lists

I had contact several times with the StumbleUpon support team. Initially I was told that “ghost banning” does not exist and that my problems might be related to bugs in recently installed software.

On August 7 I was told that bug fix, related to the discovery process was released, and that I should see my name next to all my discoveries, which was since then indeed the case. So at least problem 1. was solved for me.

The problems number 2 and 3, however persist and in a recent contact this was no longer attributed to a bug, but I was told that: The review pages display their content variously in public views, in signed-on views, and to different users and that the manner in which these are displayed are revised periodically.

So now it seems to be a matter of waiting for a reset to normal for my case.

Thumbing up your friend’s post is not going to hurt them in the least bit. It’s you that would be hurt by it, if let’s say, you were thumbing up the same spammy sites often, and reviewing them , which I’m sure isn’t the case. Let’s also say a spammer thumbs up one of your posts, or my posts, it wouldn’t effect you or me unless they were reviewing them all, and that spammer was being watched. Otherwise, that would be unfair to those who are just innocently posting good content. Does that make sense?

The only time a website gets effected negatively by a stumbler is when the same person discovers the websites’ posts often. It shows that they are not reaching a diverse audience. It can effect the traffic quite a bit as well, and it can also raise some flags of the person discovering the posts, and even the website itself since it seems a little suspicious that the same person is discovering them all the time.

Like I said, there is no need to worry if you are doing things naturally. I wrote the initial article to warn some of my social media friends who are thumbing and reviewing pages sent to them, blindly, without realizing who is sending what.

Just be mindful of what you are discovering, and keep it diverse as far as the sources are concerned. If it’s a large source, like Reuters.com or Timesonline for instance, discovering their posts often isn’t as alarming simply because they have many different stories they report on daily, and have different people discovering different stories every day. However, it’s the smaller blogs and websites that are effected by the same person discovering their posts, because they usually have very few posts per day. I hope I’m not making this more confusing. But, I think you get what I’m saying.

Thank you for your comment, and I hope this helped you.

As a small-time humor blogger, I can use all the help I can get–from people who think it’s funny, obviously. I’m glad that I haven’t damaged anyone’s rep.