Goob Is GoofyI hope Disney doesn't sue me.

I recently had some interactions with two online companies, Livefyre and Reinvigorate. Try and guess which company adopted the Zappos model and turned me into a customer for life.

One of the things that I’m always toying around with on my sites is traffic tracking software. Google Analytics is king, mainly because it’s free and has a million features, but there are other companies that track a bit more than Google does. Clicky is my personal favorite and I’m currently testing out Chartbeat, but last year I gave Reinvigorate a try.

Do yourself a favor and stay away from Reinvigorate.net.

Their statistics were okay, at best. I paid for a year-long account in October 2010 because I wanted to try their heatmapping. I found it lacking and decided the limited information wasn’t worth the cost or extra time it took people to load the javascripts, so I deleted the tracking code and thought that was it.

You can imagine my surprise when my credit card was automatically renewed in October 2011 for another $100 year long subscription with nary a warning, email, or a notification in my user dashboard.

I promptly contacted their customer support, explaining that I had no idea that all accounts were automatically enrolled in auto-renewing subscriptions and that I didn’t even use the service anymore.

My credit card was charged in late October for a yearly plan, however I didn’t intent to continue using Reinvigorate. I never received a notification or reminder that my account would be auto-renewed as the date approached. However, I canceled my account on November 18.

Is there any way I can receive a prorated refund for the 11 months I won’t be using Reinvigorate?

Their response:

Unfortunately, our system don’t know how to do prorating. You are entitled to continue using our service till the end of what you paid for.
–Nick

Oh, well that’s nice that I’m entitled to continue using something that I unwillingly paid for. I’m glad that option is still on the table.

When I replied stating that it seemed silly to blame the lack of a refund on “the system” instead of a decision that somebody in the company obviously made, I was told:

I Empathize with your situation. Unfortunately the system does not allow for this kind of refund. Your complaint has been noted. I am going to suggest that we send out emails a week or so before renewal in the future.
–Nick

A suggestion. I can’t even get a guarantee that other schmucks like me won’t get screwed in the future. Instead I get my complaint noted and a suggestion. Awesome.

I first heard of Livefyre last summer while mindlessly surfing the Internet during chemo. For the uninitiated, it’s a comment-serving company that basically takes over a websites commenting system and ramps it up. It had all sorts of bells and whistles, but the biggest thing that caught my eye was the fact that all comments were stored on both my local server as well as theirs. This was a huge difference between most of their competitors and what it meant was that you were free to leave at any time. Not many companies make it easy to stop using their services.

Flash forward to a few months ago. Guest comments were now available, further features were added, and so I made the leap on Hey, It’s Free. Almost immediately there were problems. I guess that’s bound to happen when you have close to 70,000 comments to import. I sent a message to @Livefyre on Twitter and almost immediately received a reply asking me to email them. What followed was a series of emails between myself and Jeremy, a Livefyre employee, that give Moby-Dick a run for its money in terms of word count. At one point even a few of their engineers got onboard to fix the problem.

And I haven’t paid Livefyre a dime.

It’s a free service they offer. They do have a professional version, but that looks to be aimed at large clients and websites. Folks like you and me are offered their service, and their support, free of charge.

I wish I could force Reinvigorate to forward that $100 of mine over to Livefyre. If Livefyre ever releases a mid-level package, I’ll be the first guy to sign up. The amount of time and headaches they saved me, not to mention all the features they now bring to HIF, are almost incalculable and yet they not only offered their service for free, but thanked me for my patience, joked around with me in emails, and responded to my questions with such a speed typically reserved for those on their deathbeds.

One company takes money and tells me to fuck off. Another offers a boatload of support and then thanks me for using their free product. Guess who’s doing it right.

We’re all too familiar with a generic online signup form. Step 1: Figure out an unused screen name without resorting to creative curse words. Step 2: Pick a password with at least one uppercase letter, number, and Chinese symbol (even though it’s far more secure to make it an easy-to-remember phrase). Step 3: The “security question” portion that has been made alarmingly unsafe thanks to social media.

I started blogging on Shyzer in 2002 at the age of 19. I created a Facebook account in 2004. I started Twit Twattering in 2008. And I’m fairly certain I covered each of the questions above at least once online.

My sibling’s generation is worse. Most have been leading an on-line life since they could communicate. We teach them to be safe, to not reveal too much about themselves, and yet we wouldn’t bat an eye at revealing our favorite sport or childhood hero.

And why in the hell would you give an option that invariably changes. My preferred musical genre? I guarantee today’s answer differs from what I’ll give in 12 months.

It’s worse when you can’t even create your own question. Letting me enter something random like “baseball/wine/candles” and then putting the answer as the first words I associate with those would be far more secure. But no, I’m stuck trying to remember my grandmother’s first name then in 10 months remembering which grandmother I chose.

Websites, stop doing this shit.

I want to keep my personal opinions here separate from work and HIF-related crap. But this is one of those situations that causes me to roll my eyes and scream “you’ve got to be f*%#ing kidding me!” Even worse, it’s one of those things that affects Hey, It’s Free! in that it could kill it. That’s why we need to stop SOPA now.

I’ve made companies mad before. Big companies. Apparently they get their little widdle feelings hurt when some random guy makes fun of them. And the way companies are turning into conglomerates, it’s fathomable that one of them may have ties to Internet providers and block HIF as retaliation. But that’s only IF we let Congress pass SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act.

What does this bill do? It allows the entertainment industry to censor sites that allegedly “engage in, enable or facilitate” copyright infringement. It sounds vague because it was intended to. The theory is that the entertainment industry wants to kill online piracy. But what if I link to a coupon that a company didn’t intend to release and we HIF it? Instead of facing a PR backlash and trying to explain how they screwed, they could say what I did was a piracy-friendly act and have heyitsfree.net blocked. The next time you tried to visit HIF, it’d say I was a pirate and the loving entertainment industry was protecting you for your own good.

It’s no surprise that every major online company as well as Internet and First Amendment legal experts are against this. This isn’t a left vs. right thing. It’s a “once giant industry not knowing how to move into the 21st century so they decide to lobby Congress to help them kill anything new” thing. I looked around at some of the most liberal and conservative blogs and they’re all in agreement – this bill is moronically stupid and needs to be killed.

So what can you do? Call your local Congressman. This is especially important if you live in Texas, Michigan, Vermont, or Iowa. Send them an email. Or at the very least, tell your friends about this. Tweet, share, email it and let people know they need to do something.

Having the government make sure there isn’t lead in my toys or mercury in my food is nice. It’s cool when they tell companies to stop dumping sewage in my back yard. But we don’t need them or the entertainment industry “looking out for us” on the Internet. We can take care of ourselves on here, thank you very much. Don’t let them censor the Internet – I promise you won’t like it.