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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, Stavros has some issues keeping his services up. I was a user of his https://historio.us long-time ago, a paying one, and he just killed the service and lost all my data. Some time later, he restarted the service and gave my username to somebody else. Don't put anything meaningful and valuable into his services!

  Hello,
  I'm afraid I couldn't find your backup file :/ It looks like your account may have been one of the older ones to be reclaimed, when we hadn't added the backup functionality yet. I'm sorry about that :/
  
  Thanks,
  Stavros

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That's a bit of a liberal retelling. You had a free account, the system sends you one (or two, I forget) emails if your free account is inactive, and if you don't log in for a few months it deletes the data to make room for others.

There was a period where I didn't keep backups of the data on free accounts, but people complained, so I added that.

I think it's a bit unfair to expect me to keep account data around forever for free, even after notifications that the account is inactive and will be deleted. Also, wasn't this more than half a decade ago?

EDIT: Also, your account isn't even deleted, only the pages are, so your username should still be there, no?

EDIT2: Also also, paid users don't get deleted, so something must have happened there. Maybe your payment method failed when renewing, or you didn't have a paid account? What's the username?

EDIT3: I found the thread:

You: Why did all my bookmarks disappear from my account?

Me: We only delete the links of unpaid accounts, as they take up too much space. We do have a backup export of your links I can send you, though.

You: Can you please? I will upgrade to a paid account if you restore my links.

Me: Sure, but it will have to be tomorrow, as I'm not at the computer right now.

And then what you posted above.

So it wasn't a paid account, this was seven years ago, your username wasn't given to someone else, and I didn't kill the service or lose your data.

It seems like there's a dispute of fact, whether this person was paying you or not: you say "You had a free account," and they say they were a paying customer.

I don't think "half a decade ago" is a reasonable time horizon after which to consider accusations of outright fraud irrelevant. If this person is telling the truth, then not only did you defraud them a few years ago, but you're lying about it now; this seems like an important thing for potential users of your new service to know about you. (Presumably your character has not changed much in the last five years, whether it was good or bad before.) If you're telling the truth, they're lying, presumably in order to hurt you.

I found and posted the email thread where he admitted to not having a paid account. He also managed to get into his account fine (that's how he saw that the data wasn't there), so the stuff about the username isn't accurate either. I can look at payment records, but I've literally never had a single complaint of paid users' data being deleted by accident.

I don't think he wants to hurt me (who cares about me or my service anyway?), I just think he's misremembering stuff from seven years ago.

Publicly accusing you of fraud is at the very least malicious disregard for the truth if it's a false accusation. This is supposed to be Hacker News, not Character Assassination News. (That's Twitter.)

Never said it was fraud; it was a huge disrespect to my data, as if it was deliberately deleted and not data loss, it only worsens the situation - I did not get any warning; I did not get any offer to upgrade to keep my data! I will search for the payment. I could be wrong, my hundreds if not thousands of stored links, and hours were lost due to this disrespect. Look at the pricing page for this "new" service - it screams the same attitude!

You didn't say use the word "fraud," but the scenario you described—where Stavros accepted your money for a service and then chose not to provide it—would amount to him defrauding you.

From your perspective the difference may not be significant: your links are just as lost either way, and the money you might or might have not paid for the service is tiny compared to the time you had invested in creating the links. The difference, from my perspective, is that setting up a free bookmarking service and then shutting it down without enough warning is not a very rewarding activity, so it tends to be a self-limiting problem; by contrast, selling a paid service you then don't bother to provide can be extremely lucrative, like spamming, so it's the kind of problem that tends to grow rapidly without countermeasures.

That makes it a considerably more inflammatory accusation.

Agreed. Nikolay appears to be trying to sicc a mob on Stavros.

Just a friendly warning, as his new "pricing" page reminded me of this accident!

> I don't think he wants to hurt me

in their HN profile they wrote about themselves: Provocateur extraordinaire. So malicious intent cannot be ruled out

Eh I'd rather assume the best, he seems like a nice guy.

I just paid for one year of Historious. I did like the service - that's why I was using it back in July 2010! I hope you have time to keep it up.

Next time you get years of data deleted without any warning, let's see how you're gonna react to it!

I mean, it's not "without any warning" when you didn't see the warning. It was there.

Well, maybe you don't follow as many startups as I do, but we, who are early technology adopters, get thousands of emails a day from all kinds of services we've tried out. So, if you care about us, busy technology professionals, the essence of your email should be in the subject line, especially when you expect time-sensitive actions from them or destruction could follow if they skip your email! Absolutely every other service puts that sense of urgency in the subject line! Instead of defending your position, learn from my experience as it's really huge!

Do you want me to provide you with the email trail? I remember paying for the account.

EDIT: Did you warn customers that their data (maybe a couple of megabytes) would be deleted? Did you offer me "upgrade to keep your data"? You simply disrespect our data. Also, your service was down for months if not years!

EDIT 2: Yes, you did say free accounts would probably get deleted after just 2 months without logging in.

My email thread [0] starts with me being certain I've paid for the account - that was 7 years ago and my memory back then was outstanding. Your free account had a limit of like 500 links and I had thousands and my account was paid for sure, but I was one of you first users and probably it was deleted by mistake or some flawed data migration.

Please, respect customers' data, it should be sacred - even if they are not paying customers! It didn't cost much to store links, even back in 2010!

[0]: https://nikolay.docdroid.com/H4ZYmsS/gmail-password-reset-on...

> Do you want me to provide you with the email trail? I remember paying for the account.

The question is whether it was a paid account at the time of the deletion. Paying for a year in 2010 obviously still makes the account unpaid in 2014.

> Did you warn customers that their data (maybe a couple of megabytes) would be deleted?

Yes, you get an email that this will happen.

> Did you offer me "upgrade to keep your data"?

Yes, it was in the email, it also tells you you can log in to keep it.

> You simply disrespect our data.

I don't know how many times I need to say that this is incorrect.

> Also, your service was down for months if not years!

When was this? I don't recall this, and I use it pretty regularly (and have monitoring).

Here's the email with the innocent subject of "historious hasn't seen you in a while!":

  Hello!
  We noticed that you haven't logged on historious in a while. Is there anything we can do to help? Please don't hesitate to reply to this email with anything you may need.
  
  To refresh your memory, historious is a new kind of bookmarking service which creates your very own, personalised search engine of things you like.
  
  Just as a reminder, our address is http://historio.us/ and your username, in case you have forgotten, is "nikolay".
  
  Please note that, if you do not log in or historify something for two months, the data in your free account might be removed to ensure that our service always remains fresh. If you are not using historious, you can safely ignore this email.
  
  If you would like to prevent this, just log into historious or historify something in the next month. If you are a subscriber, you don't need to do this, as we will not touch any of your data.
  
  Thanks!
  Team historious

It says "the data might be removed". Typically, you get multiple warnings before your data gets deleted, because people forget, and the warning is alarming. All these emails were unread - we all get a lot of spam and lots of informative emails and many of us just read the subject. If the subject is not suggesting that action should be taken otherwise there will be dire consequences, people might just read the subject and not open it.

> It says "the data might be removed". Typically, you get multiple warnings before your data gets deleted, because people forget, and the warning is alarming.

Sorry, but it's quite explicit. Might be removed means will be removed!

> All these emails were unread - we all get a lot of spam and lots of informative emails and many of us just read the subject.

Is it stavros fault?

> people might just read the subject and not open it.

Your problem!

No exactly. It is his problem, as otherwise I would have paid 14 years times $30, i.e., $420 of lost revenue just from me.

I’m sure we’re all very sorry that you didn’t read an email which, in retrospect, was important. It was careless of you, but we’re all careless sometimes.

I doubt stavros has the ability to force you to read your emails, though. Given that, it’s possible they aren’t at fault for your oversight.

He definitely can by putting a warning on the subject. If I read every email from every online service I've ever signed up for, I would be doing this all day long and be unemployed!

The fact that you are putting customer chats in public forum without their consent is just terrible.

It's absolutely fair game to post customer chats/emails that contradict a false and damaging narrative. Maybe the OP misremembered, maybe the OP has an axe to grind, either way the issue is firmly resolved now.

No, it absolutely is not.

>It's absolutely fair game to post customer chats/emails that contradict a false and damaging narrative.

Eh, not really. Most half-decent businesses have a privacy policy/TOS that explicitly makes this a no-go, and would be grounds for a lawsuit if a company posted a customer's conversations with said company. It doesn't look like Historious has such a policy, so legally it might be okay, but it's still scummy IMO.

Posting your side of the story is fine, but using communications that are expected to be private usually isn't, and you should be able to correct the story without posting private info (we don't even know if the transcript that Stavros posted is true.. he could have completely made it up for all we know).

With all that said, it made me curious to look at the TOS for IMGZ, and... yikes... https://imgz.org/help/terms/

I see humor in the entire project, and am okay with this. Given Stavros' clear intent to be funny and make it abundantly clear what _isn't_ being promised, it's pretty great.

I mean c'mon - have a little fun.

At any rate it's classic absurdist marketing, and I approve.

Besides, I don't read the TOS of most other services. Why would I start now?

Oh I see the humor in it and I too am entertained, but I think it's a strange attitude to take in a paid product. This seems like more the territory of "optional donations accepted".

Just think, if this were a larger company doing this, they would be absolutely crucified for deceiving customers by hiding critical info in tiny text or TOSes that nobody reads.

And FWIW, I haven't actually tried paying yet, but if IMGZ is handling any actual payments info, a clever TOS that says "we don't make any promises about your privacy" won't protect you from fun legal action if that info is ever breached (though I'd guess and really hope that Stavros is using some payments provider like Stripe or Paypal).

> Just think, if this were a larger company doing this

Just think, they said wistfully, how angry we could be if things weren’t such as they are. What a glorious, outraged life we could be leading.

Oh man, if you're angry at my posting emails, wait until you see what the other guy posted!

There is a difference between creating a public record and correcting the public record.

It's not the full thread, though. It's been many years ago, but I'm pretty sure I paid for it back in 2014, i.e., 7 years ago. Here's the full thread: https://nikolay.docdroid.com/H4ZYmsS/gmail-password-reset-on...

Well in the disclaimer it quite literally states.

> Service comes with no guarantee, not even guarantee of service. Paying us money doesn't entitle you to anything except owning less money.

So if you go into this service paying money expecting images to be hosted you're gonna have a bad time. Still humorous though, finally a payment page that states what every big company wants to state.

Well good news for you, he pretty much explicitly states all of that in IMGZ's terms of service!

https://imgz.org/help/terms/

>This is my project, and I make no promises at all, even though you're paying. I'm not even promising I'll host your images. I don't believe in stealing your money or compromising your privacy, but even those aren't promises either.

TBH, I would avoid this service on the grounds it seems to be run by one person (to what extent its just clever self promotion hinges on charitable interpretation) -- this blurb whilst humorous is on line with the Discord cutesy error messages. It really hammers home this is not in the big leagues (or the minor leagues rather) and if you are using this service, you should be fine with that. However charging customers for it is interesting since that's a sure source of customer pressure via expectation.

I haven't been this entertained for the mere price of $12 in a very long time. I think it's worth the price of admission even if I never even try to upload an image.

Oh no no no, that won't do. Please send your SLA and NDA for me to sign, we can't be spending $12 willy-nilly! We could have almost bought one movie ticket to Cats for that money!

I bought a movie on Amazon Prime just yesterday for $14 and it didn't make me as happy as this comment section.

I always wondered if people actually bought movies on Amazon. I guess some people have to pay for the rest of us to enjoy the free stuff.

It's clear: Hollywood needs to option this comment section.

Look, kudos for having a great sense of humour, but nobody is talking about a SLA or NDA, I was talking about the fact it's almost a guarantee that your service will cause an inordinate amount of pressure on you and that's quite obvious. Though I must congratulate you for making trawling through hckrnews a source of work as evidenced by the corrupt file upload that was brought to your attention.

I doubt that, this is the tenth or so service that I create and run and it's all been fine. You see, my secret power is that I'm terrible at marketing, so I only ever have two active users.

Having a hard time getting your “business advice for people who aren’t trying to run a business” consultancy off the ground?

Giving the advice away for free is a good start, but have you tried targeting people who want advice?

Woah, why so hostile? I am not trying to self advertise anything. The type of business this is in line with -- image uploading where probally data retention matters. There's just one guy runnning this and it's a no brainer you shouldn't use it for anything serious outside memes.

I'm not talking to stavros initially (but look, he replied so it's reasonable for reading that intent), I'm talking to people like me who want an imgur replacement (a la imgur acquired announcement yesterday at the same time) and host a lot of images, or just people who want a service that will be here for longer than the life of a single person.

But if you want to shut off your brain, go ahead, I had a laugh too. Just make to shut it off when reading my comments too, as it's not serious in that context then, and plus it'll be a no-op for you and it won't warrant implying I'm running a consultancy (where did this fabrication come from, really? I have no links or socials at all but I'm software guy who has a datahoarder hobby) -- please for the love of god, think me atleast smart enough to shit on the produt to try and get some sort of consultancy work.

If you get your socks off at the idea of a paid single developer lead image hosting, then let's hope the guy doesn't lose interest (as there is no obligation not to) or even, not get hit by a bus as the bus factor seems to be one.

> It really hammers home this is not in the big leagues

“This piece of writing, saying A, indicates that the author really does mean A” is a very boring observation.

Lucky for you, I wrote more than that. Trying to nitpick that sentence might as be well deserved from my criticism, I accept that, but I missed the boat this project was meant to be a "Joke" and had to deal with stuff like content abuse (seems like it's not on the CDN's radar from other threads), CSAM, data retention (see other customer thread here where data was corrupted). My biggest complaint really was it's one guy, and what happens when he gets hit by a bus? Or takes a vacation? Or is busy with other life stuff really. Really, shame on me for thinking that stuff matters given the context, and I regret that, but let's be clear, this is not a serious project, my serious criticism, let's just ignore that here (and let new people discover it out for themselves)? Lest I agitate you further let me preemptively call my observations banal -- that's a new word for you to use, it will make you less boring.

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