Felle's blog

[Originally posted on felle.org on Thursday, July 15 at 21:11. Follow-up coming soon.]

As you may have noticed, felle.org has been redirecting to serverFFS for a while now. This wasn’t me quitting blogging and by a generous notion offering my visitors to serverFFS – in fact, it’s a lot more complicated than that. The owner of serverFFS, Wouter van Eekelen, hijacked this domain and two others belonging to me in a strongly unethical – even criminal – act.

I used to work for serverFFS, parts of that is not something I regret. Since February 2008, working for that company has been both good and bad, but in 2010, little of the good was left – serverFFS started going downhill. An increased workload that Wouter couldn’t handle lead to unhappiness among customers, as well as internally among staff members.

On May 1, 2010, Wouter crossed a line when he used my name (without my permission) to reply to a customer’s ticket in an unprofessional and rude way. Immediately after said reply, the customer in question opened a topic on webhostingtalk, citing the ticket replies and recommending people not to choose serverFFS for their hosting needs.

On the same day, Wouter replied to this topic – but he didn’t explain the situation. He continued, pretending that I had indeed made this reply. He partially defended “Felix,” calling the customer “impatient” and implying that the customer was not “a normal client with patience.” On the other hand, he also continued the bashing of my name, stating that “the reply by Felix is unacceptable,” and that it would be looked into. He also claimed to have “removed the ‘sorted by last reply’ feature” that partially caused the whole mess, which he never did. In all, he continued with this unprofessionality when defending serverFFS in that topic.

It was not until 9 days later – on May 10 – when I found out about this topic (thanks to LobbyZ – Wouter still hadn’t mentioned anything to me), and, obviously a little pissed off, I confronted Wouter about it.

Session Start: Mon May 10 17:45:54 2010
Session Ident: #ffs.office
[21:16:20] <~Woet> WHO CARES

During a period up to and following the name-incident, Wouter started treating his employees as shit. Me along with a few other members of staff tried to make him aware of this – instead of acting reasonable, he refused to change his behaviour. There was a number of arguments and disagreements, now more than ever, and eventually IJzerenRita had enough, leaving serverFFS on May 24.

On June 6, after a particularly heated argument with Wouter, I quit serverFFS. Having done so, I went to reply to aforementioned webhostingtalk topic, telling them what the situation really was. Wouter didn’t appreciate me spreading the truth, so he reacted to this by glining me from irc.tl altogether and suspending my serverFFS account (no reason given) with domains belonging to me.

On June 6, June 7, June 8 and June 18 I tried contacting Wouter via e-mail, asking him for the EPP codes of my three domains – felle.org, controlv.net, and citiesfacts.com – but he ignored me and didn’t reply. With the June 8 and 18 e-mails, I also sent a blind carbon copy (bcc) to qweb – which owns serverFFS – but they chose not to reply either.

Third e-mail, sent on Tuesday, June 8 to one serverFFS and one qweb address.

Fourth e-mail, sent on Friday, June 18 to one serverFFS and another qweb address.

With serverFFS and qweb ignoring my e-mails, settling the matter in a friendly way appeared more and more difficult. Worth stressing once more is that I tried for over a month to contact them, giving both serverFFS and qweb plenty of time to consider the case. Apparently I wasn’t even worth replying to.

Early on Monday, July 12 I resorted to try contacting serverFFS’ live “support,” but when asking for my hijacked domains, I was banned from using that service as well. Before that, I was told – with a default message – to open a ticket (which I could not do, having been suspended) or send an e-mail (which I had tried for over a month).

serverFFS’ contact page, ironically, states “always a response, usually within 8 hours” for e-mail and contact form messages. Evidently this isn’t the case.

A few days earlier, on Wednesday, July 7, IJzerenRita asked Wouter about giving me felle.org back:

(13:36) ???????it?: true, but he would like to work out a deal, that involves paying
(13:36) Wouter: unless it’s more than a thousand, im not interested

Wouter declares he’s not interested in giving me the domain – or letting me pay for it “unless it’s more than a thousand.” This despite me being listed as the registrant, and therefore the legal owner, of felle.org.

Since it became obvious in the early hours of July 12 that Wouter had no intention of settling this with me – even contacting me at all – I contacted the domain registrar that serverFFS resells from – namecheap.com. Briefly describing the matter to their Live Support, I was told to submit a ticket to their fraud control department, going more in-depth.

Since only felle.org was listed with me as the registrant – controlv.net and citiesfacts.com were not, according to namecheap (though I paid for them at serverFFS) – their fraud control department could only investigate felle.org. After proving my identity, they began their investigation on the afternoon of July 12. When I woke up on Wednesday, July 14, they had finished their investigation and were able to push felle.org into my namecheap account. Big kudos to namecheap for caring about this and helping me out.

So, after my domains had been hijacked for a full 38 days, felle.org was finally returned to my ownership. controlv.net and citiesfacts.com remain hijacked by Wouter – but as controlv.net is expiring on July 20, and I have no current use of citiesfacts.com, I’ll let him have his (unlawful) fun.

More negative voices about serverFFS:
Webhostingtalk
Facepunch
Worlds Forum
Host Stadium
SA-MP Forum [1, 2, 3]