Slashdot Mirror
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
I take it you never had to ask Google for support? It can take months until anyone answers your mail IF they even bother. And what you will get is generally just a canned answer pointing you to a FAQ you probably already read a few times. Replying to that generally results in a few more month waiting for a completely uncommited "We're looking into it", or worse "Please contact some other part of Google. It's not OUR problem". Google's user support sucks so hard, they should use it to fix the BP oil leak. I had to deal with them as a *paying* customer (Android Developers do pay a fee after all), and it was like talking to badly programmed chatbots running on a steam-powered difference engine.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
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.
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.
...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...
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.