Joe Co. (not their real name) had a bad day. It started when we emailed them this:
Your plugins have been closed and your account on WordPress.org is suspended indefinitely for egregious guideline violations.
Normally we send out warning notices to encourage developers to correct behaviour, however in certain cases there are events that cause us to have to take extreme action.
We received a notice that you had been demanding users edit their reviews and comments in order to receive a refund from your product.
Your employee fake@example.com said this:
> Please kindly delete all the comment on Wordpress.org,
>
> After that, we will accept your refund request via PayPalAnd then they would provide links to screenshots of what to remove.
There’s an ugly word for asking people to modify reviews for a reward: bribery.
However asking users to modify a review and delete comments to get a refund is called EXTORTION […]
If you’ve been reading for a while, you know how much I hate bribery and extortion.
Time for Proof
Joe Co. emailed back
It’s not a nice day today for our company to receive your email on our
account suspension, but we understand your concern to protect Org’s plugins
directory. We respect that!However, in case like this, you did receive the feedback from one side and
I believe that you should take times to reviceved the feedback from our
company also. And we want you to know that maybe you should protect us and
our company from UNFAIR COMPETIOR.Yes we internally thinks that this is among our Competitor doing
something to get our Copies of Products and Try to Down us from the
Directory, here is the reason and proof:
Now, I can’t list the rest of that for reasons regarding anonymity, but I can summarize the proof:
- A PDF of their internal chat client with the person who they felt probably complained (it wasn’t that person)
- A PDF where the same person refused to let Joe Co. log into their site (reasonable!)
- An admission they handled it badly
When I opened the first PDF I started laughing.
Wanna know what it says?
The kicker? That arrow and red box is from the PDF Joe Co. sent.
Right there, they are agreeing they told the user that they would only give him a refund if he deleted the reviews. They were not spam, either, the person left one, single, solitary review.
Who was wrong?
Both Joe Co. and their user were in the wrong here.
The user knew damn well they weren’t getting a refund, and in fact I told him he was being silly for complaining that there was no refund when the terms he agreed to say no refunds.
Joe Co. should have stuck by their guns and not suggested that would give a refund at all.
Of course, what Joe Co. did after that made it so much worse… Sockpuppets. Sockpuppets everywhere. 100% of their reviews on one plugin were faked. My buddy who cleans that up sobbed into his coffee and I think that was when he wrote a ‘close all’ script.
Then they made two more accounts and resubmitted plugins and did it all again.
So while I will grant you that the user was an idiot, Joe Co. was worse.
Do You Refund?
Regardless of if you provide refunds or not, the lesson here is “stick to your guns” folks. If the policy is “No Refunds” then suck it up, buttercup. If the policy is to provide a refund within X days, then you do that. If the company has no refund policy, then don’t buy from them, because you will get jerked around.
