Today, this is an odd one, I was watching a report about the conviction of an arms dealer and towards the end, there was a piece to camera from the reporter. The shot was beautifully framed, the picture was crisp and the reporter was wearing vibrant red which matches the BBC logo. Maybe they have visited my website!

This video is really nicely framed and looks fantastic. Unfortunately, this is unusual for the BBC, but it should be taken as a shining example of what the BBC can do when they get it right.

When I got there, there was no in depth report.

There was no report at all! (see image)

Here are the two issues that have happened to me where Freelancer.com acted illegally and attempted to defraud me of my money.

The Milestone Payment Incident

After spending no less than 3 hours talking to Freelancer.com about their milestone payments, none of their support staff (except the 4th person I talked to) could explain what milestone payments were or how they worked.

When we created a milestone, the support staff told us to do it from the “Milestones” page as they did not know how the milestones worked on the projects page and as such could not tell us how to do it.

So, we went to the milestones page and created a milestone based on the instructions there. As the milestone was not for the first two options, the only one that seemed relevant was “other”.

All seemed fine until the project collapsed as the worker had used someone elses work and claimed it as their own.

I went to create a dispute, but the project was not listed. I contacted Freelancer.com support staff who told me that a dispute could not be opened as the milestone was under “other”. I explained that based on the reason for the milestone, it was the most logical selection.

Naturally, I wanted the money back as it was not a small amount. Freelancer said that they would hold the funds for 1 year before releasing them. I was furious and asked where in their terms it stated this and they pointed me to the section that refers to inactive users. I emailed their legal team and argued that they could not hold me to this as I was not an inactive user and their terms did not state anywhere that the funds of milestones would be held, therefore they could not hold me to terms that did not exist.

Freelancer finally released the funds to my account after a few emails back and forth.

The initial withdrawal issue

Today I was checking my account and we had around $230 available, so I decided to pull some of it back to an account so that I can use it. We will not be having any large projects for a while, so the funds would be of better use if I had the cash in my hands.

I decided to withdraw $201 as I had to pay a $1 fee to withdraw the funds, even though I paid freelancer a fee when they took the money for the project and then another fee when the project was disputed. So, this is essentially at least the third fee for the same money that they are forcing me to pay.

I completed the withdrawal and was presented with a confusing message:

Your withdrawal request has been successfully submitted.

Its status is ‘ Delayed’ for processing between Thu, 19 – Fri, 20 Apr 2012.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? It will be processed between the 19th and 20th, but today is only the 4th. That means that the earliest that they will send the money to my paypal account is in FIFTEEN DAYS!

I contacted their support staff and a very annoying member of staff called “Sunshine” told me that this was a security measure, even though I had used paypal to send them thousands and thousands of dollars in the past, they would hold my money for fifteen days before releasing it to me!

I asked where in the terms this was stated and she replied:

You will find it under “Payments and Billing” using this link: http://www.freelancer.com/faq/view.php

I pointed out that they can not hold anyone to their FAQ as they are not terms.

But know that these are applicable to all users on their very first withdrawal for security purposes. As mentioned earlier, it is clearly stated on our FAQs. Which you agreed upon signing up and using our Site.

Insane right? What they are saying is that I agreed to their FAQ when I joined the site, which is complete bullshit as nowhere does it state that you have to agree to their FAQ. Even if it did, I highly doubt it would be legal.

At this point, their staff did something that is common for Freelancer.com. They refused to answer my questions, ignored me, pretended there was a problem with the system and then slammed in the following replies in the space of a few seconds. Here is the last section of the chat I had with them so that you can see exactly what was said and what they did.

Me: Where in your terms does it say that I need to agree to your FAQ?

Me: And now you are ignoring me as your staff all do when asked a question of this nature.

Me: Where in your terms does it say that I need to agree to your FAQ?

Me: Hello?

Sunshine: Unfortunately there are limits to accessing issues here on live chat, please lodge a support ticket to request further information and to consider the withdrawal for you.

Sunshine: Is there anything else I can help you with?

Sunshine: Hello! Is there anything else I can help you with? If you’re temporarily away from your computer, I’ll wait 2 minutes and then close this conversation.

Sunshine: It’s been two minutes and I will now consider this conversation closed. Thank you for contacting Freelancer.com. Please don’t hesitate to contact us again.

I was naturally furious that they had done this again. Not only am I an employer who has spent thousands of dollars with Freelancer, but I am also an affiliate and regularly refer new users to them.

In short, Freelancer.com acts illegally, binds users to terms that either do not exist or do not relate to the users situation and their support staff seem to be trained to get rid of people with issues of this nature, asking them to open a ticket which gets the same blank responses stating that users are bound to their imaginary terms or FAQ.

I believe that the best solution would be to open a chargeback dispute as my card was used to pay paypal who in turn sent the money to Freelancer. This will be based on the fact that Freelancer.com are illegally holding me to terms that do not exist and therefore the service they provide is significantly not as described.

It is a hard enough job to make money online without scammers like Freelancer.com trying to rip you off along the way. My account will be closed as I will be taking my business elsewhere.

Updates

I wanted a reply from Freelancer, so I contacted them via facebook and twitter. Below are the tweets I made and received.

4th April: “Why do you illegally hold your customers to your FAQ and terms that do not exist?” sent to Freelancer via Twitter

5th April: “we’ll be getting our customer support manager to get back to you and sort everything out.” Received from Freelancer via Twitter.

Sure enough, I was emailed by the Marketing Manager who attempted to address some of the issues within this post. I replied to the Marketing Manager and asked the following questions:

1. Why do you hold users to terms that do not exist?
2. Why do you claim that users are bound by the FAQ?
3. Why do you claim that users agreed to the FAQ when they registered?
4. Why do you hold “other” milestones for 12 months when your terms state nothing of the kind?
5. Why do your staff always refuse to answer questions of this nature?
6. Why do your staff always do all they can to drop the live chat when faced with issues of this nature?
7. Why do you charge a fee to send you money, a fee to list a project, a fee to dispute when the project falls through and a fee to withdraw the funds that were sent to you for a project which fell through and was disputed? While I understand that you have fees, this is just insane as I am paying you fees left right and centre when it is not my fault. Are any of these fees refunded? If the project falls through and I win the dispute, I would have imagined that you would refund the project and dispute fee as well as maybe allowing me to recall the funds back to my funding source without another fee.

After 8 days and no reply, I emailed the Marketing Manager again who replied within an hour explaining that he was off sick after the office was closed for 4 days. How am I supposed to know he is off sick and no one else can deal with the issue?

In his reply, he did not answer any of the questions but did state the following:

You have highlighted a range of issues which we need to address.  All of the feedback that you have given is valid and in some cases concerning.

I do understand the issues you have experienced and apologise for them. As a token of our appreciation for your business and also for reaching out to let us know of the support issue I would like to offer you $100 credit to your Freelancer.com account.

What is your opinion? Leave a comment below…

Naturally I wanted to see a picture of one as they still exist today. A quick search revealed that the only website in the world that mentioned “Chan’s Metastick” was the BBC as the real name for the insect is “Chan’s Megastick”. Why the hell would it be called “Meta” when it is large and not “Mega”? Did no one check this article? FAIL! (see images below)

BBC, your journalistic integrity is getting less and less.

Read it and you will see the error on the last line.

It says “at keep” when it should say “to keep”.

You may think I am splitting hairs, but come on, this is the BBC. They should not have this number of blatant errors.

However, my account with HostGator is more than 4 years old!

I contacted them to ask what was happening and why they still had my files that were over 4 years old.

They explained that there is no law stating that hosts should remove files from an account that a customer has closed, or requested to be closed. However, they told me that I did not complete a cancellation form and that is why the files were kept by HostGator.

Ok fine, but I was not leaving HostGator at that time, I was upgrading to a dedicated server.

The agent (Chad S.) told me that even though I was upgrading and my old account was suspended due to high resource usage, I still should have completed a cancellation form. However, I was not told by anyone at the time that I would need to complete any cancellation form when upgrading.

HostGator were always a problem. Their support used to be absolutely horrendous. At one point, the agent was simply randomly pressing keys, so I would ask a question and the reply was “gkjyughkjbyfyuvbkubuk”. On another occasion, the agent was being very rude and I asked who their manager was “I don’t need to tell you” he replied. I asked who trained him and his reply was “Allah”. I contacted HostGator and they apologised profusely. It was at the same time the danish newspaper was receiving death threats for showing Allah in a cartoon. HostGator gave me 1 year for free, so I stayed with them for 1 year and then promptly left.

I think that it is very interesting that hosts do not need to delete content from suspended or closed account and I wonder if they have been known to trawl through the content to see if there was anything of any use.

I had been holding off writing about this as I thought it would seem that I was just bitching, but then I saw an article today that I really want to rip to shreds.

At the end of the day, this is pathetic journalism and yes, I will pull them for it.

The article in question is titled “Are search engine result figures accurate?“.

In the article, Ruth Alexander talks about search results (yes, with all that is going on in the world, this really is cutting edge journalism!). I will quote what the article says and then explain why they are talking bullshit.

It’s also worth mentioning that I searched for myself and got 68 million web page results.

Firstly, the screenshot within the article shows very clearly “about 69,200,000″. Learn your numbers, 69,200,000 is 69 million and not 68 million.

Secondly, they did not search for them self, they searched for any pages containing their first and last name, both of which are common first names.

I’ve written no books, starred in no films, and you’ve probably never heard of me. And yet I’m massive on the web.

No you are not. They simply searched for any pages that contained the word “ruth” and “alexander”.

Or, more likely, my secret to search engine success is to have a name made up of two popular first names.

It is not a secret, but a failure in the journalists understanding of the subject matter. Nor is it a success. In fact, it is a rather large failure. Had you searched for your name properly, you would have seen that there are “about 230,000 results” (shown in the screenshot I took which you can see to the right) according to Google, not 68 Million or 69 Million!

You might think that if a search engine tells you it’s returned, say, 68 million results, there are 68 million pages you could, in principle, view.

Not necessarily so.

A study comparing results from three search engines for queries that generated fewer than 1,000 results, found that even the best-performing search engine was pretty rough and ready in its calculations.

Wrong again. Going back to that screenshot, it very clearly shows “about 69,200,000″. You may want to grab a dictionary and look up the word “about”! However, I am certain from reading other BBC articles that the vast majority of journalists do not know how to use a dictionary or a spelling/grammar checker.

This is nothing less than irresponsible journalism. I am not a journalist, but I did do media studies which covered journalism.

The BBC used to be a shining example of sterling journalism, but now it is a shining example of poor understanding of the subject matter, research and journalism.

When the economy collapsed and the economic growth came to a stand still, the governments would not be making the money that they expected and as such, they could not pay the dept on the money that they had borrowed.

This has had a huge impact on the population and what really pisses me off is that the US and EU governments are now spending money creating websites to show people how they can save money and not live beyond their means. But it is the government who has been living well beyond their means for a long time that generated the economic crisis.

Isn’t this insane? The government borrows way more than it ever should have done based on their economic growth. The economic growth comes to a stand still and the government then spend more money telling the population to do what the governments should have done in the first place. Don’t spend money you don’t have fool!

Like this idiotic website feedthepig.org. As if I am going to take advice from a god damned farm yard animal with a hole in his head!

God damn, I am pleased that I am away from the UK where I lived, or you may find me on the streets, Molotov cocktail in one hand and a wild turkey in the other.

The Background on My Relationship With Lunarpages

For those of you who do not already know, I had an issue with lunarpages (the webhost) which started as a simple complaint about their support. At the time I was contacting them a lot as the server I rent from them kept going down. They gave me one excuse after another and none of the excuses seemed to be right. I pushed for an answer and ended up demanding that they investigate the issue to the fullest extent possible. They reluctantly investigated and found that all the downtime and server crashes were due to the hard drive within the server which was so heavily corrupted, it had just days left to live.

Lunarpages then moved me to a brand new server, however the staff completing the move failed to follow my instructions or the instructions of their manager which resulted in the server crashing and refusing to come back online. Even more time was wasted as lunarpages did not have direct access to the server and needed a special cage team to go and see why it was not coming back online.

The whole thing was a mess to say the very least and I was treated horrifically. Even Lunarpages staff commented that my issue should have been addressed a lot quicker than it was. All the signs the server was giving out pointed towards a serious issue, but lunarpages ignored all the signs. Had I not forced them to investigate, they would not have found the issue before the hard drive died and I lost everything.

The Lunarpages Review / Report

I wanted to write about the issues I had experienced and I even talked about this with AJ, a lunarpages manager. I decided that the best way to approach it was to simply publish all the e-mails that had gone back and forth between myself and lunarpages. That way I would not be giving my version of the story, I would simply be providing all the evidence so that readers could come to their own conclusions by reading the published e-mails.

I published the e-mails along with some explanations and background info (you can read the full article here). Immediately I received comments and e-mails from people who were shocked at what had happened. Not once did I receive any communications disputing what had happened or even questioning the story in any way.

The Comments on the Lunarpages Review

Recently I received a series of nasty comments from someone calling themselves “La Vita” who seemed to simply be trying to discredit my character by making me look as if I was in the wrong and I should know more than the commenter thought I knew.

Meh, whatever, it’s a free country and visitors can say anything they like. I didn’t pay much attention to it, but it bugged me. Not what was said, but the way it was said, attempting to discredit me.

I checked the stats  for “La Vita” and saw that they were geographically very close to the Lunarpages offices. I didn’t think any more of it, but I could not fight the gut feeling that they were employed by Lunarpages or their parent company Add2Net. Some of their comments seemed angry that I had included the names of the staff involved when publishing the e-mails. I did not add any names, the names of the staff were at the bottom of each e-mail that I received.

The commenter “La Vita” had claimed to be the owner of a truly huge website. They had entered their domain name into the comment, but I removed it as I did not want a link to his website from my website. When I checked the details of the website, it stated that the owner was in the USA, or at least that was the registered address. Yet “La Vita” claimed to be in Italy. Searching for his e-mail address via google, I found that he was not indeed the expert he claimed to be and I managed to locate a couple of websites where he was asking basic questions on the very topic he claimed to be making thousands of dollars a day via his website selling professional website/cms themes.

Putting that to one side, I then received another comment simply saying “Dude, you suck, get over it…”. Again, who cares what an idiot says? If you want to argue with me, make it intelligent, put your point across and try to sway my point of view and perspective on the matter at hand.

Again, I was going to let this comment pass, but the first set of digits in the commenter’s IP address (64.73.252.26) rang a bell and I had no idea why. To satisfy my curiosity, I traced the IP address and found that it belonged to Add2Net, the company who owns Lunarpages. I was shocked. I checked and double checked the details to be sure it was indeed Add2Net who had left this comment. I used multiple systems to check the IP so that I could be completely sure before contacting Add2Net / Lunarpages about this issue. You can view the trace for yourself by clicking here (opens in new window) and as you will see, it clearly says “Add2Net” next to the “organization”. I realised that I had recognised the 64 at the beginning of the IP address as my old shared hosting account with lunarpages had an IP that began with 64.

I then checked my stats to search for this IP address and see how and when they entered my website. It turns out that this IP has came to my website twice searching for names of staff within Add2Net / Lunarpages. The search terms used were “Er. Sarwan Singh Jassi” and “lunarpages bad reviews ation gilliam”.

I simply could not believe that Add2Net / Lunarpages staff were leaving abusive comments on a customers website. It was simply outrageous!

In all, there were two IP addresses from Add2Net / Lunarpages. When I checked the locale of the IP’s they were both at 33 latitude and -117 longitude, the exact same latitude and longitude as the IP address used by “La Vita”. A coincidence? I think not.

The Lunarpages Complaint

As far as I was concerned, this was a serious breach of security, not to mention a breach of trust and a highly unethical practice. I decided that the best thing to do was to immediately inform lunarpages of the issue so that they could ensure I was not at risk. If a member of staff is willing to risk his career to leave an abusive comment on a customers website from their work computer, they may well be more than willing to access my server, account or anything else that is private or personal and stored at Lunarpages. How did I know that they had not already tampered with some of my websites? I didn’t and I was worried that I may be at risk.

I contacted lunarpages and informed them of the situation with the evidence that I had at the time. One and a half days passed while I manually went through all of my stats and other information I had access to, compiling a full list of evidence for lunarpages. However, lunarpages had not replied to my ticket in over a day and a half! I opened a new ticket containing all the information that they needed for this complaint and phoned them to inform them and ask why the initial ticket had received to reply at all.

I was told that the ticket had been queued and would be passed to a senior technician who would reply. When I provided the new ticket number, the member of staff I was talking to said that their staff would not leave a comment like this on a customers website. I pointed to the evidence that I had provided and I was put on hold for a few minutes while he quickly reviewed it. When he came back, he simply explained that he could not deal with this ticket any further and would need to forward it to the Add2Net / Lunarpages Legal team who would reply within 1-2 days. The legal team never replied to my ticket, it went into a black hole and they refused to discuss the issue.

In Depth Research

I checked everything that the Add2Net IP addresses had done while on my site and I was shocked to see that they had visited a number of other pages including a post I made about Christmas which contained photos of myself and my children. According to my stats, the Add2Net / Lunarpages employee had downloaded two photos to their computer at Add2Net / Lunarpages, one which was a photo of my daughter and another which was a photo of myself with my children. Why would they download these two pictures to their work computer? We will never know.

To protect myself, I banned the IP addresses that had been involved so that they could not connect to my website any more, but should I have needed to ban IP addresses of my webhost? I am a customer of theirs, the last thing I should ever need to do is add protection to protect myself from the actions of my webhost’s employees.

Lunarpages Response

After 2 days I became sick of waiting, I had no idea what was going on or if Add2Net / Lunarpages were actually addressing the issue so I called their Dedicated Support team who seemed to be completely clueless as to what was going on. I asked to speak to a manager who told me that Add2Net / Lunarpages do not monitor or manage what their staff do online. If one of their staff wants to comment on a public blog and leave abusive comments, they can. I was stunned at their attitude of this most serious of breaches. I was informed that Add2Net / Lunarpages were conducting an internal investigation of the highest seriousness, but Add2Net / Lunarpages would not inform me of the outcome or findings of the investigation.

I do not find this acceptable as it means that if they find that the member of staff has accessed my account or my server without authorization, I will not be informed. It seemed like an attempt to cover-up a huge issue that would be damning to Add2Net / Lunarpages if it was ever revealed what actually happened. Immediately I knew that I would need to put on my chainmail and be the knight of truth, informing people of what actually happened and showing you the same evidence that I provided to Add2Net / Lunarpages so that you can make up your own mind on this particular incident. As corny as it sounds, I just felt that prospective Add2Net / Lunarpages customers should be well aware of what happened to me at the hands of Add2Net / Lunarpages.

Lunarpages Staff Return

Closely monitoring my stats I noticed that after I had blocked the Add2Net IP addresses, they had tried to visit my site again, but the server refused them access as I had told it to do so when faced with these IP addresses. They were again coming from a Google search that they must have bookmarked as it was the same search query.

Minutes later, I received a connection from a proxy in Romania via google and I could see that they had searched for “‘reasons why you shouldnt use lunarpages com”. It is very strange that an IP address is searching for my post about Lunarpages using the exact name of the article. All checks of this IP address show it to be a proxy server. Later in the day, another Romanian IP address that also seemed to be a proxy came into the site searching for me using my full name (first and last) followed by “lunarpages”. The only company who has my full name is Lunarpages. My full name is not mentioned on any websites that I own or run. The reason that lunarpages have my full legal name is because they needed the name that was on my card when I made my initial payment. On my card it says “David”, but I always go by “Dave”. Every other company that I deal with and everywhere my name is mentioned, it says “Dave” and not “David”. Why would anyone be searching for my first and last name followed by “lunarpages”? No one who would be searching for lunarpages would even know my first and last name, all my friends know my blog and would not need to make a search like this. Even if they did, they would search for “Dave” and not “David”. The only people in the whole world who knew knew my full legal name and also knew that I was with lunarpages were Add2Net / Lunarpages. As such, it is my opinion that these visitors were no other than lunarpages.

Lunarpages Investigation and Final Response

Lunarpages contacted me to inform me that they have completed their investigation into the matter. What follows is the full reply that they sent to me.

Hello, This has led to an internal investigation and actions on our end are immediately being taken to deal with those involved.
We appreciate your bringing these details to our attention. No further communication on the matter is required on your part.

Best Regards,
Shawn Williams
Customer Care Manager
support@lunarpages.com

Notice that there is no apology, no sympathy, no empathy, no emotion at all, just a flat, plain reply that is completely meaningless. The reply does not even come from the legal team who I was told would be dealing with the issue, it comes from the manager who I spoke with on the phone earlier.

I am left completely in the dark with no information at all as to whether my details have been shared and no information on whether my personal security and server security has been breached, which according to my stats, it would seem that it has.

Naturally, I replied immediately with the following:

Hello, I do think that further communication on my part is indeed required. What your staff did was highly unethical and my team of staff are still investigating everything that has happened.
Are you seriously saying that this is all that you will be willing to do?
No apology at all for what happened?
No answers to any of the questions I asked in my previous tickets? The main and most important question was “How can I know that your staff are not doing more with my info, publishing it online or even altering my server files etc?”. Are you refusing to answer the question?
I was told yesterday that this ticket would be passed to your Legal Department who would provide a full reply within 1-2 days. Why did this not happen? Was it ever passed to the Legal team? If not, why was I told that it would be passed to the legal team?

Shawn Willams replied with the following (bold added by me to highlight the main pointers of their reply in my opinion):

Hello, We have very strict privacy policies in place that address these concerns. Those policies, if breached would result in termination. Our policies and procedures have been reviewed and confirmed via audit by 3rd party firms in order to obtain our SAS70 type II certification.

Hopefully that will satisfy your concerns as for your data privacy.

Our operations manager reviews all legal claims and interfaces with our legal council. He has reviewed this matter and is the one who has initiated the internal investigation.

While traveling to a public website that allows public postings would not be a violation of ours or anyone’s privacy policy, its still possible that staff could be reprimanded for using company computers for personal activity.

Best Regards,
Shawn Williams
Customer Care Manager
support@lunarpages.com

Do you see an apology? There are a whole bunch of things I can accuse Add2Net and Lunarpages of, but only one that I can prove and that is the only thing I am asking an apology for. However, Shawn Williams seems to think that the biggest issue here was staff “using company computers for personal activity”, not the fact that said staff said “you suck” to a customer.

Also, notice how Shawn Williams (the customer services manager) is replying to this most serious complaint. Take the following statement for example: “While traveling to a public website that allows public postings would not be a violation of ours or anyone’s privacy policy”. Anyone’s privacy policy? How can he say that when there is no way he has read everyone’s privacy policy. As you can see, this is not an acceptable business attitude to adopt when replying to a complaint of such a serious nature. He is basically trying to make me look stupid and discredit me or bully me into not replying. If you look at Shawn Williams first reply, you will see that although he failed to answer any questions or address any of the issues that I had detailed at great length in my complaint, he says “No further communication on the matter is required on your part.”. That is a very blunt statement basically telling me not to reply as Add2Net / Lunarpages consider the matter closed.

I fired off the following reply:

Thank you for explaining why you had replied and not the legal team. That would have been handy earlier on. See, I was told that “the legal team will reply to your ticket” so I was kinda expecting the err legal team to reply to my ticket if you get my drift. However, knowing that they passed the information to you is fine, you may have wanted to initially include that piece of useful information so that I was aware as to what had happened and would not have needed to ask why it seemed the department who I was told would directly reply to my ticket had not.

I understand as you state “While traveling to a public website that allows public postings would not be a violation of ours or anyone’s privacy policy, its still possible that staff could be reprimanded for using company computers for personal activity.”, but that is not the case. If that were what happened, no problem, I do not mind at all. But the fact of the matter is this:
1) Add2Net Staff (at least one) while using Add2Net internet connection visited my personal blog. (no problem so far) and then proceeded to leave an abusive comment (there’s the problem). Let me get this straight. In this case, given all the evidence, you would think that “using company computers for personal activity” was the most serious offence? Not the fact that they left abusive comments?
2) Since this happened, someone has been searching google for “David *surname removed* lunarpages”. Only you and my bank know me as “David”, the rest of the world knows me as “Dave”. The only people who know that I am hosted with lunarpages and also know my full name are lunarpages and my girlfriend. It was not my girlfriend. Naturally I can not directly prove that it was you, but by the process of elimination, it was no one else.

You said “While traveling to a public website that allows public postings would not be a violation of ours or anyone’s privacy policy”. Are you saying that Add2Net and Lunarpages have no policies against or issues with staff telling existing lunarpages customers “you suck”?

Still no apology?
I am not happy with this as a resolution. I think that at the very least I deserve an apology for your staff (while at work and using an internet connection that you are legally responsible for) telling me “you suck”. This is now the third time I have asked for an apology and each time you have completely ignored it.

I believe I deserve an apology for the way your staff acted (fully detailed in initial complaint). If you do not plan to provide an apology, please say so so that I do not waste any more of your or my time chasing you for an apology. I am assuming thus far that an apology has simply been overlooked by accident.

I have worked as a manager of a superstore where I was responsible for $4 million per year. Every single cent of it was my responsibility as my primary role was the cash office manager. When other managers were not in (early in the day and late in the evening), I was in charge and had to deal with any and all customer complaints, issues or general bitching. I trained all my staff that while we could never admit anything was our fault, we could and always should apologise. This makes the customer feel as if you understand their concerns. Even something as simple as “I am terrible sorry that you have felt the need to issue a complaint about a member of our staff”. There is no admission of guilt or any acceptance of liability. It is a generic apology. Now why the hell has no one said sorry to me yet? After all, I am paying lunarpages $150 per month and when a member of their staff uses their internet connection to tell their customer (me) that they suck, I would expect an apology at the very least.

Refusal to provide any apology

I had had enough and I called Lunarpages to demand an apology. I was eventually put through to the Operations Manager who was in charge of the call centre and after pushing and pushing and pushing, he gave an apology. However. I had to tell him what to say and explain why they should apologise. He explained that the reason they had not apologised for any of this was because it would make them liable. He also said that their other concern was that I would make a huge post detailing this horrific issue. Sadly, that was the only thing they have ever said that was right.

To make matters worse, I have recordings of almost all of the calls including:

• Support staff telling me that their manager refuses to address issues they send to him
• Lunarpages staff telling me that their staff would never leave such a comment on my site. Followed by the same staff telling me they would investigate it.
• Lunarpages Operations Manager telling me why they would not and have not offered any apology for what happened.

I will post these online as soon as I can.

The domain was sold and I went to use the SSL on a new domain, but the SSL was gone. I called GoDaddy and after investigating, they told me that the SSL had been cancelled as the new owner for the domain had bought an SSL to use on the domain and no domain can have more than one SSL.

OK, so I asked how I can change an SSL so that it can be used on a new domain. “You can’t” they replied, explaining that it was a “company policy”.

When I had bought the SSL I had read everything carefully so that I knew what I was getting and what I could do with it. I asked the GoDaddy agent where it says that it can not be used on a new domain. The agent e-mailed me something from their support section that explains that it can not be used on a new domain. I asked where on their site it says that it can not be used on a new domain. “on our support section” was his reply.

So lets get this straight.

1) It is GoDaddys policy to not allow SSL certificates to be used on a new domain after 30 days of the order
2) GoDaddy only state this “policy” in the support section of their website. They do not state this within their terms, product description, order process or checkout process.

So, I paid $49.99 for my SSL which was used for 3 months before I sold the domain. The new owner of the domain bought an SSL for the domain from GoDaddy. This means that there are 9 months left on my SSL which I have entirely lost and meanwhile, GoDaddy have charged the new owner for the new SSL. GoDaddy have doubled their money for the SSL on this domain for 9 months effectively.

I refused to take their answer as they can not claim it to be “policy” when it is not detailed within their policy, nor is it detailed within their terms, the product description or anywhere else except their support section. The agent understood and agreed. He went away and when he came back he said that all he could offer would be a new SSL for $12.99. I took the SSL as it is usually priced at $69.99!

I have to say, I thought this was going to be another company that pissed me off and made me go to their competitor, but they addressed, understood and resolved the issue that I had even though it was against their “policy”. Granted, this should have never been an issue, but they have managed to keep me sweet and thus, keep my business.