In December 2024, all of our projects were suspended for supposedly putting malicious code in them, which is a blatant lie. It is very clear to me that no human reviews the projects and they’d rather put some bluenose LLM to use instead. Some of our projects involve flashing lights and loud sounds, but they are by no means shock sites and the users were warned by the potential risk, so what are we even talking about? Also, the key word here is “some”. Not all of our projects contain this type of content and are just benign messing around. We tried appealing and got a very late response telling us to download the projects, but we found ourselves unable to, because the Glitch team is a bunch of incompetent fools who cannot handle a simple problem like this. Who runs this service???
Anyone else had similar experiences?
I’m sorry that you feel disrespected. We work really hard to provide a platform that people use, many of them for free, and unfortunately that means we have to put some limits on things in order to prevent people from doing things that would hurt other people’s ability to use the platform.
We’re a fairly small team who uses a mixture of automated tools and manual review to try and keep that balance running smoothly. In some cases, the automated tools do flag things that they shouldn’t, and on a regular basis we receive those appeal requests and many of them do result in restoring service to users who shouldn’t have been restricted. When we do leave individual projects suspended, their code is downloadable by the owner of those projects, but in cases where entire accounts are suspended (which is only done via manual actions) we limit access for a number of reasons related to safety, legal issues, and so forth.
If you went through an appeal process and were denied, it seems likely to me (without looking up the specifics) that there was a good reason for it, and I wouldn’t undermine my coworkers’ decision about that. There are a lot of places on the web to host your projects and I hope you find one that is a better match for what you’re looking for.
While it should go without saying, you agreed to the Glitch terms of use, so while I have no way of seeing what the suspension reason was:
14. Termination
Glitch Termination.
We may also terminate or suspend your access to, or ability to use, any and all Services immediately, without prior notice or liability, with or without cause.
If you had several projects that were objectionable (and Glitch is entirely free to decide what objectionable means), then it’s entirely possible for folks to go “we don’t want this user’s projects, even if some of them are fine” and just blanket suspend you.
This is pretty common everywhere, so if you don’t like that policy: fair enough but then Glitch was the wrong platform to use. The only appeal for that is through support, and if that didn’t have the result you wanted, then that’s unfortunate, and may even feel unfair, but it’s also what you agreed to.
jeffreyAWESOME@protonmail.com