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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!?
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.
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
Not quite, with the free support they didn't fix the issue - they took a year to tell him he'd broken the Terms of Service, and then no reply as to why. Even then, when trialling the paid-for support, they still managed to bill him when they shouldn't have.
As for not being news-worthy, how else can people highlight these kinds of issues?!
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
And the evidence for that would be ... what?
i'm fine with people using free stuff, but seriously don't complain when it blows up in your face.
And how does complaining do you any good when commercial, expensive stuff blows up in your face? When Microsoft discontinues products? When Apple kills your app in their App Store? When DEC goes out of business? When Symbolics takes a research project, makes it proprietary, and then proceeds to kill it? Open source and free software were founded because commercial software had blown up in people's faces time and again. With open source, you at least have options for dealing with the problem, with proprietary software, you're stuck.
As for Google, if you want for-pay services, get a Google Apps domain. Those applications that you pay for are supported. And Google offers you the ability to download and backup your data so that you aren't stuck.
Even if you use the free services, so far, I have had a lot less trouble with free Google services than with any of the for-pay hosted web services I've used.
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.
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.
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.
...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...
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. ;)
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.
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.
I don't see their Feedback(tm) product listed anywhere. Maybe it's still in beta.
FWIW: I wanted to know the origin of the link they requested and they did not bother to reply.
I hope you tried
::takes off shades::
Googling for the link
YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!