I have a friend who worked at FogBugz and left when they were sold. The new owner sounds like they suck.
hey there friend
FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
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Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
#92Hail GDPR. I have a lot of trust and faith in the European corporate and business culture as far as these things go, but I'm happy I can make companies here delete my payment details, so tricks like these can't be pulled.
Yet GDPR is also what ruins the web browsing experience with all those idiotic cookies notices. Legislating technical details like that is never a good idea.
The popups are there because companies would rather not comply with the GDPR and it gives them a thin veneer of justification which means they're not the lowest hanging fruit for the under resourced DPAs when it comes to enforcement. They've started slapping Google for the methods of gaining consent being BS and hopefully they start working their way down to list until enough others get the message.
Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. It's was probably around 13 years as well, probably to try it out and never touched it since. My "account URL" shows 500 error as well. Here's the almost empty auto-reply if you reply to the email: Hi, Please reach out to the Fogbugz support team by visiting the following portal; https://support.fogbugz.com/hc/en-us/ Thank you, Fogbugz team.
"Just email everyone in the system, anyone who has ever given us an email address" "Are you sure? Those really old accounts aren't even compatible with our current platform, they won't be able to even log in" "Everyone!" "Sigh..."
Their tagline of "Where software goes to live" is a little too on-the-nose.
Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
#94If I had created such a company and I couldn't work on it any more, I would prefer to close it completely than to sell it to crooks like that.
And in that way, it does reflect poorly on Joel and the Fog Creek folks.
Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
#95> IgniteTech - Where software goes to live[0] Thats from the new owners website. What a dystopian tagline for your company. Then there's just a whole catalog of their dead software in a list too. [0]: https://ignitetech.com/
By removing just three letters you get “initech”. Coincidence? I think not.
Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
#96I got that e-mail too, on a decade-old test account: first an e-mail that reads like my account simply "expires" if I don't update. Then an invoice. Here's what I don't get: After a stunt like this, any reputation/brand value that you might have had is gone. So, the obvious conclusion is they bought the company purely to pull this trick. Any other value the company might have had is deleted. Can that have been worth…
Someone once told me that as recently as the late 2010s AOL was making millions of revenue off of old dialup accounts from the 90s that people just never cancelled and the cards just kept running. That's what they're probably shooting for here.
My parents actively paid AOL for quite some time because they thought it was for their email service, not for dialup.
Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
#97Absolutely absurd. I haven't touched it for 13 years, and just received an email that they will be billing me $31.25 with 6 hours warning. This, of course, is a few hours after an email saying that my "free subscription" will be expiring in a month, not within hours. The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for. At…
My last use of FogBugz was in 2012. After replying to FogBugz's fake bill, I noticed an auto-reply in my gmail spam: Title: "Notification - Please visit support team" Sender: "Sales and Success" The short body declares that I have to go to their support portal. I can't tell whether this stems from incompetence or if their aiming for Spam on purpose. Given their behavior, I assume the latter.
I recently noticed a collections agency sending emails that don't pass DKIM checks. Since the company's main business model is invoicing via email and their revenue is substantial, I'm positive it's malice, not incompetence. An intentional way of racking up late fees.
Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
#98Great way to ruin the FogBugz brand and reputation: move everyone from free to paid tier without consent, and send out emails with a short notice telling them they will be charged $30/month - when most of these users haven't heard from/of them in over a decade. The flood of complaints is hilarious. https://twitter.com/search?q=fogbugz&src=typed_query
I feel like the FogBugz reputation has been being ruined for at least 5 years now, probably closer to 10. They were just letting it languish, not making any improvements. We saw the writing on the wall ~3 years ago, and I spent a month migrating all of our FogBugz tickets and wiki content over to Jira+Confluence
It was acquired by private equity in 2018.
Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly the same flow of emails for me (same content) and all the links in the emails are not working.
Nothing is working. I thought that I'd be "nice" and login and cancel my account. Can't do that either, you just get a 500 errors from the sad Kiwi who now has to go live with his new evil masters.... Poor kiwi.
At least they haven't "upgraded" the 500 page kiwi – all the others have two mouths. Because they thought people wouldn't understand that a bird's beak is its mouth.
Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid
#100An email to the CEO (eric.vaughan@ignitetech.com)
Subject: FogBugz debacle. You fucked up!
… and it’s on you to fix it. No idea what I’m talking about? Search Twitter for FogBugz - you’ll get it quick enough.
At some point in the past I had a trial for some product made by Fogcreek - we are talking 10 years back or so. The trial is long expired and forgotten about. Until today, that is, when I received an email purporting to charge $31 to my “prepaid account”.
I’ll remind you of a quote on your website: > Our current customers are our only focus, and each should expect excellence from every aspect of IgniteTech. If at any time you believe we are falling short, the buck stops on my desk.
It’s on you to fix this, for everyone that got this, there are thousands of developers and business owners who got similar emails today. Perhaps your business model is intentionally to go invoice trolling, in which case my next email will be to the state AG. But I’m going to assume incompetence or inadvertence before malice and suggest that you address this quickly - perhaps on Twitter or a blog post.