Powweb.com violates free speech?

Powweb.com is where I’ve been hosting my web sites for many years. Between myself and clients, I have about 30 domains there. So, while I don’t expect to be treated as the uber-customer, I do expect a modicum of respect from my host and from it’s appointees in the forums. Today was the last straw.

 

Back-story:

I’ve been hosting my domains here since 2002, as you can see by the whois record on one of my domain names. I opened this domain with powweb and have happily been using them for years, referring MANY friends, associates, and eventually my clients there because of their great service. Recently they made a unannounced an unwelcome change to their login protocols which has caused everyone massive headaches. They added Captchas. Gasp! Oh no!

It’s not that they’ve added a captcha system that annoys myself and others as much as it is the fact that they have implemented one of the worst captcha systems in the world for people to read. In fact, it’s so bad they don’t even use it on their other internal sites… only for us members.  Let me explain:

 

 

To the left is a decent captcha image. This is the one they use when you register on their forums. It’s basically another step in the security process to stop random bots (small web computer programs) from generating accounts and then spamming the system. The captcha they use on their main control panel (called OPS) is designed for a different purpose. Putting a captcha in place forces computer programs to "read" the text in the box before their attempted login and password will be compared against the database. This prevents a would-be identity thief from simply trying to use a cracker-jack to guess random names and passwords using a dictionary file. So, what’s the problem?

The problem with the concept is minimal. Besides being the ONLY web host I’ve ever heard of who does this, there’s no major problem. What IS a problem is that this was forced on us as paying customers as a security measure with no warning, no consideration for our desires, or anything else resembling customer satisfaction being considered.

The REAL problem is they are using a completely crappy (technical jargon) captcha system. It’s unbelievable hard to read and is causing huge headaches for the people like me who resell hosting and who maintain multiple domains.

 

 

 

What do other’s think?

(Click to enlarge)

As of right now, this post has drawn SO much attention that the thread  is number 4 in powweb’s entire customer support forum. It’s outranked almost every other problem in the entire company’s list of complaints in only a month. So, let’s assume that I’m not the only one complaining.

I’d like you to take a moment to try to put yourselves in our shoes. These screenshots below are from powweb’s OPS panel login screen. You’d think this is really an easy thing to deal with right?

 

Try #1

What does that look like to you? Apparently it’s NOT 56eh5s…. invalid

 

Try #2

What does this look like? I swear to God that it’s clearly mt6ddu… umm wrong.

Try #3

Again.. looks to me like xhba8y. Nope

The 4th try worked and I got in. I felt like throwing a freakin’ party! That’s an example of what it’s like for me and my PAYING customers to login to powweb.com’s web site control panel. I have to login to these ops panels a few times per day sometimes, per customer. I may have to login on a busy day to ops as many as 30 times throughout a day. Now, I’m spending more time trying to login than I am actually working. This is WAY beyond frustrating.

Attempts to mitigate the problem:

I tried to post in the forum dedicated to the topic, located at:

http://forum.powweb.com/showthread.php?t=79280

Every couple of weeks I’ll check in to see if any progress has been made. Well, today I get a flaming email from a customer describing their dissatisfaction with a service I am providing them, through powweb. I’ll quote the email here (with permission from the author, who has made every effort to be kind in the matter).

BEGIN QUOTE

Mr. Jordan……….

Please know that these comments are not personally directed to you as the NCBBA Website Developer BUT I have had about all the inconvenience trying to login in, post and publish I can stand!!!!! As the primary contributor to the daily updates of our website I am damn tired of the failures of POWWEB.

I understand that POWWEB was upgrading their site and was unavailable for a period of time …..got it! No problem! BUT I have issues with the following:

1. The Captcha function is terrible. Half of the time you cannot read the dark gray letters on the gray background which causes me to ‘try another image’ 2-3-4 times before I have the confidence to try the login.
2. Re entering the username and password each time is a pain in the ass ….especially if the captcha is incorrect. This is the only site where retention of the information is a problem.
3. What has been added in this upgrade to POWWEB? It seems like a list and explanation should have accompanied the upgrade for the users or at least the Website Developer. I see new functions and pages of code that were formerly written words. More trial and error and errors!
4. I am tired of REMOTE PUBLISHING ERRORS. Prior to the upgrade I only had to ‘publish’ and the work was done…….What gives? My system is capable ..is theirs?
5. It takes a considerable amount of time to log-in and access the NCBBA site….2x or 3x longer than before the upgrade if you connect at all.

I’m ready to move on if we can’t get some relief on these issues. Let me know what you can resolve with POWWEB and let me know.

END QUOTE

Wow, right? In eleven years, this is the first emailed complaint I’ve ever had about the quality of the services I’ve provided through virtual hosting services. So, naturally I take this to the forums and post my complaint on behalf of my customer there on their forums.

Within 30 minutes, I get an email stating that my inclusion of the customer’s email is in violation of the terms of service of the forums without proper permission from the author. My post has been edited to remove the customer’s comments. Ok, that’s annoying, but the process makes sense. So, I email my customer the following:

Mike,

I’ve forwarded your request to one of the support forums, but the moderators removed it because I had no authority from you to post it. Please respond with an “ok” to share your email sent earlier today and I’ll post it again.

Thanks.

Best Regards,

Tommy Jordan

Within an hour or so, I had a written response from the customer stating:

Mr. Jordan…………

You have my permission to post this information with POWWEB with the hopes some of the issues can be resolved for our account……

Again, a perfectly reasonable answer that will allow me to continue with my support issue.

So, I login to powweb tonight to make my revision to my post, including the author’s permissions to use his email as content, and this is what I’m greeted with:

 

I’ve been BANNED? For two weeks? For trying to fix an issue on behalf of a customer? WOW! Additionally, if you look further up the page between the post numbers 177 and 185, you’ll notice there is no post with the author "alornmage". They banned me from a support forum for asking for support and they removed the post as well. So, I’ve written this article to accomplish two things:

1. To post this in a place that no one from powweb can remove from the web without legal effort on their part.
2. To provide a method to warn other powweb users about the horrible quality of service received from their moderators, staff, and technical support.

I freely welcome any correspondence from the moderators of the forum or powweb on this topic, however please be aware that all information will be for public consumption and emailing or commenting in any manner willfully nullifies any confidentiality claims you may wish to impose.

I’ll respond more when I hear back from powweb. Meanwhile, I’m going to technorati and Digg to rip powweb a new one. I’m gonna link this post all over the web. This action was completely inexcusable on their part.

 

 

UPDATE #1:

Now, they’ve added moderator approval to the forum as well, as evidenced by this:

So, now I’m pretty sure my other post won’t get noticed either. I made ONE post between the time they implemented moderation and the present, so it’s been done very recently tonight. These guys are really pissing off the wrong person. I’ve got just enough angst to take this as far as I have to in order to make my point. You can disagree with me all you want, but you WILL give me the opportunity to voice my opinion, especially if I’m paying for it.

 

 

UPDATE #2:

I’ve now been on hold for 20 minutes with powweb live-chat with no response from an operator. I’m also on hold on the telephone, trying to see who will answer first, after having to make 4 calls to the system to even get to a human without their system hanging up on me.

Further, I just got THIS when I tried to review the forums using another account I had to create until my first account was reinstated.

Wow.. nice support huh? And guess what? This is done my volunteer moderators approved by powweb’s staff! Nice huh?

 

Powweb’s Terms of Service for Forum Membership:

We welcome your participation in the PowWeb community forum! In order to maintain a friendly, helpful atmosphere, we require that all users abide by the rules and policies detailed below and in the forum FAQ. Clicking the "Register" button at the end of the page indicates that you agree to follow the forum rules and guidelines.

Although the administrators and moderators of the PowWeb community forums will attempt to keep all objectionable messages off this forum, it is impossible to review every message. All messages express the views of the author. The owners, administrators and moderators of the PowWeb community forums will not be held responsible for the content of any message.

By clicking the "Register" button, you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, sexually-orientated, hateful, threatening, insulting, non-productive or in violation of any laws or forum rules or guidelines.

The owners of the PowWeb community forums retain the right to remove, edit, move or close any thread for any reason, and to suspend or ban any user at their discretion. Access to the community forums is not guaranteed to any user or hosting client. Additionally, Intentional disruption of these forums is a violation of PowWeb policy, and could lead to hosting account cancellation.

Guidelines:

• Please check the "PowWeb Announcements" and "Outages / Service Problems" forums before posting a message regarding a service-related problem.

• Respect your fellow user’s views and opinions. Personal attacks, disruptive, provocative or threatening posts will not be tolerated, and may lead to suspension or banning.

• Please limit yourself to posting under one username. Users found to be posting under multiple usernames may be denied access to the forums.
(Yes, I violated this, but only in an effort to get the attention of staff members who can help me with the problem.)

• Posting copyrighted works of any kind is forbidden. Brief excerpts or links to articles, stories, lyrics, images, etc. are allowed. Posting copyrighted material in its entirety is not. All such posts will be deleted or edited to excise the copyrighted material, whichever is deemed more expedient by PowWeb staff or moderators.

• Please not that the contents of your posts may be index by Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. We do not delete posts for the reason.
(Did I read that right? We do NOT DELETE POSTS? D O   N O T   D E L E T E     P O S T S) Wow!

Update #3:

I finally got in touch with telephone support.  A guy named Mike helped me out. Let me say for the record that this guy actually "works for" powweb. He’s not a volunteer mod. He was amazingly courteous, listened to my entire rant, read this blog, contacted his supervisor about the severity of the issue of my ban, and has escalated this issue to their corporate office. Both the support tech and the supervisor agreed this is a major violation of how things are supposed to go, so thus far I’m getting some support on the issue. Let’s see what happens. I was told this was being moved into a "priority 1" support status with the admin team and that I should be contacted via telephone within 24 hours. Powweb.. if you’re reading this… call me. My phone number is in the support ticket. I don’t expect a canned email response from an issue that has cost me this much time.

And Mike…. thanks.

 

 

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