So HN to the rescue again. It's unfortunate (although the outcome is great for you!) that you have to go through the social media amplifier first.

Personally I maintain my opinion that problems getting fixed by HN are a bigger red flag than problems not getting fixed at all. The HN reader Upper Management Person either thinks putting out fires before they become higher profile failures is a cheaper way of avoiding bad press than instituting actual good policies with regards to not fucking over their customers, or they want to implement those policies but are not competent to do so.

"Send me your details and I'll fix it" = incompetent or asshole

"Don't send me your details, I've fixed the problem for you and everyone else with the same issue" = green flag

> "Don't send me your details, I've fixed the problem for you and everyone else with the same issue" = green flag

While I agree with the sentiment, fixing it in this way for any org of the CF-like scale will take days or weeks (because of peer reviews, compliance etc.). Fixing it fast by adding exception in some control panel is probably fine.

What's alarming is that the escalation process didn't really change for all the time I'm using Cloudflare as a customer (8 yrs now?) and watching jgrahamc's involvement. The fact he has a bat signal trained on the HN is a major red flag.

They may need the user's details to look into it and determine if it's an actual issue. When they have done that, it makes sense to fix it for that user at the same time. They should definitely come back and tell us that they have fixed it and why it happened as soon as possible afterwards, but I would understand if it takes a few weeks given normal levels of corporate bureaucracy.

That said, it's bad that this happened in the first place, and it makes me a little anxious about using Cloudflare's services.

Well OP chose to use Cloudfare and stay on it. It's his choice.

It's very common that you need someone's details to fix their situation right away, and avoiding similar situations in the future will take relatively slow engineering and policy changes. Additionally, details about a particular person's case can be helpful in understanding how exactly your process went wrong. Asking for details is not a red flag to me at all.

Perhaps there should be a site with metrics on which services only provide social media outrage mediated support.

On the other hand, any company should consider as soon as financially possible to get paid support and a TAM (technical account manager) from their main infrastructure/service provider… most things can be managed and escalated through such people.

It would be interesting to see what caused the ban and what will be done by Cloudflare to prevent this from happening in the future. It is good that your issue got solved but I hope others that don't know about HN can also benefit from a more structural fix.

Hey tardis_thad, can you please do a detailed post mortem on this?

I don't know anything more just yet, just that my account was unbanned.