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I build websites for a living and sometimes people don't pay their bills. Their website going down is usually not a big deal (sometimes they don't notice for months!). But their email, now THAT is a show stopper every time (instant payment).
How do you get their email to go down exactly?
As much as I want to side with the developers I think they are exposing themselves to legal repercussions and made their situation worse.
> legal repercussions like what? contract says "money for stuff". no money, no stuff.
Taking the website down entirely or just blanking it out is a very, very different matter than replacing it with a different message; and doubly so when the different message is actively harmful to the customer. Unless the designer's contract with the customer explicitly allowed them to do this, this sort of thing is a slam dunk legal case of either vandalism (using a physical metaphor) or in the UK as in this example, a criminal violation of the Computer Misuse Act.
Not to mention that it's an enormous red flag that will scare away other potential customers for this designer; because it demonstrates that you're very willing to sabotage their operations.
As much as I want to side with the developers I think they are exposing themselves to legal repercussions and made their situation worse.
In the UK, this is less of a problem, though it depends a lot on the contract between the company and the developer. Assuming nothing exotic, that the statement on the site is true (and not a malicious falsehood) and that if the hosting belongs to the end customer they did not revoke the developer's access (i.e. no unauthorised access occurred), then the developer is in a reasonable position legally. IANAL, of course…
Airing dirty laundry is in some jurisdictions a legal offence. Which is exactly why there needs to be agreement spelled out in contracts upfront, that this could happen, and the client would just sign it.
And I am a fan of smart contracts and cryptocurrencies, see my suggestion below:
As much as I want to side with the developers I think they are exposing themselves to legal repercussions and made their situation worse.
> legal repercussions like what? contract says "money for stuff". no money, no stuff.
A neutral service suspended message or no response from the server is more defendable if the client goes after you. If you actively communicate on their website, it could be argued you tried to cause reputational harm etc.
Even if you're right, provoking a legal response from a client is more than a lot of creatives and developers can handle, especially if the client is big enough to retain legal or staff a GC.
I suspect that things will turn out fine for this particular developer since the client seems small and the message is mostly innocuous.
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As much as I want to side with the developers I think they are exposing themselves to legal repercussions and made their situation worse.
You're opening yourself to claims of defamation, tortious interference, disparagement, even coercion, depending on where you are. Not saying the client will win, but they can make it so you'll need to pay lots of legal fees to defend yourself.
It's much smarter to just take the site down without any kind of message, or just something that says "temporarily unavailable". Play dumb with the client, say you don't know why it went down but to fix it but you need to be paid first. Or say it depended on cloud credits that were going to come out of payment, if you don't want it to look like the site went down due to your incompetence.
Making a big public stink might feel good, but it's not a smart business strategy.
Normal people don't air petty grievances on the internet. They use the courts and other mechanisms.
According to another comment, the business is dissolved. They don't care if their site goes down. So this guy is looking unprofessional for nothing.
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I genuinely don't know if this is a sarcastic/troll post or a honest one. I assume it's sarcasm, but I have seen people earnestly suggest such complex and orthogonal solutions to a solved problem, so I have to check (I neither up voted nor down voted fwiw. As sarcasm it's kind of funny. If genuine, I don't even know where to begin - our axiomatic frameworks may be too far apart:)
In general - smart contracts can prevent a huge class of disputes, increasing clarity at scale and decreasing the costs of litigation after the fact.