Reddit: This company didn't pay their bill, so I changed their website. | Hacker News Reader

Reddit: This company didn't pay their bill, so I changed their website.

reddit.com

12 pointsbrodd8 comments

This juvenile behavior just degrades the profession. If a client isn't paying you, take it to court. Or, if there was no contract, as in this case (OP states so in the comments), then learn from your mistake and move on.

No, I think that attitude is why people feel like they can get away with not paying. An established norm of "pay or things get nasty" would more effectively enforce payments. If nothing happens, the defaulter gets free stuff until it's resolved in court; most likely, it will be settled at a rate which is, after accounting interest, sub-market.

If things get nasty, the defaulter loses. Simple. What's funny is that outside of professional services and real estate, this is how the world works: a quick bit of paperwork and people show up to take the stuff back (e.g., the car).

There's a line that was crossed. If he had put up an 'Account Suspended' page, that would have been fine. Saying they don't pay their bills and linking to a competitor is not cool and looks bad for the competitor, too.

I do think the competing link is a bridge too far, mostly because it involves a third party.

Saying an account is suspended for non-payment is perfectly fine and well-accepted among even very large web hosts. Linking to a competitor is crossing a line.

Going to court is a lot of effort (at least in mine country). The best solution would be to keep the website on your servers, and hand it over after the payment, just like it happens in case of e.g. grocery store - you don't get anything until you pay for it.

If anything else fails then trashing the website is quite a good solution - all in all it's your website, until they pay for it.

Legal issues aside, I feel like payment is more likely to be received if similar yet less hostile message is provided as they still have the option of getting the site build by someone else for a similar price out of spite. (Note the 'Cotton Hill' link on the page is a competitor's site -- that's a pretty nasty thing to link to)

I like to think that previous instances were already tried unsuccessfully, and there was no hope of getting paid.

Otherwise, this would be very stupid.

-edit- From Reddit's post, in the edit: > I'd also like to say that they've been ignoring my efforts to contact them as well. I wouldn't have done this if I hadn't been ignored for over a month.

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