Slashdot has really deteriorated....
In response to an “All Customer Bulletin” that I sent out last week about the downtime we experienced last week, I got an email from a customer indicating that he was ashamed of our behavior and would tell everyone he knew not to do business with us.
“Strange,” I thought.
See, when I send out bulletins like I did last week, I set my personal address as the reply-to so that a) I get all the bounce-backs because its good to know what the real delivery rate looks like, b) I get all the spam verification messages because its good to know what services people are using to protect their inboxes and c) I get to see all of the ensuing questions and comments from customers first hand.
Overwhelmingly, Domain Direct’s subscribers were incredibly supportive of how we handled the situation. Out of the tens of thousands of messages sent, I only got two “I don’t care what caused the downtime, I want my money back” messages. And I got exactly one, “I’m ashamed of you, I’m moving my business somewhere else.”
The customer mentioned that he had read about what had “really” happened on Slashdot, so of course, I had to visit and find out what people where saying about us. I haven’t used Slashdot in at least a couple of years, probably more – it used to be an excellent place to get the “internet scoop”, but now I get all that (and more) from RSS services like Tucows Start, Feedcache, Pubsub and Technorati.
In visiting Slashdot, one thing became real clear, real quick.
Uninformed goofballs have taken over the place.
I could scarcely believe the amount of misinformation that had been spread. One poster alleged that Tucows had sold its registrar business a few years back and only had a smattering of customers left-over (most definitely not true – we certainly didn’t sell, and we’re serving millions of customers). Others were alleging that we turfed specific customers in order to solve the issues related to the downtime. Also not true. No one got turfed, no one had their contracts with us cancelled. In fact, during the downtime, we bent over backwards to take care of our customer’s interests.
Whatever happened to the millions of eyeballs that the Open Source community is so proud of? All I saw were a bunch of trolls leading the discussion, and very little fact-based discussion of consequence. I’m actually kind of disappointed with Slashdot in a way. I used to have warm spot in my heart for Slashdot, but it really seems to have deteriorated to the point where it does nothing but provide a comfortable home for those that don’t know any better and aren’t afraid to prove it.
I admit that I didn’t bother reading the entire thread – it ran 3 pages long, in the hundreds of posts. After page two, I kind of gave up. To everyone that posted well-intentioned, fact-based messages on page three, you have my apologies.
See this post as it first appeared on Blogware.
10 comments
Comments are closed - these are kept exactly as they were left.
(name not saved), May 9, 2006
I wish I could live in the world of most of the Slashdot crowd (save at least one sane commenter I saw) and some of the other sites/forums for the hosting industry. In that world: the customer is always right even when they are obviously wrong; customers can yell at providers but the provider can't yell back; providers can never make mistakes--even tiny ones--without being publicly villified; business rules don't apply; everything is black and white; etc...
Unfortunately, those of us actually running businesses in this industry have to live in the real world. If that means taking down one customer to make sure the rest are up, so be it. From what I understand, Tucows even went the extra mile and worked w/the customer to get them running somewhere else. Many providers would have terminated them immediately (and probably rightfully so).
(name not saved), May 9, 2006
It is really a shame about Slashdot. It almost gone two ways. The Slashdot commenters are so extreme while I hear from some people that Slashdot's posts have gone too business, some even call it Slashvertising.
But most days I just read the comments on Slashdot for their humour value. Sad but true.
siobhan
(name not saved), May 9, 2006
According to Blue Security:
[May 3rd 16:43 GMT]
PharmaMaster Strikes Again, Takes Down Tucows
PharmaMaster starts another attack and takes down Tucows's DNS servers which were serving thousands of sites, including Blue Security's. Tucows terminates Blue Security's account in an attempt to stop the attack.
Is this an accurate account?
(name not saved), May 9, 2006
Not as far as I understand the situation. Tucows is a wholesale provider of many services. The domain registrations we sell are sold separately from our DNS and hosting services, and vice versa. Just because a name is delegated to us, doesn't mean that we're authoritative from that name. Further, there's a difference between an authoritative delegation and a customer account. I would be shocked to find out that we actually terminated anyone's account - what is more likely is that our NOC, in conjunction with another operator or registrar, requested that the name be redelegated elsewhere.
This points to some interesting questions, which probably need answers. I'll see what I can dig up.
-r
(name not saved), May 9, 2006
I mean, "authoritative *for* that name"...not "from" that name...
(name not saved), May 9, 2006
From an external perspective, Ross, a lot of that can be seen as splitting hairs.
If Tucows (through a reseller) was providing DNS services for Blue Security, and if Tucows made the decision to remove them from its DNS servers and/or to modify their delegation such that their DNS services ceased in order to protect other clients, the substance of the complaint -- that Tucows stopped service to one innocent client in order to protect other clients -- still stands. Whether or not it was the right thing to do is a different question.
(name not saved), May 10, 2006
I'm glad somebody has pointed this out. For the past 2 years at least I haven't found Slashdot to be useful for much of anything. Of course I haven't looked at it much in 2 years but still.
(name not saved), May 10, 2006
I'll let you figure out what's being split ;-) here's further, and definitely more official than what I've come up with, word from Tucows...
http://tinyurl.com/gmdu9
"Blue Security has been and continues to be a customer of Tucows using
several of our services.
My guess is that the confusion comes from a comment near the end of
Blue Security's timeline saying "Tucows terminates Blue Security's
account in an attempt to stop the attack." People have taken this to
mean we stopped doing business with them. This is not the case. To
stem the attack our upstream providers blackholed the IP addresses
under attack at their edge routers. We re-IP'd our DNS service to
new IPs and pointed ns1 and ns2 to the new IPs. Later, Blue Security
(or their registrar, not sure) moved the DNS service for this domain
to a different provider."
(name not saved), May 10, 2006
So once your DNS servers were re-IP'd, their DNS info was still being served, and they decided to cange DNS servers at some later time?
(name not saved), May 10, 2006
From what Ken related, I would guess that would be fairly accurate to say. To be honest, I haven't spent a huge amount of time trying to understand the specifics. The subject and answers are interesting, but based on what I have come to understand about the situation, I'm pretty squarely convinced that our NOC Response team acted pretty fairly and reasonably.
There's a thread in our reseller discussion forums that I pointed to yesterday that would allow you to ask these questions directly to the poster to the extent that I haven't given you a proper answer here. Not that I'm trying to avoid giving any more answers, or trying to end the discussion here, but rather, that Ken and his team are in a way better spot to give you smart answers than I am.
Hope this helps.