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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."
Does anyone know why I'm just seeing a "403 Forbidden error" for this story!?
seems to be a common theme with free software and free services - it often starts out as the cheap option, but ends up costing more. i'm fine with people using free stuff, but seriously don't complain when it blows up in your face.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I've always felt that it's in the best interest of entities like Google to add some sort of official, all-service-reaching appeals process to rectify erroneous enforcement actions, or at least give an answer as to how customers broke the Terms of Use so that they can correct such behavior in the future. Being that Google is so huge and that many people's livelihoods depend on it, even if many of these critical services are free, it's in their best interest, and having a department that makes getting the ear of such a huge entity straightforward would really increase customer loyalty as well as reduce apprehension of arbitrary lock-outs.
They don't care about your chess hobby. They don't care about you. Not Apple, not Google, not Microsoft, not Donner, not Blitzen. You're a number, a nothing. The cloud will swallow you whole.
Set up your own damn server.
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.
looks like none of the above actually read the article, its not asking for help as he has contacted support through the enterprise support option and all has been resolved, he's just saying on the free support it's taken google 3years to fix the issue.
to be fair to google, I wonder how many support calls from non paying customers they must get a day so probably from the work load 3 years is probably quite fast :-)
my only other comment would be, why has this made /. not exactly news worthy.
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
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
Stand outside a Google office with a sign for 10 mins outta do the trick!
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
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:
Google has no support for anything. Not Youtube, poor support for Android it seems, and rather poor support for the Google Groups also it seems. I wonder what else is not supported properly at Google.
You have been warned!
I think you've misunderstood the term 'Free Software'. The word 'Free' in Free Software is used to refer to *freedom*, not the cost.
So with software the situation is actually the other way round to the way you present it. If you are using Free(dom) Software, then you have the source and can do whatever you need with it and you aren't held hostage by someone else's actions. If you're using non-Free Software, *then* you seriously shouldn't complain when it blows up in your face.
Using non-Free Software (even if it's gratis) often starts out as the 'cheap option' -- not necessarily in terms of cost, but in terms of local knowledge and training and effort. But it often ends up costing more, because of its inherent limitations and because you can't actually *fix* it to meet your requirements, or even get bug-fixes for it without having to replace it wholesale with a new version.
...he used "fora" as the plural for "forum" and triggered some kind of douchebag filter. These douchebag filters were first created as an experiment by Google in the late '90's to keep out the folks who wrote "boxen" as a plural for "box," but were later taken off-line. I fear that one of the filters may have missed the purge and now it is evolving, learning...
Whether it be google maps or other service, I feel the curtain will come down. I predict Gmail and shared docs will be a loss leader, but eventually I think google maps will be "called in".
They will impose a stricter map-refreshs-per-hour policy and charge a fee(albeit small) for that Google Maps Key. Next thing, that small Web House Company that did sites for those real estate agents, Rental Car Companies, and Motels will have to pay a fee, and need to recoup that.
Put all your eggs in someone elses basket at your peril I say. At least with hosting you can have backups and pick up another provider if things turn to custard.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
So just make sure you always have a fallback email account. If your life really does revolve around being able to post to, or administer, a particular group of people then why not set up a secondary account with the same privileges? It's not that hard to do.
Now, if you'll just hang on a second I'll pop over to my alternate /. account and mod this up.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Google does not owe you anything. When will people realize that? You outsource everything to Google, then complain when they lock you out. This is why one should avoid services like Googles, and it will be worse when they will try to convince you you should use some Web 2.0 computer operating system. In fact, this has nothing to do with computers - if you sleep, drink, eat and work at somebody elses property, don't expect to feel like home. It's sort of surprising (or maybe not!) to even encounter such questions on Slashdot - you actually expect everything to work fine, when you are but a mere invisible client to a benemoth that Google has become. If you want to be smart, rent your own domain name and website for 100$ a year, spend a week coding it (obviously if you can do PyChess, you should be able to do some PHP and databases), and tap yourself on your shoulder - you have just achieved independence from Google, and are now part of a distributed Internet model, instead of the ugly, error-prone, monopolized client-server system, where even contacting support is a reason for headache. Now, c'mon - WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? Google has millions of users, they have bold ambitions, but you cannot server the entire planet EFFICIENTLY with one corporation, no matter how large (bureaucracy takes over), you just can't. This was ought to happen, either to you or somebody else, and it will happen again, make no mistake about it.
Usenet died in September 1993. In fact, on Usenet it is always September 1993.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
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)
On my gmail account, I get e-mail sent to another gmail account that is similar to my account name but 3 letters longer. Whenever I send mail to that account, it goes directly to me.
This might not apply, just a shot in the dark, but the "3 letters longer" doesn't begin with + does it?
You can put "+whatever" after your gmail account name and the account will receive it. This feature permits tracking the source of spam and filtering out emails you don't wish to receive. (IE, "me+sd@gmail" arrives at "me@gmail")
Apparently you can also include periods anywhere in an email address and they are stripped out and delivered to the account. So "me@gmail" and "m.e@gmail" both go to the former.
If this is the case, the simplest solution is to filter those messages to trash.
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!
which is totally what she said
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...
This is why I don't like service bundles. They ban you for a group/blog/whatever violation, and suddenly you lose access to your email, profile, etc. etc. So I do use gmail, but I use a different account for google groups, and a different account for App Domain. It's the only way to defend yourself from their free, unmonitored, unsupported, 100% auto-managed services.
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()?
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.
... 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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And your lawyer's claim would have been what, exactly?
"They stopped giving me free stuff, without giving a good reason. It's ILLEGAL for them to not give me free stuff!"
Believe me, I've been there, and it sucks (my domain - predating Google - was once misclassified as a spam site by Google's search algorithm; the preferred/only method of resolving this is to know-a-guy who's facebook friends with Matt Cutts), but I don't know any legal theory that entitles anyone to monetary damages for not letting you play with their toys, even if the reason is silly/nonexistent.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.