Where Do You Go When Google Locks You Out? 332
Lobais sends in the cautionary tale of a man who was locked out of Google Groups for three years — losing the ability to administer his own open source project in the process. "After about a year of using Google Groups for the PyChess project, I started [noticing] a problem. When I wrote mails to the list, no one would answer. And when I answered other peoples' post[s], they seamed to ignore them and press for new answers. As I tried to check the online group to see what was happening, I got a 403 Forbidden error. After a short while I realized that this error was given for any page on the groups.google.com subdomain. The lockout meant that I was unable to manage the PyChess mailing list. I was unable to fight increasing spam level, and more importantly I couldn't reply to anybody in my community. I wasn't even able to visit the Google help forums, which are all on groups.google.com. As the services are free of charge, I never really expected any support options. ... How can we know how often this kind of thing happens? If any admin can lock you out by a sloppy click, and give you no option to defend yourself, then it is bound to happen once in a while."
Re:Appeals process (Score:3, Interesting)
Other than it being obscure, I'm good with what finally resolved the problem - he (sort of) paid for premium support.
I think that if a person or business becomes dependent on a 'free' service then charging for premium support is reasonable. But the quality of service had better be top notch where the first level support is trained to be real good at escalating problems instead of simply sending canned responses that don't really address the issue. If managed well, it can also be a revenue stream in that the people who want somebody to hold their hands for the otherwise trivial stuff can also pay for the privilege and thus its a win-win situation. However, if managed poorly it creates an incentive for bad documentation and obtuse user-interfaces intended to funnel people who would otherwise be self-service into the pay-for-service channel. Its a pick-your-poison situation.
3 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
As i read it: He was locked out, ignored it mostly for about 2.9 years and got it fixed within a few days. IMHO someone more determined would have been able to resolve the issue in very short time.
CU, Martin
Re:"No option to defend yourself"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Stand outside a Google office with a sign for 10 mins outta do the trick!
Re:"No option to defend yourself"? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm just surprised how, after all his issues, the length of time with no response, and being billed in error, he still ends with:
Distributed, provider-agostic option (Score:1, Interesting)
So he persisted for *three years* instead of starting a moderated newsgroup on Usenet and pointing his support links thereto.
Many MUAs ( e.g. Thunderbird ) can seamlessly integrate newsgroups so that their users are largely unaware of the nature of the "mailing list" that they are using. Not ideal in terms of the spirit of Usenet but certainly better than leaving one's users adrift for that length of time. They could even have followed the newsgroup through Google Groups :-/
Re:Newsflash: The companies don't give a damn... (Score:5, Interesting)
Several years back I had built up quite a large following on a Yahoo group. At one point the group had over 600 members, not bad. I did some posts on other groups on related subjects. Maybe one of them complained. Anyway, one fine day Yahoo refused to let me login. All attempts to contact the company were fruitless. I found that not only my account but also the entire group was nuked. Fortunately I had a backup of the registration emails. I shelled out some bucks for a server, emailed all my group members with the new group address, and never looked back.
Re:No support from Google (Score:5, Interesting)
A few months ago I needed to contact Google UK over an unpaid fee for their use of a photograph. Even though they have an office with staff, they have made every effort to be invisible and uncontactable. If you do get hold of the office number, and call it, you are given a myriad of options. If you work your way through each option, they _all_ ultimately tell you to go to the Google web site and send an e-mail. There is no possible way to get put through to a human in any department. Google do not like talking to people.
ps. To add to your comment about poor support for Android: There are several critical errors in Google's sample code provided to Android developers. The errors have been pointed out, and fixes supplied, by kind-hearted developers who wanted to help others. Yet it is apparently too much effort for Google to update the sample code, meaning that every new developer coming to Android must struggle with the same problems.
Re:free but not cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
So, TFS describes someone whose IP was apparently banned by google groups but somehow you being a dumbass and forgetting both your password and the answer to the security question is similar?! Give me a break...
Re:Appeals process (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:free but not cheap (Score:1, Interesting)
Sounds like someone is clicking cached search results and thus requests are sent for the images the page used to contain.
Re:Appeals process (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:free but not cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
What you're saying is very interesting, but in contradiction to my experience with GoogleBot's behavoiur.
I've seen GoogleBot-images do a normal crawl of the images on the site, respecting robots.txt and all, and then, start a crawl over the images it was explicitly forbidden from indexing, from the same IP (*definitely* a Google IP, not an impostor), just with the User-Agent header changed to an empty string. Nice, eh? It was way too fast and way too cordinated to be triggered by human action. And if there was actually a human involved in telling the bot to return to the site, *ahem*, "incognito" a few seconds later, I'd be more than happy to tell them to bugger off properly when they're told to.
Re:Appeals process (Score:5, Interesting)
At the company where I work (a hosting company) we give a user one chance to clean up their stuff. If they fail, we disconnect them (again, if the offense was bad enough to disconnect on the first time). After that, it's $50 a pop to reactivate the service, and if they continue to screw up we keep pulling the plug. Eventually they seem to figure out we won't allow that kind of garbage, and either clean up... or go away and become someone else's problem.
Not an ideal solution, but it seems to work wonders.
Re:"No option to defend yourself"? (Score:4, Interesting)
The guy waited for 3 YEARS to get an account issue resolved. He waited. He sent a couple e-mails, browsed a few pages, asked on a couple forums and that's pretty much it. Hell, I would've spammed support via e-mail 3 times a day and would have called EVERYONE all the time, if that issue would have been oh-so-important.
If you don't get a reply to a support request, send another. And another. And another. Go everywhere and tell everyone what happened to you. In 3 years you can learn legal stuff and sue their asses just to get the problem fixed.
Seems to me that his group/mailing list is a very sluggish thing going on, and he really didn't care what was happening. In 3 YEARS you can do an amazing amount of stuff to get your problem resolved. The above poster is 100% right. That guy was simply not trying. End of story.
Re:3 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"No option to defend yourself"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thankyou! I am guessing the guys who modded me "troll" are also of the lazy type who would prefer their problems to magically go away without them putting any effort into it!
Re:free but not cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Appeals process (Score:3, Interesting)
So, full disclosure, I work on abuse at Google.
I know it's not your department, but I can't pass up the opportunity of actually having the ear (eyes?) of an actual Googler.
Several weeks back, Google Group's digest emails feature stopped working for a few weeks, without explanation. More specifically, I get digest emails for comp.lang.java, comp.lang.javascript, and comp.unix.programmer, if that helps.
Any idea what happened during those two weeks? I know it impacted a bunch of users (I Googled around and several people had the same experience in the same time range). Google has been silent on the issue.
Any info appreciated! Thanks!
And to bring this on topic... The experience has certainly made me more suspicious about relying on software-as-a-service. I'm not mad or anything because, hey, it's free. The MIA service without any information or communication though, has definitely made me uncomfortable.
403 intelligence forbidden (Score:3, Interesting)
Really, if it was by accident, it never dawned on the guy to create a new user, then contact the admin and tell him his original user was blocked and ask why, if on purpose if by accident, could you fix it please....
Or he could have contacted the gmail support service (tied into newsgroups as well) to clarify why his emails were not getting there, and if this could be rectified. Contrary to many other companies, when you contact gmail service support, they actually can talk to other departments on your behalf seeing as most other services tie directly into your gmail account...
bundled servcies suck (Score:2, Interesting)
This happened to me -- only with Sun (Score:4, Interesting)
I had an open source project hosted on Kenai -- Sun's answer to Google Code and Git Hub. I was happily using it for mercurial, wiki, mailing lists, etc, ad nauseum.
Until one day I woke and could not.
Not only could I not push changes, I couldn't authenticate to the wiki, or the bug tracker either. I couldn't even create a new account, because every new account I created mysteriously didn't work either.
I sent an email into the support guys, and they looked into it.... eventually. It turns out Sun has some kind of "no fly list" and my name was on it. It turns out that I was also unable to access any other Sun services -- including Solaris patch updates on SunSolve.com!
So, I have to send an e-mail to Sun, and wait. And wait and wait and wait. Weeks go by, then months. I had to move my project, being unable to push to my public repo was killing me. Happy Google Code customer now.
Anyhow, finally months later, I get a message from Sun: "Whoops, sorry, we've turned you back on"
Like I'm going back.
Black lists are becoming more and more common. (Score:3, Interesting)
Google and Sun are far from being rare in the use of blacklist and cloaked censorship.
The nastier of such censorship techniques are those that are well cloaked in that the only thing you see is a lack of anything indicating you are actually being seen by others. There are message boards that seem to allow you to participate, posting messages etc. But in reality the only ones seeing what you are posting is you and maybe a few admins aware of the cloaked censorship. Some of these censored cloaks happen because some police or authorized (by who?) personal are to fat to get off their ass and actually do something meaningful and real, but instead try to justify their pay sitting behind a computer as a cyber sleuth.
And you thought spammers were bad. There are those who by authority promote spamming by suppressing what is not spam.
Imagine a patent troll applying such techniques so to take claim over something being done in the open, the illusion of in the open.
Imagine the prior art resources Google has in usenet archives that they can selective suppress.
Re:Appeals process (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I doubt this will help me, but maybe someone else.... My youtube account got locked...sometime in the past year? I didn't use it very frequently, and only ever used it to rate videos (I'd never posted a video, ever). Unfortunately, I don't have access to the email account I originally created the youtube account with, so...although you have a form for finding out why you got suspended, I can't use it. I have no way to find out why my account got suspended, no recourse. I don't care a whole lot because I wasn't using it for anything important, but...it uses the same username as my gmail, and I'd like to join the two accounts (now that that's an option). If the account weren't suspended, I could change my contact info to use a current email address...but I can't. Neither is there a webpage which will show me what TOS Google claims I violated despite my ability to enter in the correct authentication credentials. Here's my proposal: if your account is suspended, when you log in, you should be blocked from all site services; however, you should be routed to a special little area for resolving account issues. So, when I log in, I'd like to see, as my landing page, information on my status "you're suspended", and a little message box for interacting with google support to resolve the suspension (whether that be simply me requesting and google telling me why I was suspended, or maybe me being able to appeal and being able to see the result 'legitmate ban', 'mistake'). I think that would work a lot better than the current lack of process and completely opaque workings.
One thing Google should do ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... is always let all disabled accounts access the help forum, unless and until those accounts specifically abuse the help forum. There should not be a need to create alternate accounts to do this.
They (and lots of other companies) should also tell people what specific term of service was violated (e.g. spamming vs. posting kiddie porn vs. uploading movies with someone else's copyright, etc, whatever the case may be). If it is necessary to kill all the lawyers to get this done, then that would be a good start.
Re:free but not cheap (Score:1, Interesting)
Empty user agent string? Thats a guaranteed forbidden on my site.