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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."
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.
om namo bhagavate vasudevaya
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.
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...
How's charging a reasonably low price for a phone call or two to resolve the issue with a support person who is knowledgeable as well as able to effect change? Say, charge someone's card $10 and then initiate the support call, and if they are found out to have been an erroneous ban, refund the $10. Keeps the spammers from appealing in a massive manner, while allowing the one-off mistakes relief.
Telling somebody what they've done to violate terms-of-service shouldn't be a problem. You don't need to give away how you caught them, just what it is you think they did wrong. Surely a one-liner along the lines of "we believe you're using your Groups account for spam" should be ok, it would make the whole experience a lot less Kafkaesque.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
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.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The above was, IMO, incorrectly moderated "troll".
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.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?