Hacker News Reader

Comment by pveierland | Hacker News Reader

My worst Skype annoyance was when they seized your purchased credits if your account was left unused for 180 days. As a sporadic user of Skype when I needed to place an international call etc, having purchased credits reset automatically was such a provocation [0]. Every time I have to re-install Skype for some reason, there's always a new regression or dark UX pattern in use.

[0] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/14/skype-lawsuit-to-yie...

View on HN

I had a similar experience: Microsoft deleted all my childhood email because I didn't log into hotmail frequently enough.

This included the emails I sent to my first love. And the ones she sent me. All gone. Because Microsoft wanted to save some tiny amount of space. I love Microsoft and an writing this on a Surface device now but Christ, that was awful and would make me think twice about using Microsoft online services.

PS. If anyone on HN somehow knows ways to recover the contents on deleted hotmail accounts then please let me know.

You should think twice about storing anything in the cloud, especially if the service is "free." Always make your own backup of anything you care about.

Basically if it's local back it up to the cloud, and if it's only in the cloud back it up locally.

I'm likely channeling Jason Scott here, but this rhetoric is not helping. Yes of course people should back things up, but responding to "I just lost things of sentimental value to me" with "well you should've backed things up" doesn't come off as helpful advice.

Really, the problem is that online services (startups that are shutting down are the worst offenders[1]) are allowed to destroy user data with reckless abandon. You may argue "hey, it's their cloud" but it's also your data -- and that's kinda like arguing that a library that accepts book donations and then goes on to shreds book that nobody is borrowing anymore is justified in their actions.

[1]: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

> that's kinda like arguing that a library that accepts book donations and then goes on to shreds book that nobody is borrowing anymore is justified in their actions.

You mean, all libraries?

Yeah, fair cop. My point was meant to be a library that shreds books without first attempting to sell them, give them away or otherwise archive them (which is what most libraries do before they resort to shredding books).

Not really, though. If you donate a book that cannot be made presentable with minimal effort, it will get scrapped, rather than be put up for sale or archived. There's only limited budget, and the discard bin costs less, by far, compared to staffing a book sale (even if it's once a year) or books take up space in "an archive" when another branch or library has the book in active circulation. Way more books get discarded than you might think.

> Really, the problem is that online services (startups that are shutting down are the worst offenders) are allowed to destroy user data with reckless abandon.

How much are you paying them, per month, to safeguard your data?

Whatever their ads or user statstics pitched to VCs brings in.

Respectfully, I don't think that's the right question to be asking. Yes, you're correct that since I haven't paid them they currently have no legal obligation to treat my data with respect (usually because I've agreed to non-binding EULA that is vague enough to allow for most abuses).

But look at it from a user's perspective. A small company shows up and says "hey, look at this great 'experience' you can get if you just give us some of your data". So the user gives them some of their data, and that overall builds the community around whatever the company is selling. Then one day the company decides to delete the user's data without warning (or without their acknowledgement or consent). The data itself had worth to the users, but more importantly it is the reason why the company has a community. The fact they didn't treat it with respect is an ethics problem. Just because users didn't pay you to act as a decent person doesn't mean you should treat their data as though it was worthless.

When Yahoo deleted GeoCities they managed to set the world record for the fastest destruction of the largest amount of user-created content. The entireity of GeoCities was several terabytes (in 2009 that was small enough to fit a few hundred dollars worth of hard-drives). Was Yahoo legally obligated to not delete 22 years worth of user content in a single afternoon? No. Were they complete and utter assholes for doing it? Absolutely. Was completely un-necessary? Yes.

It seems helpful to me. Microsoft is not a startup, there is no reason to assume they would just purge Hotmail accounts one day. Reminding people that corporations lose data, whether accidental or intentional, and that they should take individual responsibility for the data they consider significant, is important.

It probably doesn't help the parent feel much better about his situation, but it does help all the other readers to highlight and learn from his experience, and especially to emphasize that such adversarial action against user data is a significant risk at large, established companies as well as small ones.

My point was that "you should make backups" is useful advice. "You should've made backups" is not, because it places blame on the user for placing trust in someone else.

Sure, you and I know that effectively all "cloud" companies will resort to this sort of scummy bullshit, but let's not blame users who have lost data because a company decided to delete their data with reckless abandon.

I hate to be insensitive to people, but, it is important to point these things out when the message will hit hardest.

I remember, a long long time ago, someone I knew had just ripped his massive compact disc collection to his Windows computer, and, by default, they were in encrypted WMA format. He was very receptive to me pointing out how bad DRM was, because now he couldn't copy them to his other computers, and how Microsoft lied to him.

DO NOT TRUST THE CLOUD

That's a very different scenario.

I don't think the library comparison is close enough. More like you leave your cherished pet at the vet for the week and the vet decides to put it down because there are too many pets and their font 5 terms and conditions displayed on the wall allow them to do so.

Very similarly, my yahoo account was gone. That was a sad day, knowing I'll never get back to my old childhood emails.

It doesn't end there. When you update to a new Windows, the old files from previous Windows installation (i.e. User documents etc.) are stored inside C:/Windows.old folder, and you have around 15 days to save your important file to some other location after which Windows will delete that folder without any notice.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-...

What important things could you possibly have in C:/Windows?

Windows.old contains your User Folder which have these folders Documents, Downloads, Google Drive etc.

No, it doesn't, or darn well shouldn't.

XP put that data in \Documents and Settings\<user>. Vista and 7 put it in \Users\<user>, and some stuff in \ProgramData.

If you've got user downloads and documents in \Windows (and thus \Windows.old), you're doing something really strange.

You appear to be under the impression that windows.old is a based on the windows folder.

It's not.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. This is trivial to google https://www-howtogeek-com.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w1200/s/www....

Those were moved to "c:\Documents and Settings" then c:\Users a long time ago.

That's exactly why I never keep any important files on system partition. I prefer to keep Windows all by itself on a separate partition, then I don't have to worry about it messing up my things.

It's a free service, it's part of the deal. If you want permanent storage, you pay.

There are other free services without president of doing stuff like that though. It's obviously always a risk with any service, free or not... but I have never lost an email using Gmail for the past 12-13 years, even on accounts I forgot about for 5+ years.

Just because somebody gives money to the poor in the street doesn't make those who don't bad people.

Plus, on the other hand, Gmail locked me out of several of my accounts for dubious security reasons. I lost my mails because of a suspicion behavior, which was me traveling or not giving them away my phone number. Lucky me I always have an IMAP client setup.

Unless you pay, you are the product. Don't blame them.

P.S: not saying this as a MS fanboy, as any peak on my comment history would let you see how much I blame this company for a lot of things. But this is business as usual. Plus, if emails are that important, you should have a backup.

And you STILL backup in two or more places.

While I'm sorry for your loss, the idea of a cloud-based email account that doesn't delete your emails is actually pretty damn new.

When Gmail launched one of its main features was the amount of storage space - people were used to having maybe 10MB of mailbox space. Companies competed over that number. It reflects that email was never seen as being permanent, you were expected to clear old emails out, and many services automatically deleted old emails.

Classically mail was always downloaded from the MTA to your local MUA (outlook, thunderbird etc).

>This included the emails I sent to my first love. And the ones she sent me. All gone. Because Microsoft wanted to save some tiny amount of space.

Always backup. Even if it wasn't stupid MS behavior, it could have been a server error.

Not "always backup" but "archive at the end of each year".

So if the service losses your data you lose ONE WHOLE YEAR of data?

No, thanks, always backup regularly -- in real time if possible (e.g. with Time Machine) and then secondary delayed backups (inc. remote locations).

I feel you. Same thing happened to me too. RIP those emails to my childhood friends.

I'd expect this kind of complaint from non-technical people. Disappointed to see this on HN. You stored your data on someone else's computer and you are upset when the owner of that computer did something with it?

I'm surprised by the amount of comments simply stating it's your own damn fault. It seems that for the OP, and for me, that this might have been the very first email that OP had. At a young age most probably. While it's not a given that emails are stored indefinitely for you online - MS didn't exactly warn or spell it out, that it at some point, at its discretion, would simply delete the emails.

I doubt that this was not explained in the TOS.

It is nonsense. I don't think there's a reason to do that except to scam users. Any UX-UI Dev / Engineer / Person with common sense knows that users would not understand the process. 180 days and my credit is disabled but I can reactivate it again anytime? what the hell?

What I'm not sure of is what happens if you buy credit without reactivating the inactive balance... Does it reactivate the inactive balance or not? If not... they are shameless.

My wild guess would be that their finance people do not like a monotonically increasing liability on the books. Since some users will never use their credits, this is their way of satisfying the bean counters.

You're absolutely right, of course.

It's still weird because it puts off customers buying Skype credits in the first place, and getting credit from your customers is pretty great.

That was my thought. But as far as the bean counters are concerned, they would base it on an aging schedule. Unused credits stop being counted at 100% after x number of months.

But there isn't really any reason to disable them in the software. Especially since they can be reenabled.

Just like if you have fully depreciated an office desk, that doesn't mean you march into that person's office and take it away. Sorry, this desk must be thrown out as it is now fully depreciated!

So I think it is an attempt at scraping more money out of their users.

"Sorry, this desk must be thrown out as it is now fully depreciated!"

This gave me a good laugh. With lowering interest rates and quantitative easing not pumping up the economy as expected, any bets on long before this becomes a reality?

Planned obsolescence is already a thing.

Wait till they apply this to people.

It sounds silly, but these things happen! Just ask anyone who has worked in a Fortune-500 company for at least a few years. Things in good condition get replaced because there's a budget for replacing them, with asking the employees actually using those things (and sometimes despite asking and getting a response on the lines of "please don't touch my stuff, I like it the way it is").

Having had this happen to me (and not realize it until later), I can say that purhasing new credits keeps your old credits in pergatory.

They neither remind you that "hey, you have credits, dont purchase more!" and they happily spend your new credits to hope none the wiser.

I imagine this was all for doing some creative accounting to pump up their books.

Same logic with gift cards. If I have 50 real dollars that never expire, why would the $50 card you spend it on expire?

The marketing that has convinced us gift cards are appropriate while cash / cheques are not is impressive.

Here in Canada gift cards do not expire (IIRC there is a law against it). Is this not the case elsewhere?

I know myself and many other people prefer gift cards because it forces you to buy something for yourself instead of just adding it to the savings account. It shows slightly more thought than just hard cash as well.

They don't expire in California either, but they can in other states.

I never used Skype again after they stole my credit (about 9€). No excuse when they could have emailed or otherwise told me it was going to expire, I only found out when I needed to use it...

It's actually worse than that. They seize your credits if you don't make a call (or text) that uses the credits in six months... it doesn't matter if you've been on skype or not.

It's not really seized, just deactivated, and you can reactivate it any time. I don't know why either, I'm guessing for legal/accounting purposes, like at one point Apple had to charge people for iPod updates: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/09/accounting-rules-chang...

Wow, I never knew that was the reason why Apple used to charge for the updates. Thanks for the link.

That's the reason I switch to google hangouts for my international calls. Just open the browser and make the call.

It also works in countries where Skype is banned / blocked by the government in my experience.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be left behind as the only tech company that didn't release a Snapchat clone. ;)

I did this for a while. But the average mobile Internet I have in switzerland is so bad that the quality suffers a lot. As much as I hate it, it still works well with whatsapp

I'm not sure if things have changed since your experience, but the last time I exceeded the 180 days of inactivity, my credits were removed from the Skype client and a link appeared in their place, telling me to "reactivate" my credits on the website.

I went to the website and clicked a link and my credits showed in the Skype client again.

As stated in the link, they replaced their expiration policy with a reactivation policy as a result of the class action lawsuit. The last time this happened to my account I was sent a link which allowed me to reactivate the credits.

I just found out mine deactivated in April and I didn't get an email about it. In the iOS app it just showed £0 and suggested I top up.

When following the link through this page I was able to reactivate it:

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/fa10378/how-do-i-reactivate...

You are lucky you could even get in. At some point ~2yrs ago, all my Skype logins stopped working. Resetting them took me into some maze of a process where i'd end up in loops going between legacy Skype logins to Microsoft email based logins and back.

No matter what I did, I could not reset the password and just gave up. I redirect all conferences to GChat/Facetime. It was almost like a hiring brain-teaser. I guess I'm not going to be hired at Microsoft.

Thanks for the info. I rarely had need of Skype credits and it would make me mad when they disappeared. Now I know how to get them back. It doesn't seem like it would be worth the PR hit to take them from people after only 180 days and, if there was some strange accounting/legal reason they really wanted to inactivate them, they should display a small a link under your $0 balance to go to the re-activate page.

I always love going on vacation, unexpectedly having to use my Skype Credits to call somewhere only to discover they've expired.

Don't you just need to send yourself a text whenever the reminder mail arrives? That's what I've been doing for years.

When can we talk about facetime? They don't even have group chat. I've been waiting for it a long time ago.

Unused credit is considered abandoned property after 6 months, depending on the state. Each state has different regulations. This is a massive pain to deal with, so most places have to work around it.

Source: I used to work at an online bank where we'd close the account after 6 months of inactivity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com