jarland

No worries! You're always welcome at DigitalOcean :)

> Why did I not receive any notification? A change in contract of that magnitude should have led to me being directly notified per email or other communication methods, so that I’d actually have a chance at still using the credit.

I agree with you completely. That is precisely why I refer to it as a communication failure. I had a year to ask "Why didn't we email about this?" I didn't ask that question. I failed. I'm sorry.

I understand that you're not interested in helping, but my offer stands, and I appreciate you and your feedback. We're all just people here trying to do what we think is right. I know I fall short, I make mistakes, but all I want is to own them and make them right.

The change was made a year prior. It was not communicated via email. That email you received was a reminder. We only put up a notification in the control panel. That was the communication failure, and I apologize for it.

At no point should anyone be advising you to take legal action to retain your credit, and I would be grateful for the opportunity to review the ticket in question.

Absolutely, please ask for me if you run into any trouble. You should not have any problem.

On one hand, the policy change was made a year prior. On the other hand, we didn't communicate it as well as we should have. I apologize for that. I consider myself as much responsible as anyone else on that. If you ever want that account credit back, please let me know. I'm an easy find on Google, or you can open a support ticket anytime.

For what it's worth, we posted on our blog about just this. https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/details-on-expirin...

Hey Matthew,

I just wanted to let you know that I really appreciate your feedback, as well as the feedback from the other commenters here.

I understand that many here are concerned that banning the account seems, from this perspective, to have been an unjustified action. I do believe that there is a bit of a misunderstanding on the timeline of events here, as well as the source of the decision. To be clear, Cash supported the decision that I had made to ban the account in question, and there had been no communication between us and Matthew at this point. We began receiving a significant number of support requests to remove domains from this account, and I authorized the shutting down of this account as it was clear to me what was happening. I have been working with our engineers to see to the removal of the domains from the account as well.

I apologize if our actions seemed at any point rude or inappropriate, it was definitely not my intention. I want nothing more than to look out for the safety and wellbeing of our customers, and I chose what I believed to be the best action. I do want you to know that if I was aware that a security researcher had been working on testing a theory, I might have acted differently. That can, however, impact the reason behind a white hat test. You generally want the company to see you as normal user, so that you can see how they act in return. We do shut down users who are intentionally causing problems for other users, and I do think that was made evident here.

I do understand that opening a line of communication with Matthew may have been appropriate, and I consider that valuable feedback moving forward.

<3 Jarland