We've just been dealing with this for my company as well. Cloudflare has repeatedly deleted our DNS and cannot provide a reason why it happened. Last time thousands of dollars of PPC Ads were running uselessly.
Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
231–240 of 433 posts
Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
$300 becomes a pretty high barrier for a lot of people. There a places with decent connectivity where that is a good weeks wages
But you get it back, the point is to make it a penalty if you are wasting their time.
> But you get it back
You're missing the part where some people, that actually would need this support, literally wouldn't be able to find that money because of the difference in purchasing power of the local currency.
Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
#233This is being looked into internally and I am involved. Likely won’t post an update here as it pertains to a customer account (unless customer agrees). BTW If you, dear reader, ever find yourself so frustrated with Cloudflare that you feel like your only recourse is a blog post... my email is jgc@cloudflare.com and I’m happy to hear from people.
I've put this idea forward a number of times here on HN in regards to other big tech companies. Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. The Ombudsman must not be part of the technology companies ordinary support processes, it must be entirely separate, and have highest level authority to demand action within the company. To avoi…
> To avoid the Ombudsman being overused, you could give it a price of say $20, which is always refunded when the case is resolved.
What if the cost was put onto the business instead of the consumer and the business just hired support people who are all Ombudsmans by default?
Instead of focusing on copy / pasting boilerplate scripts and answering as many tickets as possible, they should focus on the problem the customer is having by default and do everything possible to reduce the number of incoming questions by fixing bugs, making a better product, improving their docs, etc..
I personally do around the clock email support for 35,000+ people who sign up to my programming courses and support isn't bogging me down. Relative to the number of minutes I'm awake, support is one of the least business related time consuming things I do per day, but I send individually personalized in-depth answers to everyone who asks me questions -- usually within an hour or less.
Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
#234This is being looked into internally and I am involved. Likely won’t post an update here as it pertains to a customer account (unless customer agrees). BTW If you, dear reader, ever find yourself so frustrated with Cloudflare that you feel like your only recourse is a blog post... my email is jgc@cloudflare.com and I’m happy to hear from people.
I've put this idea forward a number of times here on HN in regards to other big tech companies. Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. The Ombudsman must not be part of the technology companies ordinary support processes, it must be entirely separate, and have highest level authority to demand action within the company. To avoi…
At 20 USD a pop, Google would make a small fortune!
I'd be the first to pay to get them explain to me some of their misterious weirdnesses.
Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
#235This is being looked into internally and I am involved. Likely won’t post an update here as it pertains to a customer account (unless customer agrees). BTW If you, dear reader, ever find yourself so frustrated with Cloudflare that you feel like your only recourse is a blog post... my email is jgc@cloudflare.com and I’m happy to hear from people.
First, you are awesome, really :)
Second, a bunch of honest questions:
Did you consult to your supervisor (or anyone with authority) to be able to bypass the support process (if there is any) like this? If so what was the response? If the response was negative, how did you convince people? After things resolve, can you kindly post how many spam or unrelated emails you receive so that it will be an example to the industry?
I'd like to put my skepticism on hold and blindly believe that your post is a reflection of pure concern and not just a PR stunt for damage control.
Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've put this idea forward a number of times here on HN in regards to other big tech companies. Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. The Ombudsman must not be part of the technology companies ordinary support processes, it must be entirely separate, and have highest level authority to demand action within the company. To avoi…
$20 won't stop anyone with using it. If it is refundable, make it $300. That is high enough that only people and businesses with a showstopper situation will use it.
Make it $20 but not refundable. Or $300 and not refundable.
This is a good way to filter the full level of importance. Most places that need a problem solved, now, dammit will be willing to pay.
And, if you want to be nice, you can refund it. Or, if the person was a jerk, you can keep it.
Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
#237Occasions are rare where I get to say "hey, I built a thing that might help here!" - so forgive me as I take this opportunity with both hands. Whether this was a bug or a rare protective mechanisme, there will be times when your DNS provider makes a mistake and removes records. You mentioned in your post your DNS isn't hard to reproduce, but how certain are you that _all_ records are restored? How long do you have to…
Looks really useful and fulfills a very important purpose. What good is all your backups if you can't get your services back up due to missing DNS configuration.
Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you get it back, the point is to make it a penalty if you are wasting their time.
> But you get it back You're missing the part where some people, that actually would need this support, literally wouldn't be able to find that money because of the difference in purchasing power of the local currency.
I was thinking price for business not personal accounts. Maybe youre thinking those are the same thing in freelance.
Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps, but Digital Ocean also host spammers / scammers and doesn't do anything about them when they're reported.
Are you saying if you use their dns you will get spammed/scammed?
I think they're mad that DigitalOcean's IP range shows up in their ssh logs with failed authentication. A lot of people think that it's the ISP's job to regulate all traffic on their network, judging from the comments here, DigitalOcean at one time or another has failed to do that.
I host all my personal stuff there, including something that updates their DNS via an API. They've been great to me.
Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is probably obvious but you're getting this kind of support because they're getting terrible PR by virtue of your post being at the top of HN. Not because he's such a great guy that cares so much about the customers. Not saying he isn't a great guy, or that anyone at cloudflare actually wanted this to be your experience.
To be fair this seems to happen with a bunch of tech companies, such as Stripe too. I wish more companies took customer support seriously. I remember about 4-5 months ago I spent like 2 weeks going back and forth with Stripe's regular email support trying to understand their docs for SCA. I kept getting a new rep who repeated the same things the previous reps were saying, which also had no bearing on what I was askin…
> was a pleasant experience, where "pleasant" felt like the person receiving the email was reading the words I wrote instead of just skimming them and pasting a boilerplate response.
Crazy how far down the bar has gone.