Frequently Asked Questions

We are happy to receive reports about problems, no matter what the source. However, if you report a technical problem with someone else's services, you may get a frustrating response.

Our Privacy Policy doesn't allow us to discuss our members' services with other people without the affected member's consent. That includes problems and our efforts to fix them or alert the affected member. Therefore, we can respond to problem reports from the public only by acknowledging the problem so you know we received your report. Unless the problem is specific to you, we will not provide you with any additional information.

Sometimes, people interpret our inability to discuss the problem as blowing them off or that we're not going to do anything about it. This is not the case at all, it is merely an artifact of properly enforcing our Privacy Policy.

What does discussing problems have to do with our Privacy Policy? Although the simple answer is that our members' services are nobody's business but theirs until they tell us otherwise, the practical reason for this is a little more complicated.

Take a simple example: from time to time we get reports like, "I went to www.example.com and it was down! Fix it! You people suck! Your servers suck!" While we can generally say "Yes, the site is down," we do not go into why or when it might be back in response to such a report, which sometimes means the person goes away believing that not only do we suck, but we suck on purpose!

There are many reasons a web site might be offline. Maybe the person couldn't pay. If it was your site, would you want us discussing your billing status with anybody who asks? Probably not. But if we respond back to all "site down" complaints but only stonewall the ones where billing is involved, stonewalling just becomes a substitute for saying that it's a billing problem. So, to protect our members' privacy, we must treat everything as a private matter even if it makes us look like we're unwilling or unable to fix a problem.

(Those who are paying attention may have noticed the similarity to the old philosophical problem of encryption: if you only encrypt things when you have something to hide, using encryption is a clear sign that you have something to hide. For encryption to be maximally effective, you have to encrypt as much as you possibly can. Others may have had similar experiences trying to find out the condition of their hospitalized friend.)

So, if you are a member of the general public, please do not assume the worst of us because we won't discuss a problem you found. We ask that you remember that our Privacy Policy is a promise to protect our members all the time, not just when it's convenient for you or when it makes us look good. Your patience and understanding will be appreciated.

Of course this does not apply to our members and their own services. If you're having a problem with your NearlyFreeSpeech.NET services, you can always expect full disclosure regarding any issues and our full support in helping to resolve the problem.

Please feel free to report downed sites or other technical problems with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET services to support@NearlyFreeSpeech.NET even if you are not a NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member (or if you are, but not the owner of the services in question). We want to make sure our members' services stay working at all times, and we'll take any tip we can get when something might be amiss.

If you are a member and there's a problem with your services, make sure to use our Secure Support Request facility so we can get started right away and not have to goof around making sure it's you.