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."

Comments

Re:free but not cheap

[Elledan]

I blogged about something similar a while ago: 'What's yours probably isn't on the internet'. In my case it was about me losing the password to my Flickr account (or someone else 'reset' it for me), and me trying to convince the Yahoo helpdesk that it really was my Flickr account. In the end it failed because I couldn't remember the security answer, even though the emails from the account kept getting sent to my email account and I know every other piece of information associated with that account. What can I do about it? Absolutely nothing apparently.

Fortunately I don't need the Flickr account as I have my personal site with a gallery I control, but it's still annoying that there's a zombie account on Flickr which will keep sending email to me for now and probably eternity (or until Flickr gets shut down).