Re: [bitfolk] How to handle unresponsive customers with issues that cannot be ignored

Hi Conrad, Rearranging your email a bit… On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 12:53:36AM +0100, Conrad Wood wrote: I've been thinking about it for the last week and I'm going to have to say, "yes YOU can, but in general the answer's going to have to be no." See the thing is, I think it's very likely that if I was to write up this alternate option in the terms, and add the necessary check box etc to the Panel then the only person who'd use it is you. So it would represent a lot of confusion and complexity for very limited value. However, I am happy to make a note in our customer database that should there be some problem with your VPS that we need you to fix and we are unable to contact you for at least 21 days, then instead of turning off your VPS's network we'll add a firewall rule and invoice you for it on a monthly basis. Assuming that there *is* a firewall rule that we can add that fixes the problem. I suppose I'm a little surprised that we could email you daily for weeks and then send you text messages and you still would have no ability to read them and rectify whatever the problem was. All the things we've discussed in this thread have been things you can solve with a firewall rule and/or a simple application reconfiguration. I'd also like to think that we only go to these lengths about the small number of things that are fairly serious risks. Things you'd really want to fix quite quickly if you knew about them. If the problem would be that you'd not be receiving the messages (as opposed to receiving them but not having opportunity to act on them) is there some other communications method that would be more likely to get through than email and text message? If so then I could certainly look at adding that to the address book. I really don't want to be turning anyone's service off either, but sometimes we do need to get people to do things. A year ago we only had one email address for each customer so when daily emails to that address went unanswered for months at a time we were a bit stuck as to what to do. Since then, the ability to provide multiple email addresses and also phone numbers was added, so now we have more options, and before turning anyone's service off I'd very likely exhaust all available contact methods¹. Now that can happen, I feel it's a reasonable time to enforce some limits on how long we'll wait. If there's other contact methods that would work better for some people then I am keen to hear about them, to see if we could make use of them. Cheers, Andy ¹ Except in emergencies, obviously. If there's an abuse report, and we look at traffic and see abuse actually happening then it just has to be turned off without time to send email or whatever and wait for response. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting