The only official archive of AnonTalk!
The following companies/services should be avoided like the plague due to their lies, illegal treatment of customers and general gross incompetence. I can only speak from my own first-hand (unless otherwise stated) experiences, but I will tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Feel free to ignore all this and waste your time and money by dealing with these scum, but if you are smart, you won't learn this the hard way. (This list is not complete; several companies have been excluded for various reasons. Some may be added later.)
| Company/service | Country | Claims to be/offer | Actually offers | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PayPal | USA | Easy Internet payments. | Easy way of getting robbed. | Out of the blue, without giving any kind of reason, they let me know that they had banned (I think they used a different word) the account. They didn't tell why in the initial message, and completely ignored all my many attempts to contact and ask them why they had done this. The account in question was over five years old when this happened, had "premium" status, had been verified multiple times and had 100% correct information in it. It had never been used for any kind of fraud or illegal activity. The money in the account, consisting mostly of micro donations from AnTs, was stolen. |
| Dragonara, AKA GigabitDC |
Switzerland | DDoS protection. | Unencrypted, non-existent protection. | Actually immediately offered to sponsor AT when I asked them about their services and prices, calling it an "interesting project". After a few days, the server stopped responding. They had silently killed the service without telling me. I had to actively contact them to find out that they had done this "because of pedo site". They don't offer true tunnels but instead use unencrypted Web proxies. Barely know English. Stay the hell away from these morons. |
| SharkTech | USA | Server host. | Broken servers and promises. | Made a promise beforehand that there would be "no problems" hosting AT. Once a payment was made, it took them only days to send a "pack up and leave" letter because of "pedophile site". Talking to the admin, it became apparent that he is a deeply religious nutjob who refused to refund my money and instead gave it to his local church as a donation. Oh, and they managed to fuck up twice before they correctly installed the server. Extremely incompetent. The only reason I selected them was that they offered DDoS protection for a relatively very small amount of money. |
| Leaseweb | Netherlands | Server host. | Tulip-munching support guys who hate their job. | Frequent hardware failures, an internal control panel chock-full of typos, broken links and public errors, broken public Web site, take WEEKS to reply to e-mails. Eventually claimed to "end the contract" because I was "rude". Apparently, it is considered "rude" over there to point out that their VPS setup frequently loses storage connectivity and asking to get access to traffic stats and then wondering why they haven't responded to a paying customer for weeks. On the bright side, they did actually refund the money, but only after several more weeks of sending them letters with bank info that they had already asked for countless times. Around when this happened, they published a press release called "LeaseWeb 1st Hosting Provider to Install Child Abuse Filter" where they boast about how they are "thinking of the children". This I figured was the real reason (PR stunt)
|
| Hostkey | Russia | Server host. | Two guys in a basement with an ADSL consumer connection (basically). | Said that they would never shut down the server without a local police order, and that they could handle attacks. Sent a "pack up and leave" letter only days after the server went up. Cannot handle even small attacks. Lies to customers. Not only did they completely refuse to refund any money, but actually had the nerve to send an insane bill for the junk traffic (which I did not pay, naturally). Don't know the difference between "Mb" and "MB". |
| ZoneEdit | USA | DNS hosting. | Really unreliable DNS hosting with a randomly broken interface. | After using them for over six years, I suddenly get a cryptic e-mail about "network abuse" on this domain. They haven't replied to any of my e-mails asking what they meant by this. I was NOT a free customer but had paid a lot of money to them over the years. Lately their service had been unusually broken and unreliable, and I was probably going to switch soon anyway. Still, this kind of treatment is unbelievable. Avoid. |
|
EveryDNS and FreeDNS |
USA? | DNS hosting. | Error messages. | I had never used these services in the past but when I signed up and tried to add this domain, they both gave errors about it being banned. Unbelievable? You better believe it. Seems like some fucking moron has added the best site on the Web to some sort of blacklist. |
| FreeDNS.ws | USA? Russia? | DNS hosting. | No hosting at all. Even worse interface than ZoneEdit. | While their interface was completely retarded, that's hardly the biggest problem. A few days after setting things up, visitors dropped drastically to near-zero. I wondered what the hell was going on since the server was not under attack. Tried to log in to the account but instead of letting me in, it gave this message: "Account suspend[...]Reason: Abuse reported: there has been multiple messages linking to images of underage girls exposing themselves, posted on anontalk.com". OK. What? You ban customers without investigating AND don't even let them know? No sane person would use that service after reading this. |
| GoDaddy | USA | Domain registrar and all sorts of other shit. | A bunch of rednecks running the worst Web site ever. | After many years and heaps of dollars paid to these retards (on the sole basis of the inherent stability of a company of their size), they suddenly don't want me as a customer anymore. Do I even have to mention that they didn't specify a reason or reply to my e-mails asking for an explanation or refunds? One big joke for a company. On the bright side, I will never again have to put up with their surreal Web site. |
| DNSexit | ? | DNS hosting. | Nothing. | Quietly censored away this domain, actually hosting a message claiming that it is "illegal", shown to all visitors. Never notified me about any of this. Had to find out via a user who reported it. At this point, I didn't bother to even ask about what the fuck they were doing since nobody ever responds to my e-mails. Avoid these complete retards. |
| Moniker | USA | Domain registrar with privacy. | Domain registrar without privacy. | Looking up what other controversial sites use, I found that Annabelleigh.net uses Moniker for domain privacy and apparently has been for quite a while. So I switched to them. Of course, after paying, it took them only a couple of days to RemOVE thE WHOIS PRIVACY AND EXPOSE thE PERSONAL INFO TO thE WORLD, simply "letting me know" about this, stating no reason. None of my many e-mails asking them why they were doing this were replied to. All I got back was: "This matter is closed. Thank you." and then complete silence. I also asked them why they allow that other site still, and I also asked the owner of that domain, but no replies were given. This is just unbelievable. |
| iDotz | USA? | Domain registrar with privacy. | Domain registrar without privacy. | (Second-hand experience.) These iDiotz quickly removed the whois privacy, then started making threats without investigating the fake abuse reports with drivel about "child porn" (which has never, is not and will never be hosted here). Yet another crappy company. |
| Tumblr | USA? | Some sort of fucking blog or something. | Nothing. | We used it for off-site news in case of problems with the site. All of a sudden, months later, a user reports that "it's gone". I verify, and it is indeed gone: "Page not found". No warning. No e-mail. No kind of notification whatsoever. Trying to log in results in a redirect to a non-existent page on their site called "./suspended". One can easily conclude that Tumblr is run by incompetent retards and needs to be boycotted. |
| Payson | Sweden | Internet payment processor. | Nothing. | Had the account for one day and then I could no longer sign in (without having done a thing). Got a cryptic e-mail about sending in physical identificiation papers. Multiple people got errors when trying to use their credit cards with them. The Web site is chock-full of typos and glitches. All in all a very unserious company. Boycott. |
| Gandi | France | Domain registrar and all sorts of other shit. | Domain name hell. Twice. | First time: Out of the blue, I get the "classic" letter about being suspended, this time actually providing a reason: I had entered "false" whois data. Except that is a lie; I had used correct info. Since they didn't give any details, the only part that I can think of that would be "false" is the telephone number, since I don't own a phone. I believe I entered "123456" since it wouldn't let me through unless I entered some number. All the other data was accurate. Since they did offer instructions on how to appeal this, I instantly updated the info with my old phone number (no longer in use, thus worthless) and sent them the legal shit proving that I am the right person (this whole thing was probably just a way to cause trouble for me). No replies. For painful not hours but days! Silence. I noticed how their privacy protection was removed and the nameservers "mysteriously" fell back to their own ones. I gave up and transferred the domain to a new, hopefully less retarded registrar. Update: It was even worse.
Second time: I bought domain protection from a company which turned out to not be a real registrar, but instead a reseller, ending up indirectly using Gandi again (I will not out them here, though, because they meant well and they are really good at the other things that they do). Without any warning, the domain was one day gone. It was a complete hell to transfer it away from them and, again, no real answers or apologies were given. |
| Moneybookers | United Kingdom | Internet payment processor. | Error messages. | As I tried to log in one day after creating the account, I got this error: "Unfortunately your account has been locked due to multiple failed login attempts. To re-issue your password you must complete our lost password procedure." Upon doing this, I never got any e-mail. Not in the spam folder either. No e-mail. I tried two more times to be sure. No e-mails arrived. Trying to contact them about this error, I got this: "To contact us you need to have a Moneybookers account so that we know exactly how to handle your request." and then they asked me to log in… which always gives the same error. Evidently an incompetent company that you should not trust with any money. |
| GlobeSSL | USA? | TLS certificate signing authority. | Nothing. | All of a sudden, I get a cryptic e-mail about "illegal content" on this Web site (which obviously is bullshit) and that they have removed the TLS certificate signing service for us. No refund or explanation as to what exactly is illegal, of course. Instead of replying as to what exactly is "illegal", I got several very aggressive e-mails back about them taking "legal actions", completely ignoring all my questions. Retards. |
| Network Solutions | USA? | Domain registrar and all sorts of other shit. | Canceled services and lies. | After a couple of days, I got an e-mail saying that they had "deactivated" this domain. That's it. No replies. No refund. Furthermore, their "privacy" registration is worthless, since it doesn't properly mask your information. Like with all these moronic companies, I got absolutely no cooperation whatsoever in resolving the non-existent "issue". They just change nameservers, set a flag to "deactivate" the domain and never talk to you again. |
and NearlyFreeSpeech |
USA | "Liberal" Web hosts. | Hideouts for thieves. | Several people had attempted before him unsuccessfully, but one day some troll made a visually verbatim AT clone (identical structure, layout, terms, features, ideas, brick by brick, exact same colors, copied and pasted CSS, JavaScript and even full texts found here) and released the source code to that copy illegally and obviously without permission. Bums naturally started making clones of this place, about four of them hosted on these hosts. Despite countless attempts, they have consistently refused to take them down (or even reply at all anymore), despite the fact that they clearly are in violation of the American copyright and DMCA laws. Not even actual DMCA forms sent in properly did any good. Since I cannot afford a lawyer, these subhumans are wallowing in the perverse plagiarism of my hard work that I put my soul into and spent countless hours (actually, years if you count past projects that led up to this) of R&D on, not to mention polished and improved every day for over one and a half year after the initial launch before I had a truly great service which was supposed to stay unique. Perhaps the worst part is that they actually claim that they came up with it. Their sites wash out the trademarks of this place and violated several other laws as well the first (and last) time I looked. Don't support these companies. Update: Dreamhost saw the light eventually and did the right thing (removed the main illegal clone). This means that they are not entirely hopeless. However, it took a lot of effort. |
| Easily | UK | Domain registrar and all sorts of other shit. | Removed the account without notice or sane reason. | Needing a secondary registrar for a different project, I picked this one due to a personal recommendation by a usually reliable person who "never had a problem with them". Within days, when trying to log in, it just didn't work. "Here we go…", I thought to myself and tried to restore the password. No such account. I contacted them and they eventually replied, claiming that the account had been removed for "fraud" because the password I had used apparently contained a string that their automated system detected as "fraud". I have no idea what the fuck this means, but I know that I don't want anything to do with such an unreliable, incompetent, nonsensical (and most likely lying) company. I didn't even ask for a refund but transfered the domain the hell away from them. Their Web interface (extremely obnoxious, by the way) doesn't let you change the contact details for two of the items; you seem forced to use their default Easily contacts. Beware. |
| Google AdSense | USA | Contextual advertisements. | Irrelevant, low-quality ads, paying peanuts. | In the early days, AT used AdSense for ads. I had plans to write some code to not display ads on "controversial" pages, but didn't get around to that until the site got banned due to "inappropriate content" (some asshole reported some topic). The entire account was not banned. About a year passed until I made a 100% ToS-abiding site (IWAP) in order to indirectly fund AT, rather than relying on donations that never came. No payment was made before Google banned the entire account due to fucktards clicking the ads repeatedly (supposedly — they never explained why). I was extremely careful to never even display any ads to myself, and never encouraged anyone in any way to click the ads. I appealed this and got a (negative) reply after several weeks where they just repeated that "the account poses a serious risk to our advertisers" without stating what they mean by this. They don't give a shit, just like all other companies. (The account was 6 or so years old.) |
Lessons learned:
See also: Legal notices.