In the past, I’ve been a loyal customer and frequent advocate of ICDSoft. I’m not anymore. If you’re curious as to why, post a comment. Oh wait, I almost forgot: you can’t!

UPDATE: Turns out I’ll be staying with ICDSoft after all, at least for the time being. Bluehost was advertised on WordPress as offering transfer assistance, which turned out not to be so helpful after all. Meanwhile, someone from ICDSoft figured out that the original guy had acted like a jerk, and offered a more reasonable solution to the problem, which was spambots hitting my site heavily, not posting successfully as a result of Akismet, but nevertheless putting an unreasonable strain on the server. I’m trying all-registration comments now to see if that solves the problem.

UPDATE (6/25): Some people just don’t know when to leave bad enough alone. Get a load of the email I just got from their a-hole for hire, Zafir Slavov:

My name is Zafir Slavov and I am authorized to represent the Management of ICDSoft.

Recently, I found this post on your blog:
http://xrlq.com/2007/06/13/

I wanted to clear out two points.

1. It seems you were not happy that your script was disabled.

Wrong. I understand why he disabled the script. What I’m not happy about was his being a jerk about it, and refusing even to try to help me find any solution at all, short of permanently disabling all comments.

The comment section of your site was causing high load on the server, thus affecting other 350 users on the same machine. The abuse team member who disabled your comments section and “acted like a jerk” was actually doing his job.

Really! So you actually pay people not only to monitor your site and take appropriate actions when necessary actions, but also pay them to send people snotty emails and refuse to help them? Nice work, if you can get it.

You can imagine how you would feel if you were one of these 350 affected customers: Your site is down, you contact the support staff, and you receive an answer - “Another customer on the same server is being spammed, we are waiting for him to resolve the problem, there is nothing else we can do”. I am sure that you will not be happy at all.
It is our job to assure the proper operation of the shared hosting servers, and this includes disabling of customer scripts which affect the server uptime and behaviour.

Neat, but it is also your job to help your customers keep their sites running, or at least not to actively prevent them from doing so.

2. The issue was with a third-party software - Wordpress.

Which is just dandy if your formal policy is to prohibit users from maintaining weblogs. In which case, it would have been nice of you to say that a long time ago and saved me the trouble of ever using your company in the first place.

Our company vision and practice is to provide our customers with any help we can. This includes help and advises with third-party software. However, this is beyond the scope of our service and we are doing this just because we care about our customers Indeed, the abuse team member who disabled your comments section did not provide you with an advise how to solve the problem with comments spam, and we apologize for that. However, this is something which is beyond the scope of our service and actually you are calling him a “jerk” because he did not provide you with something which is not a part of our service.

Sorry, I didn’t realize that prohibiting people from making functional use of the most popular weblog tool on the planet is part of your service.

The abovementioned post on your blog throws dirt at ICDSoft, but it does not state any facts. I am asking you to either remove it, or post the whole story - that your comments section was disabled because it was causing high load on the server, thus affecting all customers, and that you are blaming us for not providing you with something which is not a part of our service.

Best regards,
Zafir Slavov
Supervisor
ICDSoft

So by the guy’s own admission, there is nothing “factual” (and therefore, nothing wrong) with my post, but he wants it gone anyway because …. well, just because. Remember this the next time someone tries to sue ICDSoft for allegedly defamatory statements about anyone else.