Terms & Conditions Update: Forced Assistance For Obstinance

Over the years, we have developed several policies that cover the rare situations when one of our members engages in problematic behavior. Rather than trying to maintain an exhaustive list of those situations and different ways of handling them, we have updated our Terms and Conditions of Service to merge those ad-hoc policies into a single new “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” policy.

What’s the situation?

This is a do-it-yourself service. We’ve got a lot of carefully-developed policies, procedures, and features to allow most people to handle most situations without our intervention. We also have ways of handling the exceptions, and those generally work very well.

But, unfortunately, the structure of our service does enable a critical failure state. It generally happens when a member is wrong about two things at once.

The first one could be nearly anything. What their username is. What email address they gave us when they signed up. How Unix filesystem permissions work. How their own domain name is spelled. How to transfer their membership to someone else. Whether or not they’re using a VPN. (Each of these is a recent actual example.)

Regardless of what the first thing might be, the second thing they are wrong about is always the same: they think that they need our help to deal with the first thing and that we won’t help them. And (this is important!) they are always wrong about that.

Although that’s a problem, it’s still a solvable problem. The critical failure requires a bit more. It requires that the person needs our help (even if only to tell them how to help themselves!), but they are actively doing something to prevent us from helping them.

We’ve probably seen all the ways that can happen by now. We’ve done our darnedest to put up signs pointing people in the right direction, and we’re always willing to further improve them. People will eventually be able to sort it out (with or without our help as needed), as long as they are willing to read and follow those signs.

The “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” policy covers what happens when they aren’t.

The Obstinance of Indifference

Sometimes there is a way for people to accomplish what they want, even if it doesn’t comport with our TACOS. Transferring a membership to another person is the classic example. When you change your contact email address, you’re asked if the new email address is the same person or a different person. If you say it’s a different person, you get a short page explaining how to transfer assets between people and why it’s important to do it that way.

Some people click the back arrow and change the answer to “same person” and submit the form again. There’s a process. There are really good reasons for the process. It’s not even difficult. They just don’t care. And sooner or later, they find out firsthand about the really good reasons in a way that causes problems that we have to deal with.

The Obstinance of Rage

Sometimes, the person can’t accomplish what they want. That’s understandably frustrating. And sometimes they don’t handle it… optimally. They fall into a three-step process:

1) Do not follow the advice they’ve been given.
2) The situation does not improve.
3) Return to step 1.

That persists, building up energy and anger with each repetition, until their stack overflows and they reach escape velocity, erupting forth in a sizzling ball of white-hot rage.

At that point, we’re no longer a service provider; we’re a villain. It is not sufficient to solve the original problem anymore. Now, it has to be solved in a way that triumphs over the villain. And that means forcing us to do what they want without following our (villainous!) policies. It’s a moral imperative!

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET does not negotiate with terrorists

Aside from blatantly violating our policies and leaving us to clean up the mess, there are various ways people attempt to force us to do various things.

I’m not going to give too many examples, because sharing an exhaustive list of ways to harass us seems like maybe not the best idea. But for the purposes of illustration, let’s take a PayPal dispute.

If a member of our service files a PayPal dispute over a payment they made, yes, we have to respond to that. We go dig up our records of the charge, the associated services provided, and our refund policy and provide that to PayPal. Our track record on such disputes isn’t perfect, but we win the vast majority of them because we charged what we said we would and provided the services we said we would, and the dispute was never really about the payment in the first place.

Does that force us to waste our time? Yes. Does it do anything to help the member with their problem? No. Though in some cases, they’ve worked themselves into such a tizzy that the idea that they’re punishing us is satisfaction enough. (However, perpetrating payment fraud as a method of inconveniencing others usually isn’t a great strategy. The backfire can be brutal.)

That’s pretty much the type of situation we’re dealing with. Whatever they wanted, there was another, better way to get it. But they elected the way of pain.

And it didn’t even work.

The “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” Policy

A “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” event occurs anytime we are forced to do something for or in response to a member that is outside the normal scope of the support that member is eligible for.

When that happens, a $50.00 fee will apply. That’s the same fee we’ve charged for years for dealing with a membership transfer that violates our TACOS and causes problems we have to deal with. Indeed, that’s an example of something that will now be covered by this policy. As will payment disputes.

In addition, if you’re a baseline member and the activity precipitating the event appears to be an attempt to obtain support consistent with what’s available to a subscription membership, we’ll convert your membership for you. (The cost of the switch will be deducted from the $50.00 fee.) We may also prevent you from downgrading the membership, either for a period of time or indefinitely in order to make sure that we’ll be able to assist you in the future if needed. If that’s unacceptable, you will always have the option to cancel. (Do note that people who’ve intentionally been making our lives difficult have historically greatly overestimated the dismay the prospect of their departure would elicit.)

Bottom Line

Look, we’ve all dealt with a company we are pretty sure was fucking with us just because they could. We’ve all dealt with stupid policies that appear intentionally designed to make it harder to get what we want. We’ve all dealt with companies that act like they resent customers for existing. (In fact, I’m pretty sure OptumRX checks all those boxes at once!)

This is not that company.

This is a small business. I am the owner. I have been personally involved every day for the past 23 years in trying to make the best service possible, and to do right by every one of my customers. Even the dickheads.

We want you to be successful. We are always here to help you. I am always here to help you. I see every support ticket. I personally have over 13,500 posts on our forum. I am not a hard person to reach.

The caveat is that help is not unconditional. If you want our help, it’s provided on our terms. Terms that keep our members’ data and assets safe, and keeps our service financially afloat.

We don’t provide email support. If you email us, you’re going to get an autoresponse. Do what it says. If the type of help you want is something (rare) that we charge for, pay for it. If we say you need to post on the forum to get help, post on the forum to get help. If we say you need to follow the process, follow the process.

And if you’ve been our loyal customer for 150 years and you can’t believe that you’re being treated so despicably, yeah, good instinct. Don’t believe it. You’re not being treated like that. There’s something specific you’re doing that’s keeping us from helping you.

Whatever you do, don’t spiral into a self-feeding rage demon until the main thing keeping you from solving your problem is being so angry that you can’t think straight and you lash out at people who really, genuinely would love to help you if you would let them. It’s really bad for your digestive system.

Also, it costs $50.00.

5 Comments »

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1. I really appreciate you folks and have been a happy customer for years. This policy makes sense and is fair.

   Comment by Porter B. Hall — March 30, 2025 #

2. Impressed that you can make an infuriating situation this entertaining in the writeup. Hope it continues to be rare and that this policy helps mitigate the cost!

   Now I’m trying to imagine what it would take to de-obstinate the people who run into it. Not because I think that should be in your scope (webhosting and therapy are different jobs), it’s just the kind of support puzzle I enjoy noodling on.

   Comment by Finn — March 30, 2025 #

3. Let us know if you figure it out! Not only would that be of great help to us and to people having a bad time, but I suspect there are a lot of other relevant applications of such a capability, especially in the current climate! We’re open to anything that doesn’t reward bad behavior. -jdw

   Comment by jdw — March 30, 2025 #

4. I do not want to imagine how much of this abuse you get to have to make this policy. While I have seen things that would cause this on the forums, it’s not enough to cause this policy to be needed.

   Comment by MiquelFire — March 30, 2025 #

5. It’s really not about abuse. If you abuse me, I don’t much care unless it goes on long enough to get tedious. If you abuse anybody else, there’s no fee. I may warn you once if it’s especially mild but usually I’ll terminate you on the spot. This policy about time. Our time has value; this policy defends us against efforts to waste it.

   I don’t want to say it’s impossible to get this policy invoked (solely) by posting on the forums. Someone will eventually find a way to prove me wrong. Sure, people sometimes do get snippy there. (Though I admit I don’t always de-escalate, and can’t blame anyone but myself for that!) But posting on the forums is what we want people to do. People who do are still talking and (usually) listening. There’s hope. This policy is more for the sort of person who refuses to post to the forums. Which is a position you may find hard to understand. I certainly do.

   Email: The whirligig on my site is broken.
   Our auto-reply: We do not provide email support. If you don’t have a subscription membership, you can ask your question for free on our forum.
   Email: What? This is a serious problem! Fix it! Now!
   Our auto-reply: We do not provide email support. If you don’t have a subscription membership, you can ask your question for free on our forum.
   Email: I can’t believe you’re trying to blackmail me into paying for support to fix your own broken shit! You’re disgusting!
   Our auto-reply: We do not provide email support. If you don’t have a subscription membership, you can ask your question for free on our forum.
   Email: I WILL DESTROY YOU!!
   PayPal: Your customer has opened a “Goods not received” dispute…

   Under this policy, we’re going to beat that dispute, charge them $50 for the hassle, convert them to a subscription membership, and let them know that their whirligig is broken because they clicked “Disable DNS” last week. (Or whatever.) Then the person will either ragequit or continue on as a subscription member able to get the sort of help they need in the future. Either way works for us.

   I ought to probably add that if it really had been our problem, they still would have received the first auto-reply, but we would have fixed it. If our stuff really is broken, we don’t care if you tell us by carrier pigeon or smoke signal. These cases require both that the problem be on their end and that they’re not open to that possibility. (And, obviously, that they look at the directions we give them and say “Well, I’m not doing that!“)

   -jdw

   Comment by jdw — March 30, 2025 #

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