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Where Do You Go When Google Locks You Out?
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."
Why not create another account to let your users know what's going on, and to contact Google support staff?
Why not read the fine article and discover the he did just that and it didn't help?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I have just read it, while he did create another account to let his group know what was going on. It really doesn't sound like he tried very hard to get in touch with Google for proper support, he just waited three years for an answer to fall into his lap.
He at one point complains that all the support pages linked into Groups so he couldn't access them, but he clearly could after creating his second account. The guy just sounds a bit lazy, the way he whines at the idea of moving to a different hosting/forum provider etc
which is totally what she said
Unfortunately there's no way to explain what triggered an abuse check to good users without also explaining it to spammers, and obviously that would reduce the anti-abuse systems effectiveness very quickly.
So, full disclosure, I work on abuse at Google. False positives are obviously a problem and we try to minimize them. When they do occur, there's usually a way to appeal it, either automatically by using SMS/phone verification or by writing into support and getting a manual review (contrary to what you might read we do have free support for our products and large numbers of people use it every day). It sounds like in this case Groups did not provide an appeal path, or at least didn't do so three years ago. I'll check to see if this is still the case.
Finding a way to improve the appeals process without letting through large amounts of spammers is a tricky problem and we know we could do a better job of it today. Throwing up a call center isn't quite as trivial as it sounds for a bunch of reasons.
The robots.txt file is ignored if the final target is not in the domain.
Thanks for the header-reminder.
nosig today
For the user in the original article that is true. For lots of Android developers, not so much. We have to pay a fee to become an Android developer, and consequently we would expect at least a basic level of support. I've written 1/2 dozen times to them over both technical issues and financial issues regarding sales. To date - I have never received a single response. Of course some of these questions/concerns are only 1.5 years outstanding so I apparently only have 1.5 more years to wait. ;)
Sure, we'd like to do that. I was discussing it with management quite recently actually. There are a bunch of tricky issues specific to the case of dealing with abuse disables that we still need to think through fully and figure out good answers for, but I won't be surprised to see something like this happen in the longer term.