dustywusty

We ended up doing that ourselves, moved completely to an internal system that integrates well with our own administrative capabilities. It has been such a breath of fresh air, and took us about the same time to accomplish.

The final straw was attempting to move Zendesk down to one seat to have historical/archive capabilities for a period of time, and they couldn't even manage that process properly.

ASNs can obviously span multiple countries, and aren't a great way to gate this at all. While we block ASNs we KNOW are owned/operated by companies in limited countries, but I couldn't imagine a worse way to approach it at scale. Hate doing it, it's heavy-handed and wrong.

Can really spot someone who has never had to deal with OFAC with a comment like this. Even if I don't necessarily agree with the concept, or who is actually being blocked, my business is dead in the water if I'm a) sent to prison or b) fined out of existence.

Geographic IP information is one of our best tools to defend against those outcomes, and if anything it should be better.

Exactly what I came in to say, CCR2216 can do this for < $2k, and does it well.

The backlinks derived from PH are generally considered harmful, and rightfully so. It's gamed beyond belief. There is not much to gain from being at the top of PH other than talking about it to legacy VCs.

I couldn't imagine a better way to describe the current concept of grassroots marketing. Spam, and frankly heavy-handed and bad ways to resolve it (no links get traction, etc) have effectively closed the door here.

Anti-spam teams for a lot of social companies are under the umbrella of customer experience, and considered a cost center. The goal quickly becomes: be a hammer.

The impact to user experience, specifically around casual discovery has been profound.

The sad truth is that for the most part, the web hosting industry has normalized a fairly lax approach to security, and sees settlements like this, and even breaches, as a cost of doing business. Look at Wordpress maintenance, for example.

It's a tough business hosting arbitrary UGC, and doing it well costs a lot of time effort and money (ask me how I know). But I fully agree: treating this as just another line-item cost is absurd.

Yeah, this is what it comes down to. WordPress has an incredible following for a great reason: it works well for the people that know how to use it.

Designers and agencies are more than happy to continue to use it, and frankly they should -- it is their bread and butter. The WP drama is news for us web-devs but will affect their market in no way whatsoever.

The language is intentionally vague, and leaves the determination on the person who has to check the box.

I have a competing product and shouldn't get too far in the weeds on what I truly think here, but the predominant feeling across people that have to interact with this is that it's done on purpose.

It's not so much that people don't understand what the word "affiliation" means, it's that you'd have to be completely certain that a lawyer, hired from what is clearly a litigious org, would have the same understanding.

Couldn't agree more with this. In general, if you're writing eval you've already committed to doing something the wrong way.