First I want to say I was a 100% Glitch fan. I encouraged a lot of friends to try glitch. I also purchased pro service on the 1st day.
But I am not so sure any more.
My ‘boosted’ project was taken offline for almost 3 days, without a notice. Later I was told there is some ‘rule’, which is obscure to follow, my project violated. After communicated with the support for 3 days, it turns out it’s a false judgement. I have to transite my project to another host provider in a short time, causing my service stopped for a while. thread
As a paid customer, my question is , what’s the goal of Glitch? Is it only designed as a toy for developers or designed to host real product? Frankly speaking, if it’s not for the real product, I would not pay for it. If it’s designed for real product. My suggestion is NEVER take customer’s service or site down without a notice, giving them time to fix the problem (if there is any).
I see huge potential of Glitch. It’s so user friendly for developers. I can see it replace VPS providers and grow into a very successful business. But now, the feeling is the company is not ready to support serious product.
As a paid customer, I would love to suggest:
Make the service more stable for paid customer. At least NEVER take down customer’s site without a notice.
Provide more options, probably with more payment plan, like bigger disk size, better CPU, more memory.
I am not sure if this post can be seen by Glitch management. As a Glitch lover, I wish Glitch a bright future.
I’m just a user on this forum so I can’t really respond to this with any authority, but it makes sense that your project would be taken down, on a platform you paid for, if it violates one of their rules or terms.
Obscure or not, you’re supposed to agree to those terms when you sign up. It was assumed that you read them, and if it’s a serious project, it’s even more important for you that you do. So I don’t think them taking down your app makes them any less credible. Would YOU let anyone put up just anything on a paid platform if you made one? Also, why did you let the problem go for 3 days? If it was that important, why didn’t you try calling instead of just emailing support?
People from Support do check this forum and someone will respond. But posts like this aren’t useful and aren’t going to get anyone here to stop using the platform.
Lastly, the idea of a “real” product is arbitrary. Some people do “boost” their apps (pay) for more disk space if they need it. But as far as “real”, yes, people from real tech companies use Glitch to both share code and deploy web applications. You can share and update code in real time, in the browser. You can’t do that on Github or Bitbucket. It’s great for collaboration and prototyping. Personally I mostly use it for front end projects, but other folks build bots and you can host Node apps (which are probably best boosted).
You get what you pay for though, and a boosted app is peanuts compared to what you could potentially get with more per month on, say, Digital Ocean. So it’s not for every use case, but it does work well for certain projects.
So not only did he not know it was taken down but it was a “false judgement” which I assume he means he was suspended even though he didn’t break any rules in the end.
@bloodchen Is this related to the “Node 16 Disk Space” issue?
Hi @christina I’m not disagreeing but Jeff’s concerns are legitimate. You can see what “terms of service” are by simply reading them at say Amazon, or YouTube or your Windows license. They are not understood by the average user and it would take an attorney to determine a) if the terms are legal and b) what they actually mean.
Jeff wouldn’t let anyone do anything but this isn’t what happened to him (apparently) or me. I informed support immediately after starting up a replacement project and I received an automated reply that someone would get back to me during regular business hours. That meant Monday at the earliest. I don’t believe they answer the phone if they don’t answer emails.
The point is Jeff is a paying customer (as am I) so the odds on “anything” being uploaded is extremely slim as they have our credit card. A simple notice can be emailed asking for a reply within 24 hours (or some such) in order to verify there isn’t a mistake. Or a simple “overage” can be charged, again look at any usage-based systems (Amazon AWS and MS Azure). If one is over the disk limit a charge is applied until the project is under the limit.
The system continues to work without affecting what could be customers of the app that has been suspended.
Finally, the reason that companies pay attention to such postings is “there is always competition” and word will get out. If the next alternative is 10 times as much sure few will opt for it but if another company offers a $10 a month vs $8 a month the extra $24 would tend to be considered pocket change by many. I (for instance) maintain a separate server. I can log into the host and there is someone ready to answer questions pretty much any time of the day or night. It isn’t cheap but I couldn’t afford to have those systems out of commission for 3 days.
Glitch-folk will no doubt read this thread and perhaps discuss it at their next company meeting and that’s the point of customers making their case publicly.
Hi there! We do see this and I’ve shared it with the team, and we appreciate the feedback. We know we need to improve the suspension-to-user-notification experience - the platform doesn’t have the infrastructure currently to do that quickly/trivially, but we are aware that it’s a worthy investment to make in the future.
We will use this feedback (from everyone in this thread, too - I appreciate y’all!) to identify ways to help prevent users from running into such TOS violations that lead to instant suspension like in your case. The judgement was not false with our current policies in place, but we can use situations like this to adjust policies accordingly if doing so doesn’t harm the community or strain the platform!
with this new information I would like to provide the following feedback:
This is true and I agree. This happens regardless of weither you are using Glitch, AWS, Microsoft Azure, GoDaddy etc.
The judgement was not false with our current policies in place
Since I don’t have all the information and this is a private matter I won’t ask. With that in mind based on that wording specifically current policies there should be some type of notification when there are changes to the policy that would require them reread it or at least give aTL;DR version via email. Another option is notifying them of the policy changes via a page that is displayed on log in that requires the user to read about the new changes and click a button to agree to them.
There are a few options:
Notify the customer about the vialation and if it is a minor one and he/she isn’t a herbital offender allow him 24 hours to fix it. If he doesn’t suspend the site after another nofification letting him know about the suspension. If it is a major violation suspend the site but notify the user of the suspension anyways. This would create less stress for the support team and allow the user to attempt to fix it in a good faith case of an honest mistake.
Suspend the site and notify the user. The user would then have to appeal his suspension. This option would create more work for support.
I think this is a good idea, here is my take on it:
Lite the current one(500mb disk space)
Pro 2x the current pro plan resources $15/m
Enterprise 5x the current pro plan resources $25/m
This would be another option
Honestly I agree Glitch is fine for small and test projects. Anything bigger I would suggest paying for a VPS or waiting for Glitch to implement bigger plans.
I think an option that for an additional monthly fee the user will receive priority support would be a good idea. This would put that users tickets at the top of the other users tickets. Many big companies do this already. Something around $1 - $3 a moonth on for this would be appropriate.
With that in mind based on that wording specifically current policies there should be some type of notification when there are changes to the policy that would require them reread it or at least give aTL;DR version via email.
We would of course email all users if there were any changes to our TOS.
I feel like glitch is basically a platform for small-sites that may not need to such a focus on uptime. It’s probaly meant to save you money so you don’t have to spend a couple of bucks each month on a server just to keep your random socketio chat app up. If uptime is critical I suggest actually shelling out the few bucks for a server for your app. The project download feature is probably there for cases like this.
You make a good point, user subscriptions should indeed been taken into account, perhaps suspensions should be delayed 48 or 72 hours (last thing you want ) for paid users, and the staff would have access to a panel to reject invalid suspensions that are pending for paid users.
@Ookma-Kyi just wanted to note that I did read Jeff’s thread entirely and saw the part about it being a false judgment. However, people say “that’s BS!” all the time, and it sounded more like that. I took it as a lack of information from the start.
@tleylan I disagree to an extent about ‘terms of service’ not being understood. It takes effort to read them, but if there is a concern, no one has to agree to them either. If the project is “real” (serious, has money backing it, etc.) then a lawyer reading it is a good idea.
You’re right about the hours the support team is available - as far as I can see, there isn’t actually a way to call, but there might be a way to escalate the problem (which would probably be annoying and not worth doing). I don’t think I’d look up Anil’s blog and try to email him.
As far as “anything” being uploaded…respectfully, I think you’re going off topic here. I’m aware of flags and automation in systems. I’m also aware of competition, etc. since I said I know that someone from Glitch’s support team will read it.
Jeff’s post sounded more like he was angry about the situation while obviously remaining curious about the product. I don’t think offering another perspective is bad form, especially on a forum.
Thanks all for the input. We all want Glitch to be successful.
As for my case being “false” or not. I was told my code used a npm lib “minercraft” and glitch won’t allow crypto mining.
Although I did not go through the TOS, the “minercraft” is NOT about crypto mining. Anyone has some JS skills can find out it’s just a wrapper of some HTTP restful calls.
it’s kinda disappointing me to see this statement even after I have pointed it out to the support.
There must be a legit reason why it’s not allowed. If that package has the ability to be used for crypto mining, for example, someone could remix the project and take it in a different direction.
Well, it somehow violated their terms, based on what I read on this thread. You’ll have to take it up with Support (email them) if you disagree with the decision. The devs on this forum don’t make those calls - this is just where we help each other out and occasionally post feedback or smaller support issues (which are then either answered by Support or they tell us to email them to discuss).
I feel your pain in the sense that I never read TOS either, but I only really put up personal projects with nothing that would set off alarms. Maybe your project can be adjusted to suit their terms somehow.
I want to clarify that your case for the package being allowed is not being dismissed, I intended to communicate that in saying we “use situations like this to adjust policies accordingly if doing so doesn’t harm the community or strain the platform” but reading it now I can see I could have been more direct!
The package you mentioned is for “Interact[ing] with Bitcoin miner APIs” and our handling of mining is very strict in order to keep the platform stable for the entire community, and most often these packages fall under our radar when used in apps reported for mining violations.
I will make sure that we have a discussion internally about if we can allow this package safely given the tools we use to thwart mining so that folks like you can still use them on the platform - I’ll reach out to you directly and post in this thread when/what that decision is!
I have no problem with Glitch questioning the package and investigating. Just hope give paid customer some time to adjust instead of cutting their service right away.
Hope Glitch can become a platform we can depend on.
Here’s some info from a time I contacted support about a situation like this:
The reason is that this block regularly catches more cryotomining apps compared to false positives. So at this time, we believe that the value of this check outweighs the value in supporting a custom package manager/nixpkgs.
They’re at least polite about it. There’s no allegation whether or not I was doing crypto mining, nor “placing undue strain on our infrastructure,” nor violating the terms of service. They only said that the system correctly detected that a mining-related keyword was present in my project container’s disk and that they won’t be making changes to the detector to make my use case work.
The use of this inexact detector–and the unwillingness to take action on appeals–isn’t described in any marketing materials. If a customer would only read the terms of service, they might come to the conclusion that these uses ought to have been allowed. For them to pay and not be able to use the hosting is one of the bad things about Glitch. Ostensibly uncommon, but bad.
