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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

As has been discussed elsewhere, they broke the terms of service (specifically, you're not allowed to use the terms "donate" or "donation" unless you're a registered non profit) -- they screwed themselves.

While they should be able to get a response from a human, the idea that they're innocent is silly. It seems every small/indie developer thinks they can do whatever and ignore their contractual obligations and get away with it.

Just because you're small doesn't mean things don't apply to you.

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That's a joke.

A email telling them to remove the word donate within 5 days or their account would be closed, I would totally get that. Shutting down new orders until the verbiage is changed, same thing.

But to say that this is a reasonable action, I just don't see it. There was clearly no deception going on. While it clearly does violate the TOS, the use of donate in this context (a voluntary payment above the minimum that gives no additional benefit) is perfectly reasonable.

I'm not saying that Google isn't within their rights to do this. The author should have been more careful, fine (although I could see myself making the exact same mistake). But this still just hits me wrong. Even if the takeaway is just "if you make a completely innocent mistake that hurts no one, Paypal will alert you while Google will close your account with no recourse," that's STILL plenty of reason to choose Paypal. Who doesn't make innocent mistakes?

You are right. Google is incompetent at customer service. At some point, enough incompetence crosses the line into "evil". Though, in this case, Google is safely in the incompetent category.

It's neither evil nor incompetent. It is simply a business model. Automate what you can and let the rest fail. If any individual case becomes a public embarrassment, resolve that particular case amicably without fixing the root cause.

The unfortunate thing is just that we as users of these services are not given the choice to pay up for reasonable customer support.

Hey, they clicked "Accept" on the TOS. Perhaps they should have read it thoroughly first, and made sure whomever was doing the web design understood the boundaries. A contract is a contract. It's not "let's agree to do this until I violate it and call you a meanie"

Most of the problems that people experience are self-inflicted. If we use "you should have known better" as the only criterion to determine if sympathy is deserved, we'd be really unsympathetic. The OP should have been more careful and Google should have been more accommodating.

There are two way you can deal with things- you can opt to follow the ToS strictly and harshly, or you can opt to behave in a humane way. Robots are expected chose the former option, while human beings are expected to opt for the latter. While the Zomboid guys cant take Google to court for this, they have every right to say that Google screwed them. If you keep being unsympathetic to customers in this fashion, you are eventually going to be termed as evil.

OTOH, how many of these accounts are scams vs. how many are legit companies? If it's 10 to 1, there is an incentive to cut them off as quickly as possible, and not allow any slack.

While what you say is true, it's still a sub-optimal way to conduct business. There could be many, many ways to do this better. For starters, maybe "Your account has been canceled due to ToS violation: 'donation' may only be used for not for profit organizations."

"support charity" seems to be okay, though. This is what the Humble Bundle[0] calls it.

[0] http://www.humblebundle.com/

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