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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.

> 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!

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.)

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

>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.

No, it absolutely is not.

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...