How to lose business from IT "professionals"
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Step 1: Null-route a customer
Step 2: Claim that they were null-routed because their Murmur traffic is excessive and your service won't allow it
Step 3: Refuse refund after customer cancels service because you clearly weren't going to meet their IT needs
Step 4: Claim that the traffic in step 2 violated the ToS to justify refusing refund
Step 5: Mock actual IT pros by calling them "professionals" in air-quotes on Twitter
Step 6: Tell said professionals because they spend free time playing a game, they wouldn't want to do business with them
Step 7: Delete tweets and change logo to do damage controlhttps://i.imgur.com/OLbi9RI.png
All this, including a reply from the provider here
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Might have helped if you'd mentioned that it was a voice chat system used in a game. Slightly confusing without this information
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@Jaloopa said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
a voice chat system used in a game
It's not an in-game thing. I mentioned Murmur, I guess I should have specified it's the server exec for Mumble
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Backstory: EVE Online mmo guild/alliance uses a mumble voice chat server with a custom authentication scheme. It begins to have issues around 700 users (or when too many people obnoxiously talk at once), so they move to a new gigabit host with better specs.
Holy shit. How could anyone ever not "obnoxiously talk at once" with 700 people chatting? Am I not understanding something here?
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@boomzilla So, generally during large ops, you'll have 600-800 people in a channel all listening to 3-4 guys running it.
Sometimes people decide to talk over them.
There's also AAA chaining, where several hundred people get in a channel and everyone just spams AAAAAA in their mics. Since this is obviously expensive, it's only really used for stress testing.
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@JazzyJosh sounds liek they'd be better off with those 3-4 guys streaming the audio out one way. Why do all 800 need to be able to talk?
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@boomzilla Typically only a few people talk - a leader calling targets to attack, scouts, etc. (In theory anyway, in practice everyone's either drunk or high so they don't really follow any kind of radio discipline.)
This is what it tends to sound like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmS9vcVNr5A
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...OK?
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@JazzyJosh said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
All this, including a reply from the provider here
My favorite quote:
[quote]
it's kinda sad that 2 residential IP's where able to flood you with enough traffic that you thought it necessary to null-route a customers server.
[/quote]
If traffic from 2 residential IP can flood your traffic so badly that it can take down a "commercial grade" network if "the server (not the client originating the supposed attack) is not null-routed", that datacenter is not a good choice to choose from.Two in single sentence. It's great. :D
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@cheong said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
If traffic from 2 residential IP can flood your traffic so badly that it can take down a "commercial grade" network if "the server (not the client originating the supposed attack) is not null-routed", that datacenter is not a good choice to choose from.
But - the response from the provider on Reddit...
This was not 600 users, this was a single IP so unless the users were all behind that single IP, then we are talking about a single user generating 200,000 PPS, I have never seen that with Mumble or in fact any VoIP service from a single endpoint.
Looking at the flow traffic, I can see valid users and they are generating a handful of packets per second, this was more than likely some disgruntled user who decided to attack the server.
This is outside of our control, but we have to protect our other customers from these attacks, so we have no option but to null-route an incoming flood or attack.200,000 packets PER SECOND from a single IP triggered automated flood protection.
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@Jaloopa Sometimes random person x has important info. For example, if the enemy is trying to escape you only need one person with a warp scrambler to prevent them from warping. Therefore, you call out who you are using your warp scram against so other people can choose different targets.
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@loopback0 said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
But - the response from the provider on Reddit...
200,000 packets PER SECOND from a single IP triggered automated flood protection.
The usual choice is to drop packet from remote offending host, not the receiving side.
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@loopback0 Mumble defaults to UDP for voice transmission, you could see that was sending 60k pps, which matches up with the estimate of 600 users x 100 pps per user. If UDP fails (i.e. when the provider blocked UDP) it fails over to TCP. Obviously TCP has a lot higher packet usage than UDP does.
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@JazzyJosh said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
which matches up with the estimate of 600 users x 100 pps per user
It being from a single (or two, as later comments suggest) IP doesn't match up with 600 users?
Clearly the company in question needed to have done a better job at communicating - but this seems like a bit of a typical Twatter over-reaction.
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@loopback0 maybe, but they blew up their own HQ because some guy was possibly trying to attack it.
You null-route the offending traffic, not the legitimate traffic. If one IP address is attacking you, blacklist the IP. Don't take down the whole channel for legitimate users. That's just common sense...
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@loopback0 The main issue people are having with this isn't them blocking the traffic as much as them insulting their customers and refusing a clear refund.
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@JazzyJosh said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
as much as them insulting their customers
Yeah, like I said, they needed to have done a better job at communicating with the customer.
However - if they were genuinely getting tickets and live chats with comments like
good luck with the fucking DOS'ing and driving your reviews into the fucking ground mates. you just pissed off 850 people trying to get into our server, not one guy. We are going to ride you into the fucking ground, faggots.
Then the use of "professionals" isn't exactly unjustified.
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@loopback0 the anger was completely justified if they responded to a supposed DDOS by just shutting off the servers until things calmed down... and then told their customers -- paying customers -- to go take a hike when they complained about it.
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@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
the anger was completely justified
Anger, maybe.
We are going to ride you into the fucking ground, faggots.
Maybe not.
Wasn't this all one paying customer anyway?
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@loopback0 said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
However - if they were genuinely getting tickets and live chats with comments like
Some people are rude. I doubt it was anyone who was actually involved in TEST's IT and much more likely that a random scrublord left that.
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@JazzyJosh said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Some people are rude.
Right - and calling those people "professionals" is acceptable, because they're not being professional. That's all I'm saying.
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@loopback0 Well, it's not IT professionals who are leaving those messages.
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@JazzyJosh Quite.
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@loopback0 if the company's response prior to that was completely unprofessional then I can hardly fault the customer for eventually arriving at that point too. It really all depends on how it all played out, and in which order. What was said right before that? What's the complete timeline look like?
@loopback0 said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Right - and calling those people "professionals" is acceptable, because they're not being professional. That's all I'm saying.
It just brings you down to their level. Bitch to your coworkers over in the lunchroom if you need to. Just don't put it out in public on social media or anywhere else.
If you're working for a company's support, you absolutely will deal with some unprofessional customers now and then, and you absolutely cannot stoop to their level. You represent the company. It is your job to be professional even if the customer isn't. Pointing out that the customer is being a crybaby and publicly shaming them for it isn't professional.
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@JazzyJosh said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
everyone just spams AAAAAA in their mics.
Are they Canadian?
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@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
if the company's response prior to that was completely unprofessional then I can hardly fault the customer for eventually arriving at that point too.
Yes, both sides are at fault.
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@loopback0 both sides are at fault, but the company has a lot more to potentially lose.
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@JazzyJosh Pfft. If you'd have put "EVE Online" somewhere in the post I wouldn't have clicked-through.
I guess that ISP just doesn't serve the kind of dickholes who play EVE Online.
Hey, let's reverse this: The EVE Online Guide For Obtaining Customer Service
Write emails like this:
good luck with the fucking DOS'ing and driving your reviews into the fucking ground mates. you just pissed off 850 people trying to get into our server, not one guy. We are going to ride you into the fucking ground, faggots.
Or this:
i will be taking my internet spaceships and leaving, get fucced commies
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@JazzyJosh said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
It's not an in-game thing. I mentioned Murmur, I guess I should have specified it's the server exec for Mumble
The problem is nobody knows what the fuck "Murmur" or "Mumble" is. I play games like 60 hours a week, and I've never heard of either. (Maybe vaguely heard of Mumble, when I dig way back into my brain.)
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@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
@loopback0 the anger was completely justified
No.
Contacting a guy who's just doing his job and calling him a faggot is never justified. Threatening to DoS a ISP is not only never justified, but is quite possibly a criminal act.
Goddamned, EVE Online players are the worst trash on Earth. Why would you defend this shit?
If I ran this ISP, I'd boot their asses with no refund the fucking millisecond the word "faggot" appeared in a support ticket. I don't give a shit what else happened among any other party in this mess of shit, that one quoted email justifies everything.
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@JazzyJosh said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Some people are rude. I doubt it was anyone who was actually involved in TEST's IT and much more likely that a random scrublord left that.
Then TEST should have been more careful who they gave the keys of the kingdom to, because that gigantic asshole should not be allowed anywhere NEAR a customer service transaction on behalf of a group of people.
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@blakeyrat said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Contacting a guy who's just doing his job and calling him a faggot is never justified.
I said the anger was justified, not what he said. What he said was unprofessional. But the anger was completely justified. Make sense now? And the guy wasn't doing his job, he was doing a shit half-assed job. And, being an complete asshole about it.
Threatening to DoS a ISP is not only never justified, but is quite possibly a criminal act.
I read it as a putdown for their complete inability to deal with the lame-ass 1 or 2 IP-address DDOS that they were complaining about, not as a threat of DDOSing them. Although I can see how it could also be interpreted as a threat.
Goddamned, EVE Online players are the worst trash on Earth. Why would you defend this shit?
Because the ISP is supposed to be the professional ones and they stooped to exactly the same level.
If I ran this ISP, I'd boot their asses with no refund the fucking millisecond the word "faggot" appeared in a support ticket. I don't give a shit what else happened among any other party in this mess of shit, that one quoted email justifies everything.
I'd be highly surprised if all the bridges weren't burning long before the customer put "faggot" in a support ticket. A parting shot like that doesn't justify anything that preceded it. You want to justify anything that came after it... go right ahead, but it still makes them just as bad as the customer.
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Apparently the presumed DoS was actually just an artifact of carrier-grade NAT:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4hx9w4/eve_online_guild_moves_voice_chat_to_a_new_host/d2tlf83
Also, the occurrences of language such as calling them faggots happened outside the main support ticket groups, but they don't seem to indicate who sent them (the primary customer, or other people who just decided to get in on the action), though it seems likely it's other people, not the primary customer.
Here's the (reddit) OP's pastebin of the primary support interaction thread:
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@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
I said the anger was justified, not what he said. What he said was unprofessional. But the anger was completely justified. Make sense now?
No. Because nobody gives a shit about your emotional state. (And for the record: being angry at some event in a video game, no matter what it is, is not justified. But that's kind of beside the point.)
The only thing that matters is the action. And the action here was he sent an email to some poor guy just doing his job calling him a faggot and threatening to DoS his company.
You're drawing this weird line here, to separate the emotional state from the action taken as a result of the emotional state, and I don't see the line. It's one and the same. (Or, to be more clear: the action matters, the emotional state doesn't. Hell, you're just assuming he was angry in the first place; maybe he was in a zen-like calm while composing that email. Unless you're secretly Counselor Troi, you don't know.)
The guy who wrote that email needs anger management classes, he certainly doesn't need people like you white-knighting for him to explain his behavior.
And like I said, if I ran a company I'd have a standing policy to delete the account of anybody who put an email like that to our support team. I don't even care if we'd go out of business as a result; it's just the right thing to do.
@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Because the ISP is supposed to be the professional ones and they stooped to exactly the same level.
When?
Where's the message from the ISP calling people faggots? I guess I missed that.
Or, more likely, you're somehow using the term "same level" to mean "not even goddamned REMOTELY the same level".
@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
I'd be highly surprised if all the bridges weren't burning long before the customer put "faggot" in a support ticket.
Possibly; but the point is: one the "faggot" is out there, you stop bitching about not getting your refund. You instead hang down your head in shame because you fucked-up both as a person responsible for IT infrastructure and as a human being. And you hopefully take a step back and spend a LONG time thinking, "do I really want to be associated with the 'faggot' guy?"
@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
You want to justify anything that came after it... go right ahead, but it still makes them just as bad as the customer.
If the company said anything remotely that bad, you'll have to quote it here. Nothing of that sort is in the tweets you've provided.
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@blakeyrat said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
And for the record: being angry at some event in a video game
WTF? He was angry that a real company in the real world took his real money and didn't provide the service that he paid for. Fuck off with that nonsense.
Anyway, read the actual script of the support incident (@Dreikin just posted it). He never used "faggot". The company claimed someone said that to them, but I have yet to see any evidence of it or of who supposedly said it. And whoever it was, the company went right ahead and engaged them in the shitflinging, and yes, that does make them just as bad.
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@blakeyrat said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Goddamned, EVE Online players are the worst trash on Earth.
Totally. I'm sure a few of them can be found in the commit logs of git, too.
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@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
WTF? He was angry that a real company in the real world took his real money and didn't provide the service that he paid for. Fuck off with that nonsense.
Right; because someone on their account was calling the company "faggots".
The only emotion he should have been feeling is shame and embarrassment.
@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
And whoever it was, the company went right ahead and engaged them in the shitflinging, and yes, that does make them just as bad.
So you can't quote anything they said even remotely as bad as calling people "faggot". As I knew you wouldn't be able to because when you said the company was equally bad, you were fucking lying you fucking liar.
Protip: I'm not stupid enough to fall for your obvious lies. Try to be a tiny bit more subtle next time.
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@blakeyrat said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Right; because someone on their account was calling the company "faggots".
Goddamnit you didn't even read my entire post.
Evidence I've seen indicates that never fucking happened. Unless I see evidence otherwise, that's how it was.
Methinks the company selectively misremembered that the comment was representative of what they'd received in "live chats and sales tickets", when in fact it was some random Twatterer from the "deluge of abuse on Twitter, Facebook and now this here in Reddit".
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@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Goddamnit you didn't even read my entire post.
Yes, I did. The only assertion you made was that it didn't appear in that specific log of text. Well, ok. It doesn't. So what?
@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
That never fucking happened. Unless I see evidence otherwise.
Fine; I'm ok with a skeptic.
But you also can't claim the company was putting out messages just as bad as that email, because I'm not ok with a liar. And that was a lie.
@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Methinks the company selectively misremembered that the comment was representative of what they'd received in "live chats and sales tickets", when in fact it was some random Twatterer from the "deluge of abuse on Twitter, Facebook and now this here in Reddit".
The only question that matters is: did it come from that specific client?
And while I can't Sherlock Holmes my way to an answer here, considering that's about the average level of discourse for the type of human garbage that plays EVE Online, I'm going to believe it did.
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@blakeyrat said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
The only question that matters is: did it come from that specific client?
If it didn't, he should pursue libel charges against them for quoting him saying it.
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@anotherusername Yes he should, but I wager he knows EVE Online is full of human garbage and he, deep inside, knows it did.
BTW good job hitting the "vote down" button on all my posts.
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Here's Delimiter's post where they talk about the "faggot" message:
The relevant section:
We do not cancel the customer's service, the customer cancelled the service, we were providing the customer flow data when we started getting live chats and sales tickets with comments like:
good luck with the fucking DOS'ing and driving your reviews into the fucking ground mates. you just pissed off 850 people trying to get into our server, not one guy. We are going to ride you into the fucking ground, faggots.
Theni will be taking my internet spaceships and leaving, get fucced commies
Since then there has been a deluge of abuse on Twitter, Facebook and now this here in Reddit.
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We do not cancel the service
Null routing a server does not count as "cancelling the service"? Good to know.
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@Rhywden said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
We do not cancel the service
Null routing a server does not count as "cancelling the service"? Good to know.
Hell, if you want to get into that, here's what Delimiter_com said near the end of the post above:
The customer was only null-routed and he decided to cancel his service.
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@Dreikin Which is about as honest as "I'm not touching you!!!!!" or "Stop hitting yourself!"
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@blakeyrat I am of the opinion that a company stealing money from its customer and then calling them unprofessional on Twitter/Reddit/wherever is just as bad as some random idiot behind a keyboard calling them "faggots" for doing it.
You appear to disagree with me. That's fine. You have your own opinion, and we all know what it's worth. Quit fucking calling me a liar, though, for saying something you disagree with.
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@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
I am of the opinion that a company stealing money from its customer
Irrelevant.
@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
then calling them unprofessional on Twitter/Reddit/wherever is just as bad as some random idiot behind a keyboard calling them "faggots" for doing it.
Really.
You think "unprofessional" as an insult is exactly as bad as "faggot" as an insult.
@anotherusername said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
You appear to disagree with me.
I have trouble believe anybody would agree with your weird-ass position.
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@blakeyrat said in How to lose business from IT "professionals":
Really.
You think "unprofessional" as an insult is exactly as bad as "faggot" as an insult.I think "lying thieving scumbags" is exactly as bad an insult. Maybe worse, if it's true.
I have trouble believe
Irrelevant.
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@anotherusername I think
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